Is the Handoff Project Scholarship Yet? Testing a Clinical Teaching Change Against Boyer's Four Scholarships and Glassick's Six Standards, and Redesigning It So the Answer Becomes Yes
Student Name
American College of Education
NUR6013: Multi-Dimensional Professorial Role in Nursing Education
Module 3 Assignment
Instructor Name
March 18, 2030
What Counts as Scholarship
For much of the twentieth century, scholarship in American universities meant research that produced new knowledge, and teaching was judged separately and usually valued less. Boyer (1990) proposed a broader view with four overlapping forms: the scholarship of discovery, which is original research; the scholarship of integration, which connects knowledge across disciplines and makes sense of it; the scholarship of application, which brings knowledge to bear on real problems; and the scholarship of teaching, which treats teaching itself as a subject of inquiry. Nursing embraced this view, since so much of what nurse faculty do is application and teaching. The American Association of Colleges of Nursing's (AACN) position statement on scholarship in academic nursing uses Boyer's categories and describes scholarship as including discovery, practice, application and teaching, with the common requirement that the work be made public and open to review by peers (AACN, 2018).
My university's promotion guidelines for clinical-track faculty follow this model. They accept the scholarship of teaching and the scholarship of practice as the primary forms for my track and require evidence that the work has been peer reviewed and disseminated, through publication, a refereed presentation or adoption of a product by other programs. That requirement is where my own work so far falls short.
The Work in Question
Last year I changed how my clinical groups end each day in the intensive care unit. Before the change, students gave a brief verbal report to their assigned nurse and left. I introduced a structured handoff using a written tool based on the unit's own format, practiced in a short simulation before the first clinical day, and followed by a two-minute feedback exchange with the receiving nurse. Students told me they felt more confident, nurses told the unit manager that student handoffs had improved, and the other clinical instructors adopted the tool the following semester. It felt like a success. The question for this paper is whether it is scholarship, and if not, what would make it so.
Testing It Against the Six Standards
Glassick (2000), summarizing the work that followed Boyer's proposal, explains that the Carnegie Foundation surveyed journal editors, press directors and funders to learn how they judged excellence, and derived six standards meant to hold for every form of scholarship. The scholar must set clear goals and be adequately prepared, choose methods that fit the question, reach results that matter, present the work effectively and critique it reflectively. I applied each to the handoff project.
Clear goals: partly met. I wanted better handoffs, but I never stated what better meant or what I expected to change. Adequate preparation: partly met. I knew the unit's handoff practice well, but I did not review the literature on teaching handoff to students before designing the tool. Appropriate methods: not met. I collected no data before or after the change, and the evidence I have is anecdote. Significant results: cannot be judged, since there are no results to judge. The adoption of the tool by other instructors suggests value but does not show it. Effective presentation: not met. The work has not been shared beyond my department. Reflective critique: partly met. I revised the tool after the first semester, but informally, without recording what I learned. By Glassick's standards the handoff project is good teaching, and good teaching is not yet scholarship.
Redesigning the Project
Oermann (2014) describes the scholarship of teaching as inquiry about learning and teaching, asking what works best and why and seeking answers systematically, and suggests that much of what educators already do can become scholarship if it is approached this way. The redesign follows the six standards. The goal becomes a question: does structured handoff instruction with simulation practice improve the completeness of students' end-of-shift handoffs in the intensive care unit, compared with the previous approach? Preparation begins with a literature review on teaching handoff to students and on the tools used to measure handoff quality, which I will complete this summer with help from the health sciences librarian. For methods, I will compare two consecutive cohorts, the one taught next fall with the tool and the one taught this spring without it, since the other instructors are willing to return to the old approach for one semester. The receiving nurses will score each student handoff against a checklist of the unit's required elements, and I will measure students' confidence with a short survey at the beginning and end of the rotation. The project will need review by the university's institutional review board, probably as exempt educational research, before any data are collected.
Significant results will be judged by whether the difference in completeness is meaningful and whether it holds across both groups. Presentation will take the form of a poster abstract submitted to the state nurse educators' spring meeting and, if the results justify it, a brief report in a peer-reviewed nursing education journal. Reflective critique will be built in: I will write a short memo after each semester noting which parts of the course succeeded, which fell short and which I plan to revise, and the memo will become the limitations section of anything I publish.
Other Forms Open to Me
The scholarship of teaching is the obvious route for my track, but Boyer's other forms are also within reach, and a promotion file is stronger when it shows more than one. The scholarship of application is the nearest. The intensive care unit where I teach is revising its early mobility protocol, and the unit's clinical nurse specialist has asked whether I would help evaluate it, since I know the literature and the unit. If the evaluation is designed with clear goals and methods and its results are shared beyond the hospital, it would count as practice scholarship under my university's guidelines, and it would keep my clinical expertise current at the same time. The scholarship of integration is also possible. Much of the published guidance on teaching students in intensive care units is scattered across critical care and education journals, and an integrative review drawing it together would be useful to other clinical instructors and would build directly on the literature review the handoff project already requires. The scholarship of discovery is the one form I will not pursue now. Original research of the kind the tenure-track faculty conduct would need preparation and time I do not have, and my track does not require it. Choosing among the forms deliberately, rather than taking whatever opportunity appears, is itself part of managing the scholarship role.
What the Exercise Revealed About the Role
Testing my own work against explicit standards taught me three things about the scholarship role. First, the gap between good teaching and scholarship is mostly about method and dissemination, not about the quality of the idea, which means many ideas I already have could become scholarship with more deliberate planning. Second, the scholarship of teaching is well suited to clinical-track faculty, because the questions arise from work we already do, but it requires time that my workload does not protect. I have asked my chair whether one of my clinical groups can be covered next fall in exchange for the project, as the promotion guidelines allow for faculty with approved scholarly projects. Third, scholarship is a public act. The requirement that work be shared and reviewed by peers is not a formality; it is what turns a private improvement into knowledge other educators can test and use.
References
American Association of Colleges of Nursing. (2018). Defining scholarship for academic nursing: Task force consensus position statement. https://www.aacnnursing.org/news-data/position-statements-white-papers/defining-scholarship-nursing
Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Glassick, C. E. (2000). Boyer's expanded definitions of scholarship, the standards for assessing scholarship, and the elusiveness of the scholarship of teaching. Academic Medicine, 75(9), 877-880. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001888-200009000-00007
Oermann, M. H. (2014). Defining and assessing the scholarship of teaching in nursing. Journal of Professional Nursing, 30(5), 370-375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2014.03.001
How this NUR 6013 Module 3 example is structured
NUR 6013 Module 3 usually examines the scholarship role and what counts as scholarship for educators; your classroom's instructions decide the focus. This example defines scholarship from its primary sources, explains what the author's institution counts, applies explicit standards to a real piece of the author's work, identifies the gaps and redesigns the work to close them.
NUR6013 Module 3 questions, answered
What does NUR6013 Module 3 usually ask for?
NUR6013 Module 3 usually asks you to examine the scholarship role of nurse educators and what counts as scholarship, often by applying a framework to your own work or setting. Your classroom's instructions decide the focus.
What is the scholarship of teaching?
Systematic inquiry into teaching and learning, with clear questions, appropriate methods and results shared publicly for peer review. Good teaching becomes scholarship when it meets those standards.
Which standards judge scholarly work?
Glassick's six standards are widely used. They ask whether the goals were clear, the preparation adequate and the methods appropriate, whether the results mattered, and whether the work was presented well and critiqued honestly.
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