Nurse Educator Tips for Teaching

The Future of Nursing Report 2020-2030 calls for nursing education to integrate the social determinants of health in the curriculum to prepare future nurses to take an active role in identifying and addressing health inequities. This podcast with Dr. Emerson Ea presents ways that deep thinking helps students to plan care for patients from various populations.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, nurse educators had to adapt quickly to required changes in nursing education following isolation mandates. Educators worked diligently to provide a quality remote/online educational experience with limited resources. This podcast with Drs. Amy Mersiovsky and Dawn Reiss presents themes identified in a scoping review including teaching pedagogy, technology challenges, online teaching role, learning environment, leadership, clinical education, and well-being.

In this podcast, Dr. Ruth Woroch describes an innovative teaching strategy for nurse practitioner (NP) students. Students participate in longitudinal scenarios over multiple semesters where the patient (a standardized patient) is seen multiple times by the students. The scenarios are complex, and patients have multiple co-morbidities. Dr. Woroch explains why the faculty developed these scenarios and their implementation in the curriculum.

Kristin Petrovic explains the integration of nursing ethics with critical and open pedagogy in nursing education. She also shares key teaching strategies that faculty can adopt for their classrooms. Learn more about this new framework in the podcast.

Dr. Rebecca Fenton, in her pediatric course, prepares nursing students to do vision and hearing screenings for school-aged children. She follows the Texas screening guidelines, and manual. Following this training, students are able to get their certifications in visual and hearing screening. Learn more about this in the podcast.

Finding strategies to engage students in the application of nursing ethics is challenging. To provide a safe venue for students to wrestle with ethically wrought patient scenarios, faculty created vignettes based on personal clinical experiences that present numerous ethical dilemmas. These vignettes help students to use critical thinking and communication skills and to develop self-awareness of personal bias. Susan Siebert and Ashley Carter explain their teaching strategy in this podcast.

Julie Blazek and Dr. Toni Morris discuss the benefits of exposing prelicensure students to primary care nursing. They describe their academic minor in primary care, curriculum revision to include experiences in primary care, and collaboration with clinical partners.

Rana Najjar, Joanne Noone, and Karen Reifenstein discuss supporting an inclusive environment through correct name pronunciation. They share key times and strategies to pronounce names correctly.

Academic nursing has a long history of partnering with practice-based settings to provide clinical learning experiences for nursing students; however, these placements are not easily obtained, especially in pediatrics. The COVID-19 pandemic required a pediatric hospital and 3 academic nursing programs to rethink clinical instruction through an academic-practice partnership. This podcast with Drs. Simmy King, Bethany Cieslowski, Denise Pope, and Devora Winkfield presents the structure and outcomes of the partnership to help promote student learning in a BSN program.

Continued restrictions imposed on face-to-face learning related to the pandemic resulted in a decision to permanently transition a graduate nursing education advanced assessment course from a hybrid to an online learning modality. This podcast with Drs. Barnes and Vance presents the process of transitioning from a hybrid format to a totally online format in a physical assessment course for advanced practice nursing students. Student-centered learning, faculty presence, student and faculty engagement, student-to-student engagement, and critical thinking are emphasized.