Learn how deliberate practice and self-explanation techniques help AT students strengthen clinical reasoning and become more self-directed learners. Dr. Chris Schmidt, PhD, ATC, will share practical examples of using ATu resources in classroom, lab, and clinical settings.

Featured Speaker: Christopher Schmidt, PhD, ATC

An athletic training professional for 30 years, Dr. Schmidt’s career spans clinical care, academic leadership, and professional service. From treating patients across diverse settings to shaping undergraduate and graduate programs, he’s a contributor in the field, influencing best practices through research and committee roles with the NATA and CAATE. His passion extends to curriculum design, interprofessional education, and youth sports injury prevention, helping to shape the future of athletic training.

00:00 Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies Webinar

04:03 Teaching Strategies for Knowledge Retention

08:14 Deliberate Practice with Feedback Strategy

11:18 Athletic Training Education Strategies

13:45 Peer Feedback Implementation Strategies

17:49 Clinical Reasoning Process Development

20:56 Clinical Reasoning Teaching Strategies

22:59 Faculty Resource Guide Teaching Strategies

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

How to Build AT Students’ Clinical Competence With Deliberate Practice

Teaching athletic training students to perform a skill correctly is one thing, but teaching them to think like experienced clinicians is another. That means helping them explain their clinical reasoning, teaching them how to catch their own errors, and guiding them to refine their skill technique on their own. So how do you build that kind of competence in your classroom and lab?

In the second installment of our evidence-based teaching series, Christopher Schmidt, PhD, ATC, ATu Education Lead and Director of Faculty Development & Support at Clinical Pattern Recognition, shared two approaches for developing hands-on skill and clinical reasoning, whether you teach in the classroom, the lab, or clinical settings. The first installment focused on helping students retain information, and this session moved to helping them build true clinical competence. The good news is that both approaches are practical enough to start using in your next class.

Deliberate Practice: Beyond Mindless Repetition

Not all practice is created equal. Students can spend hours in the lab repeating a skill and still fail to develop competence if that practice lacks two things: immediate, specific feedback on the parts that challenge them, and a requirement to perform the skill correctly after receiving correction. That combination is what separates deliberate practice from simple repetition.

The feedback also has to arrive at the right moment, so when students are learning motor skills such as palpating anatomical landmarks, performing range of motion assessments, or executing special tests, they need feedback exactly when they struggle with a specific component of the skill. In the webinar, Dr. Schmidt explained that this feedback should target “the part of the skill that is at the edge of their current ability.”

The evidence for this approach is compelling. Research shared in the webinar shows that simulation-based education (SBE) combined with deliberate practice produces an effect size of 0.71, significantly outperforming the patient encounters that happen to come along in traditional clinical education. Findings on testing-enhanced learning (TEL) also transfer directly to skill-based outcomes, not only to didactic knowledge.

ATu’s extensive video library of expert demonstrations gives you a foundation for putting this into practice. Instead of curating content by hand, you can quickly build focused skill sessions around the detailed, step-by-step instructions that accompany every technique video. That saves you preparation time and gives students a consistent standard to practice against.

Four Ready-to-Use Tactics for Deliberate Practice in Your Course

Dr. Schmidt shared four tactics you can bring into your course, and they work well together. The first two focus on what happens while students practice, and the second two extend feedback to partners and to time outside class. Here is how each one works:

• Micro-skills: Break labs into micro-skills to reduce cognitive overload by chunking complex procedures. Instead of practicing an entire shoulder examination, dedicate 8 to 10 minutes each to palpation landmarks, range of motion assessments, and individual special tests, then integrate everything at the end.
• Rapid cycle feedback: When you see a student performing a skill incorrectly, interrupt immediately instead of waiting until they finish. Give specific corrective feedback in the moment, have them redo that step correctly, and then let them continue.
• Peer feedback with structured rubrics: Copy the positioning, stabilization, palpation, and rationale from each ATu technique page to build a 3 to 5 criterion rubric. Students then use it to assess each other during practice.
• Video self-review: Students record themselves performing a technique, self-rate using your rubric, and resubmit. This is particularly valuable for hybrid or HyFlex programs.

Rapid cycle feedback may be the most important shift in how you provide correction. Allowing incorrect motor patterns to solidify only creates problems you will need to fix later, so early intervention prevents errors from becoming ingrained habits. It feels uncomfortable at first, both for you and for your students, but that discomfort is protective.

Peer feedback turns ATu’s detailed content into a force multiplier, because every technique page includes comprehensive instructions covering positioning, stabilization, palpation, and rationale. If one student stabilizes the wrong shoulder during dynamometry testing, their partner can correct the technique and point to the accurate demonstration on screen. That means students receive specific, actionable feedback even when you are working with another group.

ATu’s video library also supports micro-skills with targeted demonstrations that students can reference before and after class. Video self-review then extends deliberate practice beyond the classroom, as students compare their performance to the expert demonstration and identify gaps. That metacognitive exercise accelerates skill development while building self-awareness.

Self-Explanation: Developing Professional Reasoning

The fifth and potentially most transformative strategy in our series asks students to articulate the reasoning behind every clinical decision they make, every single time. Clinical reasoning does not develop in isolation or in silence. The ability to make sound decisions and advance patient outcomes emerges when students explain why they chose a particular intervention, what would change their mind, or how they arrived at a specific conclusion.

This habit transfers directly into clinical practice, where athletic trainers must justify treatment choices to physicians, explain interventions to patients and families, and eventually teach the next generation of professionals. Building that communication skill starts in your classroom, where you can consistently ask elaboration prompts such as “What made you think of that?” You can also ask what would change their mind and how they arrived at a conclusion.

Self-explanation serves several purposes, and the first is that it prevents students from reading content back from your presentation slides without understanding it. Testing whether they can repeat information tells you nothing about their clinical reasoning. Second, it normalizes professional explanation as a core competency, so students begin to expect it of themselves and others and develop the communication patterns that define expert practice.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, elaboration prompts reveal when students stumble onto correct answers without understanding why. That blank stare when you ask them to explain their reasoning is a warning sign, and it needs to be addressed before they begin clinical experiences where patient outcomes depend on sound decision-making. ATu supports this work throughout its narrated demonstrations, where experienced clinicians verbalize their thought process during assessment videos, so students hear the expert reasoning that guides each decision.

Elaboration Prompts in Practice: Cue Cards and Productive Correction

To make elaboration prompts easier for students to answer, consider giving them structured cue cards with sentence starters, such as “The key finding was…” Other starters can help them explain what they ruled out and why, and name the evidence that would confirm their conclusion. These scaffolds help students articulate their reasoning until it becomes second nature.

Students tend to keep these prompts close at hand. Some tuck them into the notebooks they carry to clinical rotations, others keep them on their clipboards at clinical sites, and others post them on their desktops during class. Having the starters in view keeps the habit going well beyond your classroom.

When students make errors, resist the urge to skip past the discomfort. The immediate correction might feel harsh, but you are safeguarding future patients. Help students identify where their reasoning broke down, what led them astray, and how they can self-correct. That metacognitive awareness, understanding what went wrong and what they would do differently next time, is just as important as arriving at the right answer.

Bringing It All Together: Starting Small and Explaining the Why

These strategies are not magic, and using them means accepting an uncomfortable truth: techniques that improve actual learning sometimes lower students’ confidence in the moment. You may encounter pushback, because students accustomed to passive learning might resist the cognitive effort of retrieval practice or the vulnerability of explaining their reasoning out loud. The good news is that you can get ahead of it by explaining, at the start of your course, which strategies you are using and why. Students who understand that their discomfort signals genuine learning are more likely to embrace the process.

Deliberate practice and self-explanation also work best alongside the retention strategies from the first installment: retrieval practice, spacing and interleaving, and worked examples with fading. You do not have to adopt everything at once, so start with one small change in your next class. Here are three places to begin:

• Pick one skill and break it into micro-skills of 8 to 10 minutes each.
• Interrupt an error right away, have the student redo that step correctly, and then let them continue.
• Ask students what made them think of that after each answer, and what would change their mind.

The webinar also mentioned a Faculty Resource Guide Toolkit with drop-in templates for each of the five strategies in the series. You do not need to build anything from scratch: open the toolkit, select the template you need, and you are ready for your next class session. It pairs well with ATu’s technique videos and narrated demonstrations.

Dr. Schmidt grounded both approaches in what learning science tells us actually works. That is how you prepare students to do more than pass exams, because they learn to understand when and why to apply a technique. It also helps them become self-directed learners who provide excellent patient care throughout their careers.

Watch the full recording to see Dr. Schmidt’s examples in action, claim Complimentary Educator access to explore ATu for yourself, or set up a demo with our ATu Education Lead to talk through how deliberate practice and self-explanation can fit your courses. Starting with one micro-skill or one elaboration prompt is enough to begin.