Nurse Educator Tips for Teaching

Critical thinking has long been valued in nursing education and is a foundational element of clinical judgment. Discernment is often viewed as a particular type of critical thinking that involves making distinctions, including distinguishing fact from truth. In this podcast, the author (Miriam Abbott) describes discernment activities ("accuracy assignments") that she integrated into 3 online nursing courses. She shares her findings in the podcast and article.

Drs. Kim Leighton and Suzan Kardong-Edgren describe their new study that evaluated the reliability characteristics of CLECS 2.0 using secondary data analysis of 591 prelicensure nursing students. This study led to CLECS 3.0. This instrument can be used to compare how well prelicensure nursing students believe their learning needs are met in 3 clinical learning environments: traditional clinical learning, face-to-face simulation, and screen-based simulation.

Rural areas face a persistent shortage of BSN-prepared nurses, impacting health care access and equity. In this podcast (and article), Dr. Kim Hudson-Gallogly discusses the barriers to rural clinical placements for undergraduate nursing students and introduces a faculty-led Rural Immersion Capstone Model (RICM) as a sustainable solution. The model can be used as a prototype for undergraduate and graduate student learning.

Nursing programs teach many psychomotor skills that are not practiced enough for students to achieve mastery, leading to skill decay. Teaching fewer psychomotor skills could improve skill performance, yet there is no consensus about which skills are most essential. In this podcast and article, Dr. Mike Aldridge discusses the psychomotor skills most essential for new graduate nurses in medical-surgical nursing based on the results of a study using the Delphi methodological framework.

Expert clinicians who enter academia are often unprepared to function in the role of nursing faculty due to a lack of academic preparation for teaching roles. This gap in readiness can lead to challenges in delivering effective instruction, mentoring students, and meeting academic expectations. Drs. Abby Suarez and Rebecca Lane describe their orientation program for novice nurse educators and how they are using it in their own nursing programs.

As nursing education continues to transform, nursing schools are seeking intentional strategies to ensure clinical experiences are meaningful and support students' development of clinical reasoning and judgment. Traditional post-clinical assignments, such as care plans and concept maps, have served as tools to evaluate undergraduate learners' understanding of patient care. This podcast with Dr. Katie Parris and article present a high-impact clinical teaching strategy to help students to engage in critical thinking with competency-based education as a framework.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing concept in today's world, and healthcare is no exception. Nurses who lack the ability to engage with AI risk exacerbating biases and causing patient harm. This podcast with Drs. Kate Bayan and Asma Taha and their article describe how an innovative strategy using generative AI can be used as both the subject and the tool for transformative learning, simultaneously addressing digital literacy, critical thinking, cultural humility, and evidence-based practice.

Pre-rounding, reviewing patient data from the electronic medical record to formulate preliminary management plans, is an essential professional behavior for nurse practitioner students. To develop this clinical skill and promote metacognition, students design a personalized data collection template in a clinical seminar, identifying which data elements they will review and how they will organize the information.

Harm reduction approaches are well-established public health interventions that can reduce mortality associated with substance use. Concepts related to harm reduction and overdose prevention have been virtually absent in the nursing education literature. This study by Dr. Brayden Kameg and colleagues evaluated changes in nursing students' perceptions toward people who use drugs and knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about overdose prevention following an opioid overdose prevention workshop using simulation. A total of 569 students participated in the workshop. Competence and readiness to manage an overdose increased among participants (P

Extensive clinical hours and prior health care experience are widely believed to enhance new graduate nurse practice readiness, yet supporting evidence is limited. Dr. Ryan shares an important study that examined these assumptions. Using data from 189 students from 8 BSN programs, Dr. Ryan and colleagues found no significant associations between practice readiness and total clinical hours, between practice readiness and percentage of simulation hours, or between practice readiness and prior health care employment.