Nurse Educator Tips for Teaching

Incivility between and among nursing faculty is a national and global phenomenon. In this podcast, Dr. Cynthia Clark, the leading expert on civility, presents characteristics of faculty who demonstrate incivility and describes how to use cognitive rehearsal and other strategies to manage these behaviors when encountered in the academic setting.

Learn more about cognitive rehearsal and how to use it in Dr. Clark's article.

Nurse educators encourage students to bring knowledge forward and apply it to new situations continuously. However, nursing students are rarely asked to apply their liberal arts knowledge to patient care. In this podcast and teaching tip, Dr. Melissa Klamm presents a teaching approach that used a faculty-assigned reading of Plato's Allegory of the Cave along with faculty-developed parallels between the allegory and health promotion and patient education to review before class.

Innovative approaches are needed to deepen students’ understanding of nursing’s history. Drs. Coleen Toronto and Maureen Hillier explain how they use the Hello History AI app for nursing students to experience life-like conversations with Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton. 

You can learn more about this creative teaching strategy in their article.

Dr. Rachel Cox Simms explains how she uses ChatGPT to generate NCLEX style questions for students to review during virtual office hours. With ChatGPT she is able to customize the questions to meet individual students' needs for review. She also discusses considerations for faculty when using ChatGPT-generated questions.

Read more about this in Dr. Simm's Teaching tip.

Active learning strategies for responding to bias often involve students role-playing potentially triggering scenes. A virtual escape room was developed to encourage the same level of active learning, while removing students from the need to playact distressing explicit and implicit bias. The escape room includes several virtual environments depicting different varieties of bias and prompting student responses. In this podcast and article, Juliann Stanis discusses the virtual escape room and why she developed it.

The increasing trend of human and natural disasters in the world has given rise to the importance of disaster preparedness in nursing education. Dr. Jessica Gregg describes an innovative strategy she developed in which students create their own disaster simulations. Students were assigned to the roles of patient, narrator, or triaging nurse who was faced with limited resources and supplies. Learn more in this podcast and teaching tip.

Dr. Beth Tremblay and Dr. Janice Hawkins describe their approach to integrating climate and health topics in prelicensure education with their “energy efficiency treasure hunt” and Climate for Health Ambassador Training. In this podcast, they share specific topics, tools, and teaching strategies you can use to thread climate education throughout nursing education curricula.

Article

In this podcast, Dr. Lesley Bonfe and Dr. Emily Carroll share their teaching strategy to build communication competencies based on the SBAR format. Learn more about how they use a consistent rubric over two years of a nursing program to assess progressive levels of competency development in prioritizing and communicating patient information to healthcare colleagues and family members.

Article: https://journals.lww.com/nurseeducatoronline/citation/9900/raising_the_sbar.300.aspx

Drs. Catarelli and Booker describe the Innovation Studio they developed for teaching prelicensure students about evidence-based practice. Students self-selected a team and worked collaboratively through the steps of EBP to develop an innovative solution to clinical problem. This was followed by a Shark Tank, where the selected teams pitched their clinical product or prototype to local nursing leaders and alumni. Learn more about this engaging and interactive strategy in the podcast and the authors’ Teaching Tip.

Nursing education is moving toward competency-based education (CBE) and assessment. In this podcast, Dr. Gerry Altmiller discusses CBE and explains how to develop strategies for measuring competence. She shares a study that used screen-based virtual patient simulation as a strategy for assisting learners in developing competencies and for assessing outcomes.

Learn more about CBE and assessment in their article.