NUR5194 Module 1 practicum plan example

A Semester in Someone Else's Course: The Nurse Educator Practicum Plan, With Objectives Mapped to Program Outcomes and the NLN Competencies, and a First Look at Post-Conference

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR5194: Capstone Practicum for Role of the Nurse Educator

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

September 12, 2028

Setting and Mentor

The practicum takes place in the school of nursing of a composite public university in the Southeast, in NURS 3320, Adult Health Nursing I, the first acute care clinical course in the junior year of the traditional BSN program. The course enrolls 64 students in eight clinical groups of eight, each with a clinical instructor, on medical-surgical units at two hospitals. Students spend two 8-hour clinical days a week on the unit, and each clinical day ends with a one-hour post-conference led by the clinical instructor.

The mentor is the course coordinator, an associate professor with a PhD in nursing education, certification as a nurse educator and 14 years of teaching in the course. She supervises the eight clinical instructors, most of whom are part-time, and has agreed to meet weekly with the author, to observe the author teaching and to provide access to the course's materials and de-identified assessment data, subject to the school's approval. The author will work with one clinical group throughout the semester alongside its instructor and will take part in the course's didactic teaching and faculty meetings.

Objectives

The practicum has six objectives. Each is mapped to one of the MSN Nurse Educator specialization's outcomes and to one of the core competencies for nurse educators described by the National League for Nursing, eight competencies that range from facilitating learning and learners' development, through assessment, curriculum work and leading change, to scholarship, the educator's own continuing improvement and working within the institution (Halstead, 2019).

First, facilitate learning for a clinical group of eight students across the semester, using at least three evidence-based teaching strategies, mapped to the competency of facilitating learning. Second, plan and lead at least eight clinical post-conferences, each with written objectives and a structure grounded in a clinical judgment framework, mapped to the same competency and to the program outcome on applying learning theory. Third, assess student clinical performance using the course's evaluation tool and provide written formative feedback at midterm, mapped to the educator competency concerned with assessing and evaluating learners. Fourth, design, implement and evaluate a scholarly project that addresses a nursing education problem identified in the course, mapped to the competencies of functioning as a change agent and engaging in scholarship and to the program outcome on scholarly inquiry. Fifth, participate in the course's faculty meetings and one curriculum committee meeting and write a brief analysis of how the course fits the program's curriculum map, mapped to the curriculum competency. Sixth, maintain a reflective journal and complete a self-assessment against the educator competencies at the beginning and end of the practicum, mapped to the competency of continuous quality improvement in the educator role.

Activities, Evidence and Timeline

The semester is 15 weeks. In weeks one to three, the author will observe the clinical instructor, co-lead post-conferences and complete the needs assessment for the scholarly project, including observation of post-conferences in several groups and review of the course's clinical evaluation data. In weeks four to six, the author will lead post-conferences independently for the practicum group, draft the project proposal and submit it to the mentor and course faculty. In weeks seven to twelve, the author will implement the project, complete midterm evaluations for the group with the instructor and attend the faculty and curriculum meetings. In weeks thirteen to fifteen, the author will evaluate the project, complete final evaluations and write the scholarly paper and reflection.

Evidence for each objective will be collected as the practicum proceeds: teaching plans and the mentor's observation notes for the first objective; post-conference plans and a peer observation for the second; midterm evaluations and feedback, reviewed by the instructor, for the third; the project proposal, data and paper for the fourth; the curriculum analysis for the fifth; and the journal and self-assessments for the sixth.

Starting Point: What the Author Brings and Must Learn

The plan was shaped by an honest starting self-assessment. The author has nine years of experience as a medical-surgical nurse and four years as a unit preceptor and charge nurse, and has taught informally at the bedside for most of that time. Against the educator competencies, the author's strongest area is facilitating learning in the clinical setting one to one, where years of precepting have built comfort with coaching a novice through a procedure. The weakest areas are those that belong to academic education rather than practice: evaluating students' performance against a formal tool and writing feedback that will stand up if a grade is appealed, understanding how one course fits a program's curriculum and accreditation requirements, and designing a teaching change that can be evaluated with evidence rather than impressions. The six objectives were chosen with this profile in mind. The first draws on existing strengths, while the third, fourth and fifth target the gaps directly. The mentor reviewed the self-assessment and added one expectation: that the author practice leading a group, not only coaching individuals, because group facilitation is a different skill from precepting, and post-conference is where the difference shows. That expectation is part of the second objective and is one reason post-conference emerged as the project focus. The self-assessment will be repeated at the end of the semester using the same competency statements, and the change between the two will be discussed in the final reflection in Module 6.

Ethical Responsibilities

The practicum involves students' educational records, which are protected by federal privacy law, and patient care on hospital units. The author will access only de-identified course data provided by the mentor, will store notes without student names and will not use any student's work in the scholarly project without the school's approval. Because the project will evaluate a change in teaching, the author will ask the university's institutional review board whether it requires review or qualifies as educational quality improvement, and will follow its determination. On the clinical units, the author will follow each hospital's student and faculty policies and will not document in patient records except as the instructor directs.

A Preliminary Project Focus

In the first week, the author observed two post-conferences in the course. Both followed the same pattern: each student in turn described their patient and what they had done, the instructor asked about diagnoses and medications, and the hour ended when everyone had spoken. The questions were almost all at the level of recall. This matches research on post-conferences. In a qualitative study of 20 clinical post-conferences, faculty asked mostly lower-level questions of knowledge and comprehension, and discussions tended to be task-oriented (Hsu, 2007). Post-conference is the only protected time in clinical education for students to reason aloud about their patients, and the course's clinical evaluation data show that students' lowest scores are on the item for interpreting patient data. If post-conference asks only what students did, it cannot teach them to think about what they saw. The preliminary focus for the scholarly project is therefore to restructure post-conference around a clinical judgment framework, drawing on the clinical judgment model described by Tanner (2006), with its four phases from noticing to reflecting. Module 2 will assess this problem systematically before the project is proposed.

References

Halstead, J. A. (Ed.). (2019). NLN core competencies for nurse educators: A decade of influence. National League for Nursing.

Hsu, L.-L. (2007). Conducting clinical post-conference in clinical teaching: A qualitative study. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 16(8), 1525-1533. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2702.2006.01751.x

Tanner, C. A. (2006). Thinking like a nurse: A research-based model of clinical judgment in nursing. Journal of Nursing Education, 45(6), 204-211. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20060601-04