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Teaching Techniques That Work: Advice for Nurse Educators

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Teaching new nurses the best patient care techniques as well as critical medical terms for diagnosis, illness management, and medication administration is part of the job of a nurse educator. Nursing students can be taught using a variety of methods both in the classroom and in a clinical setting. To your students, you owe a duty as a nurse educator. It can be challenging to prepare the next generation of nurses. How can you be sure they are fully informed and capable of applying their knowledge in urgent situations? The following teaching techniques will help you make your lesson plans interesting for nursing students.

Storytelling

By telling stories, nursing students can simulate the characters and circumstances they might experience during clinical rotations or on the job. Making a virtual community with families and medical professionals as characters that students can follow throughout a course is one method you can use. Students can identify with the characters and become engrossed in the tales of families facing healthcare issues and healthcare teams collaborating to find solutions. This emotional investment may help students pay closer attention to the decisions made by healthcare professionals and may even help them remember these incidents during tests or clinical training.

Simulated nursing activities

Things could get interesting from here on out. Divide the class into smaller groups so that students can practice more practical interventions and techniques, such as a code blue scenario, and use their critical thinking abilities to respond quickly and effectively. While you, as the teacher, can participate and provide guidance as needed, try to play a supporting role and let the students handle the labor-intensive tasks.

Role-playing

Students take part in characters in role-playing exercises that simulate scenarios from the healthcare industry, such as patient-nurse interactions. Students acting as nurses apply the concepts of patient care they have learned in class, while other students watch and offer feedback. This is a good teaching method for developing decision-making, problem-solving, and interpersonal communication skills that are patient-focused.

Using concept maps

You must have completed sentence diagrams in English class, don't you? This is sort of the same idea as this, only much more sophisticated. This tactic encourages students to visualize concepts, which prompts them to critically analyze, judge, and think. By enabling students to understand the relationships between clinical data and the overall clinical picture of a patient, concept mapping helps students fill in knowledge gaps and clarify knowledge that already exists.

Using case studies

Repeated PowerPoint slides can become boring. To stimulate student discussion, try incorporating case studies with visual aids, lab tables, and patient quotes. This keeps those slide shows interesting and compels students to use what they have learned in class and to consider the implications of real-world situations.

Debate

Giving students a prompt—such as a contentious nursing or healthcare issue or a current nursing trend—and asking them to share their opinions on it is part of this teaching strategy. Debate promotes active engagement with the subject matter and with other students. Additionally, it aids in the growth of students' argumentation, public speaking, and critical thinking abilities.

Service-based education

This instructional strategy involves placing students in community organizations or service projects instead of keeping them in the classroom. In order to fulfill service requirements, the class as a whole, as well as individuals, small groups, and the class may all participate. Volunteering at a local hospital, clinic, hospice, or other healthcare facility is one example of a service-based learning activity. As they work on various assignments or projects, students can hone their teamwork, communication, and problem-solving abilities. Additionally, service-based learning encourages the values of community commitment and active learning.

Giving students the skills they need to effectively retain the massive amount of information they encounter during their time in the program is the aim of these strategies. Many nursing students are successful in their programs by memorizing concepts and words for long enough to recite them verbatim on a test. Don't let those be your students! You can encourage students to retain information and graduate with the skills necessary to succeed as nurses in today's high-stress patient care environments by using engaging, active learning techniques.

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Image by bublikhaus on Freepik
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