NUR6013 Module 5 role transition analysis example

From Charge Nurse to Drowning in the Shallows: Tracing a First Two Years of Teaching Through Schoening's Four Phases, With What Helped, What Did Not and What a Program Should Offer the Next New Hire

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR6013: Multi-Dimensional Professorial Role in Nursing Education

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

April 1, 2030

The Transition

For fourteen years I was a critical care nurse, the last six as a charge nurse in a surgical intensive care unit. I precepted new nurses, taught at the bedside every shift and was the person others came to with difficult problems. When I joined the faculty, I expected teaching to be an extension of what I already did. It was not. By the middle of my first semester I was working sixty hours a week, rewriting lectures the night before I gave them, uncertain how to grade a care plan and unable to answer basic questions about the curriculum I was teaching in. I had gone from expert to beginner in a single step.

A Model for the Transition

Schoening (2013) developed the Nurse Educator Transition model from a grounded theory study of 20 nurse educators teaching in baccalaureate programs. In that model the move from nurse to educator unfolds in four stages. It begins with anticipation and expectation, passes through disorientation, continues as the new educator seeks out information and ends with the formation of an educator's identity. Anderson (2009), interviewing 18 nurse practitioners and clinical nurse specialists in their first or second year of full-time teaching, described the same journey through the metaphor of a mermaid entering a sea of academia, with patterns she called sitting on the shore, splashing in the shallows, drowning, treading water, beginning strokes and moving throughout the waters. I use Schoening's phases to organize my experience and Anderson's patterns to describe how it felt.

Tracing the Four Phases

Anticipatory and expectation. In the months before I started, I imagined the role as bedside teaching with more time to explain. I expected my clinical expertise to carry me. It did in clinical teaching, where my first groups rated me highly, but I had not anticipated the classroom, the examinations, the committees or the language of the curriculum.

Disorientation. This phase took most of my first semester, and it matched Anderson's drowning closely. I did not know how to write learning objectives, how many slides an hour of teaching needed or how to respond to a student who disputed a grade. The loss I felt most was competence. At the hospital I knew what to do in almost any situation; at the university I did not know what I did not know. My orientation had been two days on policies and the learning management system, and I was assigned a mentor I met once.

Information-seeking. In my second semester I began, in Anderson's words, treading water and then taking beginning strokes. I asked my co-teacher to let me watch her lecture, joined a faculty development workshop on examination writing and read the program's curriculum documents properly for the first time. The information I needed was available, but I had to find it myself, and I found it only because I had stopped being too embarrassed to ask.

Identity formation. This year I have begun to think of myself as an educator rather than a nurse who teaches. The change came not when I felt competent in the classroom, which I still do not always, but when I started to care as much about how students learn as about what they know. Entering the Ed.S. program was part of that change, since it was the first time I chose to study teaching rather than simply do it.

The Loss Nobody Mentioned

The transition literature describes disorientation mainly as a problem of knowledge: new educators do not know how to teach, evaluate or navigate the institution. My experience included a second loss that took longer to recognize, the loss of my clinical identity. For fourteen years my sense of myself had rested on what I could do for patients. In my first year of teaching I spent two days a week on a unit, but always as a guest, responsible for students rather than patients, and when a patient deteriorated I stepped back so that the staff nurse could act and my student could watch. I missed the work more than I expected, and I felt my skills slipping. Twelve months in, I hesitated over a vasoactive titration that I would once have done without thinking.

New faculty who came from advanced practice described a similar pull between their clinical and academic selves (Anderson, 2009), and the resolution I found was to keep a foothold in practice. I now work one twelve-hour shift a month as a per diem staff nurse in my old unit. It costs me a Saturday, but it keeps my skills current, gives me stories and examples that students recognize as real, and preserves a part of my identity that the academic role had begun to erode. I have included it in my development plan, and I would recommend that departments allow new clinical-track faculty to keep a small practice commitment rather than treat it as a distraction from the role.

What Helped and What Was Missing

Three things helped. My clinical expertise gave me credibility with students and a domain in which I felt competent while everything else was new. My co-teacher, who was generous with her time and materials, became my real mentor. And the faculty development workshop on examination writing gave me a skill I could use immediately. Three things were missing. My orientation covered the institution but not the role: nothing on teaching methods, evaluation, curriculum or the expectations for promotion on my track. My assigned mentor had no time, no guidance and no reason to meet me. And my workload in the first semester was the same as that of experienced faculty, which left no room to learn.

The literature suggests these gaps are common and remediable. Schoening (2013) recommends integrating formal pedagogical preparation into graduate programs and creating evidence-based orientation and mentoring for novice faculty. A systematic review of 60 articles on mentoring non-tenure-track nursing faculty found that such faculty need planned programs and mentoring strategies suited to their role, and that structured mentoring can improve their progression, scholarship and career growth (Cullen et al., 2017). My department has neither for clinical-track faculty, although most of its new hires are on that track.

A Proposal for the Next New Hire

My department will hire two clinical-track faculty this summer, both experienced clinicians. I have proposed four changes to their first year. First, a role orientation, not only an institutional one: four half-day sessions in the first month on teaching methods, writing examinations, clinical evaluation and the promotion guidelines for the clinical track, taught by experienced faculty. Second, a structured mentoring arrangement: each new hire paired with a mentor on the same track who has agreed to meet every two weeks for the first semester, with a short list of topics for each meeting and a small stipend or service credit for the mentor. Third, a reduced first-semester load: one clinical group fewer, or a co-taught rather than solely taught theory course, so that the new faculty member can observe before carrying full responsibility. Fourth, an end-of-year conversation using the NLN competencies to identify development priorities for the second year.

Each change addresses a phase of the transition. The role orientation shortens disorientation by supplying information that I had to find alone. Mentoring supports information-seeking. The reduced load protects the time in which learning happens. And the competency conversation helps identity formation by giving new faculty a picture of the educator they are becoming. My chair has agreed to pilot the orientation and mentoring this year and to consider the reduced load in next year's budget.

References

Anderson, J. K. (2009). The work-role transition of expert clinician to novice academic educator. Journal of Nursing Education, 48(4), 203-208. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20090401-02

Cullen, D., Shieh, C., McLennon, S. M., Pike, C., Hartman, T., & Shah, H. (2017). Mentoring nontenured track nursing faculty: A systematic review. Nurse Educator, 42(6), 290-294. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000000394

Schoening, A. M. (2013). From bedside to classroom: The nurse educator transition model. Nursing Education Perspectives, 34(3), 167-172. https://doi.org/10.5480/1536-5026-34.3.167