Dr. Tracy Moore, PT, DPT, OnCS, will share strategies educators are using to improve classroom engagement with PhysioU. Learn approachable ways to integrate apps, simulations, and e-learning across your curriculum, whether you’re just starting or already using the platform.

Featured Speaker: Tracy Moore, PT, DPT, ONC 

Dr. Moore is a physical therapist, faculty member, product manager and educational leader. He completed his Doctorate in Physical Therapy at Azusa Pacific University and later received the Oncology Clinical Specialist certification from the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialties. Following a residency at City of Hope National Medical Center, Dr. Moore began his academic career teaching subjects such as oncology, clinical skills, differential diagnosis, and acute care. He is an active speaker at national and international conferences, specializing in oncology rehabilitation, chronic pain, and learning science. Dr. Moore continues to conduct and publish research, present at industry conferences, and contribute to PhysioU app design and development. His approach uniquely bridges the gap between the student experience, clinical expertise, and learning science in order to help faculty and students revolutionize healthcare education in their own classrooms around the world.

00:00 PhysioU Teaching Strategies Presentation

03:27 Student Learning and Retention Strategies

12:43 PhysioU Teaching Strategies Demonstration

21:44 Clinical Reasoning Skills Development Strategies

28:31 Critical Thinking Skills Development

32:59 Brain Dump Teaching Strategies Discussion

35:29 Video Content in Education Strategies

Helpful Links: Complimentary Educator access | Educator resources | Set up a Demo

Five Evidence-Based Strategies That Boost Student Engagement in Your PT Course

You are halfway through explaining a critical concept when you glance up and see students who are typing dutifully or looking in your direction while their minds are elsewhere. In an age when Instagram and TikTok offer novelty on tap, how do we create classroom moments that stick? The answer is to build the deep, retrievable knowledge students will need in a clinic, facing a patient with complex symptoms and no time to consult their notes.

That is the question Dr. Tracy Moore, PT, DPT, OnCS, Director of Product & Education Strategy at PhysioU, took up in a faculty webinar. He walked through five evidence-based strategies that work whether you teach in a traditional, accelerated, or hybrid program. Each one creates productive struggle, the slightly uncomfortable feeling of working to retrieve information, connect concepts, or explain reasoning, which is what builds lasting expertise.

Retrieval Practice: Making Students Reach for Answers

The first strategy Dr. Moore shared is retrieval practice, and the key is keeping it low-stakes and frequent. When students pull information out of memory instead of passively reviewing it, they strengthen neural pathways in ways that flashcards and highlighting cannot match. That is why recall belongs in your regular class routine rather than only in exam week. The silence that follows a recall prompt can feel deafening, but resisting the urge to rescue students is the point, because the moment of reaching is where the learning happens.

• Open class with a two-minute brain dump: “Without looking at your notes, write down everything you remember about COPD.”
• Close class with a one-minute paper that asks, “What are the two most important things you learned today, and what’s still fuzzy?” You are not grading it, only giving students permission to practice the act of retrieval itself.

We built this principle into PhysioU through “learning boosts” and the clinical reasoning questions embedded in our case studies, so the practice is ready for you to assign. It also prepares students for the clinic, where a physician may ask them to explain a treatment rationale and they will need to recall it on the spot. Even a brief, ungraded exercise gives them a chance to rehearse that skill.

Spaced Practice and Interleaving: Why Cramming Fails

Retrieval gets even stronger when you pair it with two related strategies, spaced practice and interleaving. Spreading study time across multiple sessions outperforms cramming, even when the total time invested is the same. Mixing topics between sessions, which is what interleaving means, also outperforms blocked practice, even though students often find blocked practice easier and more comfortable. That comfort is a warning sign, because when learning feels too easy, students are often relying on short-term memory or pattern recognition rather than real understanding.

Interleaving brings productive struggle back into the room, since students have to identify which type of problem they are facing before they can solve it. That extra effort is what makes the learning last. Dr. Moore described several ways to build this into a course:

• Add cumulative quizzing, with roughly 30% of each quiz reaching back to prior units.
• Use a “three-day revisit rule”: introduce a skill this week, practice it again in separated sessions, then revisit it before the final.
• Mix cases from earlier units into your case study work, so that if you are teaching COPD this week, you add one cardiac case from last month.

PhysioU’s “bookmarks” make it quick to assemble these mixed review collections. You can build a study guide (even if you call it that mainly to calm student anxiety) that pulls together objective exam techniques, diagnoses, and post-op content from across multiple weeks. That way you are testing students and also training them to make the connections that expert clinicians make automatically.

Worked Examples and Deliberate Practice: Show the Thinking, Then Give Feedback

Worked examples address a common gap in clinical education, which is that students see expert performance but never hear the reasoning behind it. Dr. Moore encourages faculty to narrate their clinical reasoning out loud as they work through a case, explaining why they choose one assessment over another, how they rule out differential diagnoses, and what concerns them about a particular presentation. A line such as “Although they’re in the gray area, I’m comfortable treating this patient because…” lets students hear how experienced clinicians think, not just what they conclude. Once students have heard that thinking, you can fade your support in steps:

• Start with a fully worked case in which you walk through everything.
• Move to a half-worked case, giving substantial information while students complete the key sections.
• Finish with an independent case and step back.

This scaffolded approach builds confidence while developing competence. Dr. Moore also shared a note from the research: during skill acquisition, strip out irrelevant stock photos and decorative elements, because extraneous images increase cognitive load when students are wrestling with new, complex material. It can feel counterintuitive, but early on clarity matters more than polish, and the visuals can come back later.

Feedback matters just as much, and this is where many well-intentioned labs fall short. Telling students to practice a shoulder exam and turning them loose with a partner is not deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means focusing on a specific sub-skill that is challenging enough to require concentration, with correction the moment an error occurs, such as when a student stabilizes the wrong shoulder or positions the goniometer incorrectly, rather than after the whole examination or at the end of the session. Dr. Moore recommends interrupting students during skill acquisition so they do not practice errors and build faulty motor patterns, then shifting to delayed feedback once skills are more established.

To make that immediate feedback meaningful, students need clear targets and the training to give each other useful corrections. A simple three-to-five criterion rubric covering patient safety, therapist positioning, and proper stabilization gives them those targets. PhysioU’s demonstration videos supply the key instructions, positioning cues, and palpation landmarks that students can use as ready-made standards while they practice.

Self-Explanation: Making Students Say Why

The final strategy may be the most important for developing clinical judgment, and it is self-explanation and elaboration. Every time a student answers a question, ask why, and follow up by asking what made them think that, how they arrived at the conclusion, and what would change their mind. This discourages students from simply parroting slides, because they know you will probe their reasoning. It also helps you spot gaps in understanding before those gaps become dangerous in practice, and it trains students to explain their professional reasoning to physicians, patients, and families.

Occasionally a student will land on a brilliant answer and then admit they do not know why they gave it. That is your signal that they have made a lucky guess or applied a pattern they cannot yet articulate, so keep pushing. The discomfort is protective, since it is better to struggle with articulation in the classroom than to freeze when a physician asks them to justify a treatment decision. Structured cue cards with sentence starters, one for stating the key finding and another for explaining what was ruled out and why, give students a scaffold for practicing professional communication while their confidence builds.

Making It Real on Monday Morning

The one moment that has stayed with us from the webinar came midway through, when Dr. Moore paused and asked participants to recall the first two strategies without scrolling back through the slides. That flash of mild panic is exactly what we want students to experience regularly, because brief retrieval moments throughout a learning session dramatically improve retention. Yet many instructors rush to fill the silence and supply the answer before students have grappled with the question. Dr. Moore’s fix is to build intentional pause slides into your lectures, with a simple reminder to stop, ask about a topic, and wait 15 seconds before accepting an answer.

Time is always the constraint, particularly in accelerated and hybrid programs, but once these strategies become routine they do not require massive time investments. Many faculty already use pieces of these strategies, so the shift is more about doing them systematically than starting from scratch. The good news is that the examples Dr. Moore shared are small, sustainable changes you can start with this week:

• A two-minute retrieval exercise at the start of class.
• A 15-second pause in the middle of a lecture.
• Three questions from previous units mixed into your weekly quiz.

The “Monday Morning Kit” mentioned in the webinar includes drop-in templates for each approach, each designed to take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to implement. Dr. Moore’s webinar made clear that you cannot out-entertain Instagram and do not need to, because the real work is meeting students at moments of genuine intellectual struggle and guiding them through to competence. When retrieval, spacing, worked examples, feedback, and self-explanation become routine, you are preparing students for the day they stand in a clinic with a patient asking questions and need to reach into their expertise with confidence.

Watch the full recording to see Dr. Moore’s strategies in action, claim Complimentary Educator access to explore PhysioU for yourself, or set up a demo with our PhysioU Education Lead to see how these strategies fit your courses. Small, steady changes add up over a semester, and they start with one retrieval prompt in your next class.