By Rebecca L. Potter, MSN/ED, RN, Kaplan Nurse Consultant
Have you ever felt alone? As a nursing faculty member, I did at times.
It didn’t matter if it was a community college or a large university setting. I felt that the struggles I was having with student’s behaviors, engagement and learning was me or something I was doing. At first I thought it was my newness to academia, but I loved teaching and seemed to be so good at it when I was at the hospital and in the adjunct/clinical settings. Then I thought it was the lack of mentorship from senior faculty. I was the youngest on staff and many were seasoned and in their own silo’s. Maybe it was just the school that was not up to date with the innovative and current practices I was trying. I could find so many excuses to explain why students in my Foundations courses were struggling with learning nursing content and acclimating to the world of nursing. I tried so many ways to reach them and make sure that they all learned and all were successful in my course. It was exhausting all the way until my last day as a faculty member.
Starting a new position as a Kaplan nurse consultant opened my eyes, wide. I started traveling during orientation and quickly saw that the struggles I was facing as a faculty member were not mine alone- others were facing them too. During our visits faculty would share and ask how to deal with the student who was not self-efficacious, or the ones with a lack of engagement, how to balance learning versus grading, and many other academic issues that I had dealt with as well. The feeling of being alone with my struggles was a part of the past and I vowed to make sure no other faculty member feels alone.
How do we deal with the students whom are not as efficacious as we would like or as they need to be in a nursing courses? After attending the continuous education event Overcoming the Challenges of Non-Self-Efficacious Students from Kaplan Nursing I started thinking more about how to increase the student’s want and will to learn. This led me start discussing with students what self-efficacy was and how it would help them succeed. It also required me to examine my own teaching and incorporate deeper approaches to learning. Of course I always put in a visual, auditory, and kinesthetic way to learn a concept. Although what was being taught could be considered superficial learning. My colleagues and I started incorporating more case studies and simulation into skills lab and lectures. We also opened up the lab with times each of us was in there. The key was to provide more problem-based learning.
Prompting student engagement takes constant work from educators. Kaplan’s white paper on How Nursing Students Study gave me some great tips to add into my practice and courses. I first encouraged the students to think about their thinking and how they study with a short quiz on our learning management system. With the results of the quiz they could go to the syllabus and find a table that would list out active learning strategies for their learning type/s. This was much like Kaplan’s recommendation of “providing a ‘top ten’ list of tools/reference material to assist…” I also started incorporating practice questions after lecture, lab, or in clinical down time as a response to student surveys. I enjoyed role modeling to the students how to think through a nursing question, how to eliminate answer choices, and how to critically think through the answer choices remaining. The encouragement and feedback were immediate, and students enjoyed it. To take it a step further a faculty member can then put a similar question into a quiz or test where the students who were engaged and participating will get that one correct (an easier way to earn a point).
I want each and every one of you reading this to know you are not alone. There are other nursing educators out there that are struggling with similar issues. Together we can work to come up with best practices to address the issues and be more successful as a teachers and learners.
What about you? Share some of your best practices with us- we’d love to hear from you!
References used:
Irwin, B. (2011). Overcoming the Challenges of Non-Self-Efficacious Students. Continuing Education Event offered by Kaplan Nursing.
Kaplan Nursing White Paper How Nursing Student’s Study.
