Three Educators Who Teach the Same Nurses: The Tenure-Track Professor, the Community College Instructor and the Hospital's Professional Development Specialist Compared on Six Dimensions
Student Name
American College of Education
NUR6013: Multi-Dimensional Professorial Role in Nursing Education
Module 2 Assignment
Instructor Name
March 11, 2030
Why These Three Roles
The new nurses who start on our partner hospital's units each year have been taught by several kinds of educator. Some came through my university's BSN program, some through the community college's associate degree program across town, and all of them meet the hospital's professional development staff in their first week. To understand my own role better, I interviewed one educator in each of the three roles for about an hour, using the same questions, and read the documents that define the roles. The three were a tenure-track associate professor at my university, an instructor in her ninth year at the community college and a nursing professional development specialist responsible for the hospital's nurse residency program. I compare the roles on six dimensions: who the learners are, what the workload contains, what counts as scholarship, how secure the appointment is, how performance is evaluated and what preparation the role requires.
Learners and Workload
The tenure-track professor teaches BSN and graduate students, mostly in the classroom, and supervises two doctoral projects. Her workload is formally divided: about 40% teaching, 40% research and 20% service, with a reduced teaching load in exchange for grant funding. The community college instructor teaches pre-licensure associate degree students, many of whom are older, hold jobs and have no parent with a college degree. Her workload is almost entirely teaching: fifteen contact hours a week in the classroom, skills laboratory and clinical settings, plus advising and committee work, with no protected time for research. The professional development specialist's learners are licensed nurses: new graduates in their first year, experienced nurses changing specialties and staff needing annual competency validation. Her work is organized around the hospital's needs rather than a semester. In a typical week she runs residency seminars, validates competencies, responds to an educational need raised by a quality problem and meets managers about orientation plans.
These differences follow from what each institution is for. The university is judged partly by research, the community college by access and licensure outcomes, and the hospital by the safety and competence of its staff. Each role looks like a version of the others until one asks what the institution is paid to produce.
Scholarship, Security and Evaluation
Scholarship means different things in each role. For the tenure-track professor, it means peer-reviewed publications and external funding, and her tenure decision in two years will turn largely on them. For the community college instructor, scholarship is not formally required; she described keeping current through continuing education and certification as the expectation. For the professional development specialist, the defining standards describe a role that includes being a champion for scientific inquiry, supporting evidence-based practice and research among staff and generating evidence about professional development itself (Harper & Maloney, 2022). She has presented two posters on residency outcomes at a national conference, but her performance review does not require it.
Security and evaluation differ just as much. The tenure-track professor will either receive tenure, with considerable job security, or leave. The community college instructor has a continuing contract after a probationary period, renewed on the basis of teaching evaluations and a peer observation. The professional development specialist is an at-will hospital employee, and her position depends on the hospital's budget; she told me that her department had lost two positions during a financial downturn three years ago. Her performance is measured by organizational outcomes, such as residency retention rates and the completion of competency validation, rather than by student evaluations. My own clinical-track appointment sits between these: renewed annually for the first six years, with promotion possible on evidence of teaching excellence and scholarship of teaching, and more secure than the hospital role but less secure than tenure.
Preparation
The preparation each role requires reveals another difference. The tenure-track professor holds a PhD and completed a postdoctoral fellowship. The community college instructor holds an MSN in education and the Certified Nurse Educator credential, and her college requires a master's degree for full-time faculty. The professional development specialist holds an MSN and certification in nursing professional development. In a survey of 989 professional development practitioners, political skill, the ability to influence others in an organization, was reported at high-average levels, and for those without formal leadership positions networking ability was predicted by certification and a graduate degree (Harper et al., 2024). That finding reflects something the specialist told me: most of her work depends on persuading managers and staff to change practice, without authority over any of them. The NLN competencies for academic educators address leadership and change as one competency among eight (Halstead, 2019), but for the specialist it is the center of the job.
Where the Roles Meet
The three roles are not as separate as their job descriptions suggest, and the points where they meet are where each could learn from the others. The clearest meeting point is the clinical unit. My students and the community college's students are precepted by the same staff nurses whom the professional development specialist trains as preceptors, yet neither academic program has ever asked her what she teaches them. When I asked, she described a four-hour preceptor workshop that uses the same feedback model I use in clinical debriefing, under a different name. A second meeting point is competency assessment. The specialist validates skills against checklists that are more specific than my program's clinical evaluation tool, and she said that new graduates often cannot describe the evidence behind procedures they perform correctly, a gap our programs could address before graduation. A third is the transition itself. The community college instructor described students who pass the licensure examination but leave their first job within a year, and the specialist's residency data show that most first-year departures happen in the first six months. Neither educator had seen the other's information. Some institutions formalize these links through joint appointments, in which an educator works partly for a school and partly for a hospital. My university has one such appointment, which has been vacant for two years, and the comparison suggests it should be filled.
What the Comparison Means for Me
The comparison clarifies choices I will face. My clinical-track appointment gives me the teaching focus I enjoy, but promotion requires scholarship that my workload does not protect. The tenure track would give me protected time for research but would require a PhD and a program of research I do not yet have. The community college role would let me focus entirely on teaching the students I find most rewarding, and the hospital role would keep me closest to clinical practice.
The comparison also shows that these roles depend on one another. The associate degree graduates and my BSN graduates arrive at the hospital together, and the professional development specialist sees the gaps in both. Yet the three of us had never met before this assignment. Projections of faculty retirements for the decade that began in 2016 put the losses at roughly a third of the faculty employed in 2015, concentrated among the senior, doctorally prepared members who teach graduate students (Fang & Kesten, 2017). With faculty numbers under that pressure, educators in different roles cannot afford to work in isolation. I have proposed a twice-yearly meeting of educators from the three institutions to share what each sees in the new nurses they teach, and the professional development specialist has offered to host the first one.
References
Fang, D., & Kesten, K. (2017). Retirements and succession of nursing faculty in 2016-2025. Nursing Outlook, 65(5), 633-642. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.outlook.2017.03.003
Halstead, J. A. (Ed.). (2019). NLN core competencies for nurse educators: A decade of influence. National League for Nursing.
Harper, M. G., & Maloney, P. (Eds.). (2022). Nursing professional development: Scope and standards of practice (4th ed.). Association for Nursing Professional Development.
Harper, M. G., Maloney, P., & MacDonald, R. (2024). Nursing professional development practitioners' self-perceived influence. Journal for Nurses in Professional Development, 40(2), 82-87. https://doi.org/10.1097/NND.0000000000001026
How this NUR 6013 Module 2 example is structured
NUR 6013 Module 2 often compares the professoriate across academic and practice institutions; your classroom's instructions decide which settings. This example selects roles that share learners, grounds each in its defining framework, compares them on stated dimensions with specific detail, identifies what the differences reveal about the institutions and applies the comparison to the author's own decisions.
NUR6013 Module 2 questions, answered
What does NUR6013 Module 2 usually ask for?
NUR6013 Module 2 often asks you to compare the nurse educator's role across academic and practice institutions, such as universities, community colleges and hospitals. Your classroom's instructions decide which settings.
What dimensions should the comparison cover?
Useful dimensions include learners, workload, scholarship expectations, appointment security, evaluation and required preparation. State them at the start and compare each role on each.
Can I use interviews in this paper?
Often yes, if your instructor allows. Interviews add specific detail, but ground each role in its defining framework or standards as well.
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