Nurse Educator Tips for Teaching

The need for learners to engage in deep learning and develop a spirit of inquiry to lead change requires RN to BSN programs to create new models to prepare learners for new or expanded practice roles. In this podcast with Ms. LaNeigh Harkness, Dr. Ellarene Duis Sanders, and Dr. Patricia Francis-Johnson, you will learn how the faculty reinvigorated their RN-to-BSN program, preparing learners for expanded roles. They developed an innovative Application Practice Model to enhance learners' critical thinking, problem solving, self-direction, and communication skills to address practice issues needing improvement. Also read their article.

A diverse nursing faculty is critical to recruiting, educating, and supporting a diverse nursing workforce. Dr. Kumhee Ro and Dr. Joshua Villarreal present their BOLD Framework, which was derived from a series of qualitative semistructured interviews from nursing Faculty of Color (FOC). The BOLD framework begins with an assessment of the institution's organizational culture, capacity for critical reflection, and perceptions of FOC as individuals. These areas of assessment are visualized as encircling the 4 steps that guide administration through opportunities to engage faculty: Be genuine, be Open to the art of inquiring, Listen deeply to the voices from our culture, and Do by lending action to words. Having completed the 4 steps the final action, Facilitate the Power of Networks, provides ongoing sustained support for FOC. Learn more in their article.

In this podcast and article, Dr. Erica Sciarra, Dr. John Patro, and Cristianna Cardinale describe an interdisciplinary pilot project that provided faculty with strategies to create a supportive and engaging learning environment while reinforcing psychological and physical wellness. Faculty were provided with an interactive Prezi™ presentation, which contained teaching strategies to promote engagement and increase wellness, and approaches to develop relationships among faculty and peers.

Educational institutions often struggle to access faculties from different health care fields for interprofessional simulations. Nursing and paramedicine educators from a university and a community college collaborated on a simulation on the management of immunization anaphylaxis in the community. Dr. Janet Loo and Ms. Tammie Muise describe the simulation, its development, and students' learning outcomes. They also discuss the challenges they encountered in implementing this simulation (e.g., coordinating schedules, space, and training of facilitators) and how they addressed these. If you are interested in offering community based interprofessional simulations, be sure to read their article.

The flipped classroom is a pedagogical approach to create active learning experiences in the nursing classroom. Dr. Blumenstock developed the DIET-RX acronym for a series of steps faculty can use when teaching with a flipped classroom approach. Learn more about DIET RX in this podcast and her article.

Dr. Shira Birnbaum describes a full-semester writing course she developed and strategies for improving student writing. Students identify problems in early drafts of their work, which they subsequently learn to resolve. She emphasizes that writing, like clinical learning, requires an investment of time and labor far beyond what is typical in didactic approaches to classroom-based graduate education. Students reflect on their learning in the accompanying article.

High-quality video productions integrating 360° simulations of real-life nursing scenarios have shown promise in enriching learning experiences and refining students' competencies, attitudes, and knowledge. Dr. Patrícia Freire de Vasconcelos describes the development of a 360° video simulation scenario for teaching medication safety in nursing. The methodological framework comprised 3 key stages: (1) crafting the script; (2) evaluating the script's validity by expert judges in medication administration; and (3) developing the set, filming scenes, and refining the video using a 360° camera. The 360° video was tailored for utilization with virtual reality glasses, rendering it accessible for integration into nursing education curricula. The final version consisted of a continuous scene that ended with a question that prompted the identification of errors.

Learn more in their article.

Adjunct clinical faculty play a vital role in ensuring an adequate number of instructors for nursing students. Dr. Bryce Catarelli and Professor Karen Schofield describe a clinical bingo game they developed for first-semester nursing students and clinical faculty to serve as a guide for the hospital experience. Each space on the bingo card is a skill practiced in laboratory/simulation or an action that is appropriate for students' ability and level of education. Each skill is signed off on completion, creating a log of skills/actions performed by the student. Their article provides additional details about their bingo game.

In this podcast, Dr. Kaitlyn Kolcun and Dr. Kelly Sullivan explain their rationale and process for transforming traditional prebriefing and debriefing experiences for a virtual-reality simulation to an online asynchronous format. Learn more about how they developed and implemented asynchronous prebriefing and debriefing activities and assessed student learning outcomes. Drs. Kolcun and Sullivan also describe the interesting subjective feedback students provided about the asynchronous virtual simulation experience.

Read more about this in their teaching tip.

Nursing students' perceived usability toward a technology application affects their learning experience. Few studies have investigated immersive virtual reality (IVR) simulation for learning fundamental nursing skills. Dr. Wong and her research team explored the usability of IVR simulations with first-year nursing students and their perspectives on this learning modality. In this podcast and article (which is Open Access), Dr. Wong describes their mixed-methods study using surveys and focus groups. The findings demonstrated students' positive inclinations toward IVR simulation learning. Two areas emerged: using IVR simulation as a complementary modality for learning fundamental nursing skills and barriers affecting students' usability of this technology. By addressing concerns about usability, IVR simulation can be an important complementary modality for skills learning.

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