As a nurse educator, you have a responsibility to your proteges. Preparing the next generation of nurses can be daunting. How can you make sure that they know everything they need to know – and can apply it in critical situations?
Here are 10 Strategies according to Jie-hui Xu’s Toolbox of Teaching Strategies in Nurse Education:
Strategy 1: Lecture
We hear you – lecture? That’s it? The truth is historically, lecturing has proven to be one of the most effective ways to present information to large groups of students when you need to cover a lot of material quickly.
But what about the belief that it gives the students a passive, non-thinking, information-receiving role?
With technology, lectures don’t have to be boring. Incorporating polling technology, videos, and interactive software applications, can make the lecture fun and combat the passive student role.
Strategy 2: High-Fidelity Simulation
Simulation allows you to to recreate a clinical scenario in an artificial setting. These scenarios often mimic the patient care environment and allow for direct application of theoretical knowledge.
Simulations often provide innovative educational experiences that help nurses assess and develop clinical competency. Plus, it improves the nursing student’s satisfaction and self-confidence. Win-win!
Incorporating debriefing sessions after each simulation as well will improve critical thinking and clinical reasoning. It’s important to discuss the scenario, what went right, what went wrong, why that is the case, and to evaluate your nursing students reactions to the simulation.
Warning: We do not mean for you to reenact the Stanford Prison Experiments.
Strategy 3: Concept Mapping
Remember all those sentence diagrams you did in English class? This is kind of the concept here – but way more advanced.
This strategy motivates students to represent ideas visually, which causes them to analyze, evaluate, and think critically. Concept mapping helps complete missing knowledge and clarify existing knowledge by allowing students to see interrelationships in clinical data and grasp a patient’s total clinical picture.
These concept mapping applications are even available on mobile devices.
Strategy 4: Online Course
The best part about online courses for nurses? They can control their own study time and work it around their schedule. In today’s hectic world, we don’t always have time to make it into a physical classroom.
By using online courses, the instructor can prepare diverse learning materials, such as literature, videos, websites and discussion forums, and administer an online test to evaluate comprehension.
Strategy 5: Games
Now we’re getting to the good stuff, because who doesn’t like games? Using games to teach content that may be considered dry or boring can bring about a fun, open, and enjoyable atmosphere ideal for learning.
Plus, games combined with lectures are more effective than lectures alone in improving student knowledge. Best of all worlds!
Just another article about the recent insights on Gamification in Nurse Education.
Strategy 6: Role Playing
Wait – isn’t this the same as Simulation or Games that we have already listed as strategies?
Not exactly. In role playing, students represent and experience characters known in every day life, and helps students learn how to communicate and deal with conflict.
To utilize this strategy, establish the goal of the role playing activity, and debrief after the activity is complete to provide feedback to students.
I know I was hoping for a dungeons and dragons joke, but I rolled a critical fail.
Strategy 7: Jigsaw Classroom
In this strategy, Home Groups are formed to resolve a task. The Home Group allocates one member to each Expert or Research Group who gather data to bring back to the Home Group. This technique reduces racial conflict, promotes better learning, improves student motivation, and increases enjoyment of the learning experience.
Again, debriefing should follow to ensure that support, reflection, and increased learning can happen.
This a great method to bridge gaps between certain learning styles with your nursing students as well.
Strategy 8: Case Study
Generally when we think of case studies, we think of using them in business practice – but they can also be a great learning tools.
Case studies are realistic and complex stories that help bridge the gap between theory and practice, and between the classroom and the workplace.
The use of Case studies in nurse education is suitable for teaching about clinical diseases, culture competence, communication skills, and other topics.
Strategy 9: Debating
Debating should be used when teaching a controversial issue or discussing a trend in nursing education. It helps students to become actively involved in in learning the course content and promotes critical thinking skills and enhances verbal communication skills.
It may help to create an anonymous environment to discuss more sensitive issues. This is not necessarily a learning method to “out” someone for their beliefs, but to demonstrate the vast differences in every social situation and how it impacts individual communication styles.
Strategy 10: Problem-Based Learning
In this strategy, educators present realistic patient scenarios, ask questions, and require students to search for holistic answers. It also encourages active and self-directed learning, self-appraisal, clinical problem-solving skills, teamwork, discipline, and integration of information.
This can be used to teach relatively complex or messy problems with broad association with basic science and clinical experience, such as heart failure or pneumonia.
Do you have unique strategies you’ve used in your Nursing Education or that an instructor used that you remember? Let us know in the comments.
If you’re looking for a way to help your Nursing Students organize and manage their credentials, documents, work history, and more, the Nurse Backpack app is here to help.
Have questions? Contact us here.
