Exemplar

Facilitate Learner Development and Socialization

Nursing is a unique profession, one that has a unique identity when compared with many

entry level positions in society. Because of this, nurse educators need to orient nursing students

to the role and “socialize” them to what being a nurse can and should look like. This competency

refers to that socialization. In addition, it encourages providing “resources to diverse learners that

help meet their individual learning needs” and fostering “cognitive, psychomotor, and affective

development of learners” (NLN, 2005).

Situation: Unfolding Case Study

My final teaching project incorporated several different teaching strategies to not only

improve knowledge retention, but also to improve critical thinking skills and teamwork. The

students were told to get into their clinical groups and then split into two smaller groups, creating

groups of 4-5 students each, for a total of 8 groups. This not only made it easy for determining

teams, but also gave students a chance to reinforce relationships with their peers from clinicals

and learn how to work together for a common goal; this is a critical piece of nursing. The

students then sent a representative to my desk where I gave them the first page of the case study,

The students were instructed to try to not use their notes and to rely on their memory, but they

could utilize their notes from class if necessary. The teams worked together on questions that

mimic those seen on the National Council for Licensure Exam (NCLEX), and when they

believed they had answered them all correctly they would bring their papers back up to me for

grading. If the answers were all correct their team would get the next phase of the case study; if

an answer was incorrect students would have to go back to their group, change their answer and

resubmit it until the answers were all correct.

 The case studies were developed using patient scenarios that would address several key

concepts in the course. Professor Brode had mentioned that students traditionally have struggled

with the intrapartum/obstetric material, and that it would be helpful to provide more

opportunities for them to interact with that content. I developed the content in the project using

my knowledge as Certified Inpatient Obstetric nurse, but also compared my information with

the powerpoints given to students to ensure congruency. The powerpoint information is

supported by the students’ textbook, Maternity and Pediatric Nursing (Ricci et al., 2021). The

three main case studies were a patient with vaginal bleeding and a placenta previa, a patient with

new-onset pre-eclampsia who ends up with a cesarean delivery, and a precipitous delivery

vignette. The main concepts that I wanted to cover were placenta previa (compared with

placental abruption), interventions for late decelerations, cesarean delivery vs. vaginal delivery,

and precipitous delivery. Furthermore, I wanted the students to gain experience with Next-Gen

NCLEX (NGN) questions, thus several questions were developed to give students practice with

questions other than the “Select-All-That-Apply” (SATA) questions that students have seen

throughout their nursing program. I used free sample questions from Naitonal Council of State

Boards of Nursing (NCSBN) as a guide for creating the questions (NCSBN, 2021).

During the unfolding case study, the students would sometimes get stuck on a particular

question, and they would come to me to resubmit several times for the same question. This was

an interesting predicament, one that I had not prepared for in advance. In these situations, I

looked to my preceptor, professor Brode, for assistance in giving students appropriate prompts to

get them to think correctly about the question, but not necessarily give them the answer directly.

This usually helped them reframe the question or find the right answer in their class notes; from

there I made sure to give the same prompts to other students struggling with the same question.
 At the end of the project, students were given a brief evaluation form to fill out prior to

leaving the classroom, one that would provide their anonymous reactions about me as a teacher

as well as their experience with the project itself. Questions included “I would recommend this

project be used in future courses” and “This project increased my knowledge about pre-

eclampsia”, and students had to give a score of 1 to 5, with 5 being “strongly agree”. The total

project time took about as expected, approximately 45 minutes, which took them to the end of

the class period.

This experience was simultaneously satisfying and eye-opening. I loved the opportunity

to help students practice NCLEX-style questions and to help them apply what they had just

learned in their maternal-newborn content. But I did not know until after the project was

completed that there is a particular pattern to NGN questions; typically they ask a lower level

diagnosis question, then move on toward nursing interventions, etc. Though I may have naturally

tended towards that pattern, it was unintentional and I wish I had known there was a pattern so I

could have applied it when writing the case studies. That being said, the students were overall

quite positive about the experience and appeared engaged, which was encouraging to me. I could

also see the students learning during the case study, particularly on the questions that they got

wrong initially.

Significance of Situation to the Competency

This situation met the competency in a variety of ways. For one, the project allowed

students to interact with the material in a different, more active way. Nursing students are known

to be largely kinesthetic learners, so giving them an opportunity to engage with the content via

the case study may have assisted them to retain knowledge better than with a simple didactic

lecture (Hallin, 2014). The competency requires educators to provide a variety of methods of
learning the material, especially for a variety of learners. After the project, a student came up to

me and professor Brode in her office and wanted to review some of the last questions of the case

study. She reported that her group was particularly competitive and did not give her enough time

to read through the questions, let alone attempt to think through and answer them. She and I

spent time going through the final two pages of the case study, personalizing her education to

meet her needs by giving her more time to read the questions and verbally process them. She

initially was very overwhelmed with the material; she left feeling more confident because she

knew most of the answers and simply was not able to take the time to answer them when in the

group setting. This was another way the project allowed me to facilitate a student’s learning.

Finally, the project assisted in socialization development because the students worked

together in teams and needed to rely on one another in order to complete the case study, not

unlike how nurses need to collaborate to provide the best possible patient care.

References
Hallin, K. (2014). Nursing students at a university-A study about learning style preferences.

Nurse Education Today 34, p. 1443-1449.doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2014.04.001

NLN (2005). Core competencies of nurse educators with task statements. National League for

Nursing.

Ricci, S., Kyle, T., Carman, S. (2021). Maternity and Pediatric Nursing (4th Ed.). Lippincott.

ISBN: 978-1975139766

NCSBN (2021). Next Generation NCLEX: Sample Pack. NCSBN.

https://ncsbn.az1.qualtrics.com/WRQualtricsControlPanel/File.php?

F=F_eR8xOxTNt8iyUiG#page16