NUR 6063 Module 5 Reflective Practice and Resilience Paper Example

The Meeting Where I Defended Myself: A Structured Reflection on One Faculty Meeting and a Resilience Plan for a First-Year Nursing Program Director

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR6063: Visionary Leadership for Nursing Education

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

February 10, 2031

Why Reflect on One Meeting

A well-known distinction separates reflection-in-action, the thinking done in the moment while events are still moving, from reflection-on-action, the examination afterward of what happened and why (Schön, 1983). Leaders are usually good at the first kind under pressure and poor at the second, because the next problem arrives before the last one has been understood. This paper is an exercise in reflection-on-action. I chose one event from my first semester as director because it changed how I lead and because I handled it badly at first. I use the reflective cycle described by Gibbs (1988), whose six stages run from an account of the event and the feelings it raised, through judgment and analysis, to a conclusion and a plan, since those stages keep me from jumping from what happened to what I will do without understanding why.

Description

In November, I presented the phased enrollment plan to the full-time faculty. I explained that the entering class would grow by eight next fall and by sixteen more the following year if two conditions were met. I had expected the faculty to see the plan as a defense of their workload, since I had refused the president's original request. Instead, a senior faculty member who has taught in the program for nineteen years said, in front of everyone, that I had handed the president the expansion and dressed it up as a victory, and that the faculty had not been consulted before the decision was made. Two others nodded. I answered by listing everything I had done to protect them, the vacancy request, the clinical group I was teaching, the conditions in the plan, and my voice rose as I spoke. The meeting ended quietly and early.

Feelings and Evaluation

I felt stung and unappreciated, and underneath that, afraid. I had staked my first semester on rebuilding trust with this faculty, and the criticism suggested I had failed. Driving home, I felt anger at the faculty member and then embarrassment at my own defensiveness.

Evaluated honestly, some of the meeting went well. The plan itself was sound, and the faculty member's challenge showed that faculty felt able to disagree with the director openly, which the exit interviews suggested had not been true a year earlier. What went badly was my response, and the process that led to it. The faculty member's central point was correct. I had consulted the president, the hospital and the state board, but I had not consulted the faculty before deciding, despite having told them in August that changes affecting their courses would not be made without them. My answer defended the decision when the complaint was about the process.

Analysis

Why did I skip consultation and then respond defensively? Three reasons stand out. First, the decision felt urgent, with the president wanting an answer within two weeks, and I treated the faculty as people I would inform rather than people I would ask. Urgency is a common reason leaders abandon their own principles, and I had no rule that protected consultation when time was short. Second, I had come to see myself as the faculty's protector, which made criticism from them feel like ingratitude. That view is a distortion of servant leadership; serving people does not entitle a leader to their approval. Third, I was tired. I was teaching a clinical group, writing the accreditation plan and working most weekends, and tired people defend themselves more readily than they listen. Looking back through my calendar for the three weeks before the meeting, I found no day on which I had left the building before seven in the evening, and no conversation with anyone outside the program about how the work was going. I had been treating exhaustion as a temporary cost of a demanding first year, something to wait out, when it was already shaping how I responded to the people I was trying to lead.

The third reason connects this reflection to resilience. Luthar et al. (2000) describe resilience as a dynamic process of positive adaptation in the face of significant adversity, rather than a fixed trait a person has or lacks. Understood that way, my resilience was not failing because of some weakness in me; the conditions I was working under were wearing down the resources I needed to adapt well.

Conclusion

I conclude that the problem was not the plan but the way I made it, and that my defensiveness came as much from fatigue as from the criticism. I could have done two things differently. Before deciding, I could have held a single forty-minute meeting with the faculty to present the request and hear their concerns, which would have fit within the president's timeline. During the meeting, I could have said that the faculty member was right about the process, apologized for it and asked what they would change in the plan. I did the second, a week later, in a follow-up meeting, and the faculty proposed a change to the conditions that made the plan better: requiring that a mentor be assigned to the new jointly appointed faculty member before the second phase begins.

Action Plan: Resilience as a Leader's Responsibility

My action plan has two parts: habits that protect my own capacity, and changes that protect the faculty's, since the two are connected. Shanafelt and Noseworthy (2017), writing about physicians, argue that although burnout is a system problem, most organizations treat it as the individual's responsibility alone, and they describe nine organizational strategies, including acknowledging and assessing the problem, cultivating community at work, promoting flexibility and work-life integration, and providing resources for resilience and self-care. Their argument applies to a nursing faculty as much as to physicians, and to a director as much as to faculty.

For myself, I will keep one protected reflection period of thirty minutes each Friday, writing about one event that week using the six stages, so that reflection-on-action becomes a routine rather than a crisis response. I will stop teaching a clinical group once the vacancies are filled, and I will not work more than one weekend day a month except in the weeks before the accreditation report is due. I have joined the network of nursing program directors in our state, which meets monthly, because a director has no peers inside the program with whom to think aloud.

For the faculty, I will adopt a consultation rule: any decision that changes a course's content, schedule or size will be brought to the affected faculty before it is made, even when time is short, and if time is too short for consultation I will say so openly and explain why. I will also include two questions about workload and exhaustion in the annual faculty survey that already carries the SL-7, so that the program assesses the problem instead of guessing at it.

I will know the plan is working if the Friday reflections continue through the spring, if my weekend work falls to the level I set, and if the faculty survey shows that faculty feel consulted. I will reflect on this plan itself in May, using the same cycle.

References

Gibbs, G. (1988). Learning by doing: A guide to teaching and learning methods. Further Education Unit, Oxford Polytechnic.

Luthar, S. S., Cicchetti, D., & Becker, B. (2000). The construct of resilience: A critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. Child Development, 71(3), 543-562. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00164

Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Basic Books.

Shanafelt, T. D., & Noseworthy, J. H. (2017). Executive leadership and physician well-being: Nine organizational strategies to promote engagement and reduce burnout. Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 92(1), 129-146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2016.10.004