In my career as a nurse at UMMC, I have seen my philosophy of nursing education change drastically as I have advanced in my role as educator. When I first started my career as a staff nurse in the Children's ER, my main focus was on learning how to hone my basic skills needed to care for my patients. At the time this involved IV skills for the pediatric population, time management, and critical thinking skills. Over time, I became better at these skills and shifted my focus onto more of a holistic approach of patient care. Once I felt like I had mastered my approach in assessing and caring for my pediatric patients, I then moved to the adult ICU and felt like I had just started all over again. There were new skill sets I needed to learn and the approach to holistically caring for the patient changed greatly due to the change in my patients age groups and disease processes. This change was hard for me, but it helped me develop my initial nursing philosophy: Do as much good as you can, for as long as you can.
I knew that my main goal in becoming a nurse was to positively impact this world in some way. I wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself, and to make a difference in someone's life. I think that is why the Children's Emergency Department and the Medical ICU were so attractive to me as job opportunities. The downfall of working in a high stress, low yield environments such as these is that the burnout factor increases enormously. Fatigue, increased anxiety, and depression are just a few of the things I found myself dealing with only a few short years into my nursing career. I would leave work thinking "I don't know if I made the right choice with this career" and "How am I going to do this for 30 years?" That is when the nursing educator position seemingly fell into my lap. I feel like God opened up this opportunity for me to lead my fellow pediatric emergency nurses in education and help them understand they are not alone.
Like in the video below, I believe our nursing institutions have a responsibility to their students to enhance the way our nurses learn coping abilities and how to recognize and control burnout. Some ways I believe these institutions are able to do that are to collaboratively establish evidence based nursing education practices to help teach the faculty how to teach the students. Using research and data, nursing educators could learn the best ways to teach nursing students and new nurses that may not be by using traditional methods. Innovative technology and creatively incorporating different learning techniques could greatly improve the comprehension of the nursing student or new nurse in both the clinical and education setting.
I have felt what most of these brand new nurses are feeling and I am able to recognize the signs of burnout and intervene. That is probably one of the most important facets of my job role as a nurse educator. This has helped me evolve my nursing philosophy and shift it to include nursing as a part of the overall message: Do as much good as you can, for as long as you can, for your patients and your fellow nurses. I feel like we as nurses must have each other's backs and be key players in recognizing and intervening in nurse burnout. Going forward, my goal as a Nurse Educator in the Children's ER is to help teach these young nurses about the signs of burnout and some things to do to avoid it. Also, I intend to focus on increasing nurse retention within the emergency department. I feel like if we can help decrease burnout, the retention will follow. In the future, my goal as a Nursing Instructor will be to focus on ways to increase healthier behaviors for nursing students that they will be able to carry with them throughout their career. In conclusion, I would like to say to any future nurses out there "Do as much good as you can, for as long as you can, and have each others backs."
Reference:
Nurse Leaders Discuss the Future of Nursing Education. (2013, May 07). Retrieved July 29, 2017, from https://youtu.be/11j8NFYVc2A
Current Teaching and Learning Strategies
The modified version of Gagne's Nine Events of Instruction that Smith and Ragan revised in 1999 is the instructional design theory that I would use as a nurse educator teaching strategy. It can be used with problem-solving content, such as the content found in mathematics and science (Mastrian, McGonigle, Mahan, & Bixler, 2011).
Where Smith and Ragan's adaptation differs from Gagne's design theory is that it provides a more hands on learning and immediate feedback. I believe that it is a more accessible way for today's learners to ingrain the skill we are trying to teach for a longer period of time. The nine steps of the adapted version include: deploying attention, establish instructional purpose, recall prior knowledge, present materials, provide learner guidance, elicit performance, provide feedback, enhance retention and transfer, and assess performance.
I believe the best way to really learn something is to have hands on practice along with discussion and clear outcome guidelines. Using this instructional design theory fits these expectations and provides a template for nursing educators to teach a wide range of skills and concepts. I feel that it allows enough flexibility to tailor it to the specific learning needs of the audience, but also provides enough structure to help budding nurse educators efficiently present educational material and assess the learner comprehension of the material.
Reference:
Mastrian, K. G., McGonigle, D., Mahan, W. L., & Bixler, B. (2011). Integrating technology in nursing education. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett Publishers