The Pediatric Rotation: A Competency Guide for Clinical Instructors

Your student arrives competent in general physical therapy and largely without pediatric pattern recognition. That is not a gap in their education. The rotation is where that knowledge becomes clinical judgment, and you are the one who converts it.

Most clinical instructors are handed that job without ever being taught it. This is the working scaffold for it.

WHAT IS INSIDE, 12 PAGES

The seven competency domains that actually matter in pediatrics, and what growth looks like in each.

A three-level behavioral rating scale: Not yet, Developing, Setting-aware. Defined by what the student does, so your feedback points at something you saw rather than at their personality.

The rotation arc in four phases, scaled to an eight to twelve week placement.

Scope, supervision, and billing: what a student may do, and what may be billed. These are two separate questions with different answers, including the CMS Medicare Part B condition that line-of-sight is not the standard.

Two reproducible weekly forms, one each. Your record of the week, and the student's own check-in that you read.

Midterm and final checkpoints, one signed page each, with a student self-rating column alongside yours.

Feedback that changes behavior, in five minutes a day.

The student's private reflection page, reproducible.

Six friction points you should expect, and when to call the program.

HOW IT FITS YOUR PROGRAM'S PAPERWORK

This does not replace your academic program's evaluation instrument, and it is deliberately instrument-agnostic. It is the scaffold underneath whatever tool your program uses: what to watch for, when to watch for it, and how to turn observations into the specific behavioral language those forms ask for.

It carries no CEU, no certification, and no accreditation.

The eight to twelve week arc and the caseload progression are the author's professional recommendation based on clinical and teaching experience, not figures extracted from research.

YOUR LICENSE

This copy is licensed to you as an individual clinical instructor. Print or reproduce any page, in any quantity, for the students you personally supervise.

Program-wide use is a separate license. Reproducing this for clinical instructors you do not supervise, hosting it on an intranet or learning management system, or issuing it as your program's standard rotation packet is not covered here. For that, contact drky@beingthept.com.

PDF, plus a fillable edition so the weekly forms and checkpoints can be typed into and saved rather than printed.

Onboarding a licensed new graduate instead of supervising a student? The companion program is The First 12 Weeks.

Adapted from The Pediatric PT Playbook by Kyan Sahba, PT, DPT, PhD.

TERMS OF USE

This is professional education for licensed clinicians and for students in training. It is not clinical advice for any individual patient, and nothing in it creates a clinician-patient or supervisory relationship with the author or publisher. Where it differs from your academic program's requirements, your employer's policy, your state practice act, or a payer's rules, those govern.

Digital product. Because the files are delivered immediately on purchase, please read this description and the page count before buying.