Pedagogical principles used by anatomy teachers to facilitate the teaching and learning of anatomy to physiotherapy undergraduates in the United Kingdom

The teaching of anatomy for physiotherapy differs from other health professions, and yet there is lack of guidance for the best practice in the literature, especially within the United Kingdom (UK). The present study aimed to provide the most effective pedagogical guidance for teaching a typical anatomy curriculum for a three-year BSc Physiotherapy degree program within the UK. The research design used a constructivist grounded theory where semi-structured interviews were conducted with eight registered physiotherapists teaching anatomy to undergraduate physiotherapy students within the UK. The study generated 72,292 words of qualitative data that were thematically analyzed using Saldana's coding techniques until data saturation was reached. The results had three main components: a pedagogical backdrop composed of five pedagogical issues, pedagogical approaches with its three sub-components and pedagogical timings of phases of when anatomical teaching was conducted across the three undergraduate physiotherapy degree programs. The cognitive load theory (CLT) best explained the results through five main pedagogical principles: spiral curriculum strategies, visual anatomical imagery, kinesthetic anatomical skills, strategies for teaching clinical physiotherapy anatomy, and using anatomical principles for metacognition. The study proposes a new modified version of CLT which acknowledges that newly acquired knowledge is fragile in novice learners, who have limited long-term memory capacities, and subsequently require regular revisitations, and also acknowledges kinesthetic input and germane cognitive load metacognition strategies. The study recommends appointing anatomy theme leads to take responsibility for the spiral curriculum approach across the 3 years and to introduce explicit anatomy teaching during the later clinical years.