Posts Tagged 'nursing education'
SURPRISE!
(Now that I have your attention…)
Does an educator dare surprise the learner?
Only if you want to make the best use of your time with your students, you’ll use the element of surprise to shorten students’ time to discovery. Surprise is a result of incongruity, which is one of the leading theories on why humor works. (more…)
Posted in: Columns, Integrating Humor
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Posted in: Bubbly-ography
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Reflecting on what’s been learned
As yet another semester races toward closure it is important you make and take time to reflect on the activities in which you had your students engaged. Now that your students have some distance, what educational value can your students identify as they reflect on one activity after another?
Especially if you’ve integrated humor-based activities into your instruction, your students need to look back, inward, and outward, to see – and communicate with you and their peers – how all the semester’s activities have contributed toward what they have learned. This is not a graded activity. The purpose of the conversation is to help students reflect, integrate, synthesize and articulate what they learned. (more…)
Posted in: Columns
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Probing Questions: The perfect set-up for a nursing joke!
Okay, readers. This month I’m taking a risk. I need to discuss the concept of “probing questions,” but I’ve been around enough nurses to know that simply saying the word, “probing,” sends them off into a world OB nurses and proctologists know all-too-well.
Perhaps I could use the alternative term, “open-ended.” But, again, my mind jumps directly to hospital gowns.
This is a real distraction!
Jumping in, regardless: 6 core questions
Despite my mental images of all the take-offs you’re going to launch into, it is important that nurse educators be fully armed with one of the most powerful teaching techniques available for the professional educator: asking probing (open-ended/higher-order) questions. By open-ended, we mean those that cannot be answered by a simple yes/no or fact. By higher-order, we mean those that cause a person to think and to integrate a range of information in the generation of their answer.
Have you ever stopped to realize that there are only six types of questions? That’s right. SIX. Regardless of what words a person chooses to use, you are always trying to get at six questions or some derivative of them: who, when, where, what, how and why. (more…)
Posted in: Columns
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A Curious Side Note about “Evidence”
This month’s column is, admittedly, not focused on humor. Sorry about that, but I had a conversation recently that I just have to share as I scratch my head in disbelief. My conversation was with a nurse-friend who was telling me the realities of her days on the floor of the hospital where she works. As is probably normal for most nurses, she had to be prepared to hit the ground running from the first second on duty to whatever time she was able to leave (she often covers double shifts because, as a per diem nurse, she can use the extra money).
She knows I’ve been working on nursing education transformation with Dr. Jan Boller, an associate professor and director of nursing leadership programs in the College of Graduate Nursing at Western University’s College of Health Sciences in Pomona, CA. My friend and I began talking about “evidence-based” nursing care. Her comment to me startled me and has been on my mind ever since.
She said, surprisingly defensively, “When I have a patient that needs [some kind of care procedure], am I supposed to run to the staff lounge and look up how to do the procedure properly? I don’t have time to find the evidence for what I’m doing.”
Hmmmmm. Is this a typical interpretation? (more…)
Posted in: Columns
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