Advertise on podcast: Nurse Educator Tips for Teaching

Real-time instructor feedback is a key component in nursing education, yet the phrasing of feedback prompts is rarely discussed. At the end of each class throughout the semester, the author asks nursing students: What is one area of opportunity for my teaching today? The phrase "area of opportunity" is intentional and tends to change how students respond. Dr. Valerie Wright discusses the power of this single question in obtaining feedback on teaching in this podcast and teaching tip.

Learning and professional growth are embedded throughout the undergraduate curriculum. Beginning with the first-semester professional practice course, students are introduced to the professional nurse role through key concepts such as practice excellence, collaboration, and innovation. Early in the course, faculty observed students struggling to understand the nurse's professional role and the importance of these concepts. In this podcast and teaching tip, Dr. Jennifer King presents a teaching strategy to engage students with material whose importance was unclear and help them think critically and build confidence.

Understanding how the brain learns has the potential to strengthen student engagement and learning. One practical framework for operationalizing neuro-based learning is the 4A learning sequence (Anchor, Add, Apply, Away). This simple neuro-friendly teaching sequence is well-suited to nursing education because it can mirror the cognitive processes that support clinical reasoning. The authors explain neuro/brain-based learning and how to use the 4A sequence in this podcast and article.

Critical thinking has long been valued in nursing education and is a foundational element of clinical judgment. Discernment is often viewed as a particular type of critical thinking that involves making distinctions, including distinguishing fact from truth. In this podcast, the author (Miriam Abbott) describes discernment activities ("accuracy assignments") that she integrated into 3 online nursing courses. She shares her findings in the podcast and article.

Drs. Kim Leighton and Suzan Kardong-Edgren describe their new study that evaluated the reliability characteristics of CLECS 2.0 using secondary data analysis of 591 prelicensure nursing students. This study led to CLECS 3.0. This instrument can be used to compare how well prelicensure nursing students believe their learning needs are met in 3 clinical learning environments: traditional clinical learning, face-to-face simulation, and screen-based simulation.

Rural areas face a persistent shortage of BSN-prepared nurses, impacting health care access and equity. In this podcast (and article), Dr. Kim Hudson-Gallogly discusses the barriers to rural clinical placements for undergraduate nursing students and introduces a faculty-led Rural Immersion Capstone Model (RICM) as a sustainable solution. The model can be used as a prototype for undergraduate and graduate student learning.

Nursing programs teach many psychomotor skills that are not practiced enough for students to achieve mastery, leading to skill decay. Teaching fewer psychomotor skills could improve skill performance, yet there is no consensus about which skills are most essential. In this podcast and article, Dr. Mike Aldridge discusses the psychomotor skills most essential for new graduate nurses in medical-surgical nursing based on the results of a study using the Delphi methodological framework.

Expert clinicians who enter academia are often unprepared to function in the role of nursing faculty due to a lack of academic preparation for teaching roles. This gap in readiness can lead to challenges in delivering effective instruction, mentoring students, and meeting academic expectations. Drs. Abby Suarez and Rebecca Lane describe their orientation program for novice nurse educators and how they are using it in their own nursing programs.

As nursing education continues to transform, nursing schools are seeking intentional strategies to ensure clinical experiences are meaningful and support students' development of clinical reasoning and judgment. Traditional post-clinical assignments, such as care plans and concept maps, have served as tools to evaluate undergraduate learners' understanding of patient care.  This podcast with Dr. Katie Parris and article present a high-impact clinical teaching strategy to help students to engage in critical thinking with competency-based education as a framework.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing concept in today's world, and healthcare is no exception. Nurses who lack the ability to engage with AI risk exacerbating biases and causing patient harm. This podcast with Drs. Kate Bayan and Asma Taha and their article describe how an innovative strategy using generative AI can be used as both the subject and the tool for transformative learning, simultaneously addressing digital literacy, critical thinking, cultural humility, and evidence-based practice.

Pre-rounding, reviewing patient data from the electronic medical record to formulate preliminary management plans, is an essential professional behavior for nurse practitioner students. To develop this clinical skill and promote metacognition, students design a personalized data collection template in a clinical seminar, identifying which data elements they will review and how they will organize the information.

Harm reduction approaches are well-established public health interventions that can reduce mortality associated with substance use. Concepts related to harm reduction and overdose prevention have been virtually absent in the nursing education literature. This study by Dr. Brayden Kameg and colleagues evaluated changes in nursing students' perceptions toward people who use drugs and knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about overdose prevention following an opioid overdose prevention workshop using simulation. A total of 569 students participated in the workshop. Competence and readiness to manage an overdose increased among participants (P

Extensive clinical hours and prior health care experience are widely believed to enhance new graduate nurse practice readiness, yet supporting evidence is limited. Dr. Ryan shares an important study that examined these assumptions. Using data from 189 students from 8 BSN programs, Dr. Ryan and colleagues found no significant associations between practice readiness and total clinical hours, between practice readiness and percentage of simulation hours, or between practice readiness and prior health care employment.

Effective nurse-physician communication is essential for patient safety and care coordination. Communication failures are a leading contributor to sentinel events, highlighting the need for interprofessional communication training in healthcare education. Yet many nursing and medical students have limited opportunities to practice structured, real-time communication with future colleagues. This podcast presents a simulation experience that integrates a school of nursing and a medical school to help students embrace interprofessional communication.

Advanced practice nursing programs face a critical shortage of preceptors to guide the translation of education to clinical practice. Preceptors face barriers to mentoring students, including inadequate training and orientation, and a lack of benefits and time.  This podcast with Dr. Kala Christopherson and article present the results of a study for improving the education, retention,  professional development, and recognition of preceptors within the Portal to Precept Model. The Model focuses on academic-practice partnerships and can be applied to all levels of nursing education.