Teaching - the Sarah Key way

Posted by Nell Mead at 12:00 on 28 Nov 2011

Last year, Sarah Key invited me and nine other physiotherapists (all accredited practitioners of the Sarah Key Method, or APSKM) to a meeting at Highgrove, where she revealed that she was beginning to think about retirement and wanted us to consider taking on the legacy of teaching her courses in the future, and also that she was planning to write a textbook of her method for physiotherapists, to which she wants some of us to contribute. I understand that her popular books are already being studied in some schools of osteopathy, but she’s written nothing specifically for practitioners yet.

As experienced physiotherapists and enthusiastic practitioners of the SKM, we were all pretty flattered to be invited, and keen to get involved; and as Sarah has never let anyone else teach her courses before, we set out to train ourselves up. We’ve had help with this from Sarah herself, who has given us access to the PowerPoint presentations we’d be teaching, and also from her administrative staff Carmel, Ruve and Federica – and most of all from physiotherapist and researcher in spinal biomechanics Manos Stefanakis and his PhD supervisor, Professor Mike Adams who presented a superb lecture at our teacher training meeting at Kensington Palace in June.

We’ve all put in a lot of individual work into reading and absorbing reference papers, learning teaching and presenting skills; and meeting up on a regular basis to practise, update each other on the latest spinal research and discuss logistics, in Tetbury, Bristol, London and Belfast and during Skype-based conference calls.

And this month, we finally had the chance to put it all into practice as five of us took turns to teach the Sarah Key Masterclass 1 course at Highgrove.

With Sarah herself and Manos watching and assessing our teaching, we were all a little nervous; but the fifteen delegates were enthusiastic and the course went really well, with no real glitches. Everyone felt well prepared, and I think the work we’d put into learning and understanding the academic research behind the presentations really paid off. They do say that if you want to improve your knowledge of something, you should teach it; and that definitely rings true for me.

After the course, Manos took each of us aside to feed back on our performance, which was extremely helpful and reassuring as he felt we had all done well; but equally important and gratifying was the response from the delegates, who reported back with comments including:

• “enjoyable and helpful”,
• “I have honestly never been to such a good course before”
• “a fantastic few days”
• “a huge inspiration”
• “a really enjoyable 3 days of amazing learning and discussion”
• “your course has ignited my passion again... I can’t fully express to you my sense of relief and enlightenment”

Pretty awesome, huh?  Of course, the real credit goes to Sarah as it's her passion and years of work that underpin the Masterclass; but it's nice to hear that we managed to convey it successfully.

The next Sarah Key Masterclasses will be run in 2012 in Scotland and Northern Ireland, as we’re breaking away from just using Kensington Palace and Highgrove to make the courses more accessible. They’re open to physios and osteopaths. If you’re interested in attending, please contact Federica Bertolini at admin.uk@sarahkey.com.

*Picture taken by Manos Stefanakis of me standing on Sarah Key, at her 2010 Back in a Week course.