Personal Philosophy Of Nursing Education

My Personal Educational Philosophy

1. Introduction

Central to healthcare is the patient. The exclusive relationship that is built between a patient and a group of healthcare experts requires a balance of accountability, skills, competence, and ethical guarantee (Frenk et al., 2010). To facilitate the development of this delicate balance amidst the arduous demands in healthcare service, it is essential that nursing education should be person-focused. It should encourage confidence in healthcare professionals and allow them to make better judgement and provide expert clinical reasoning in the delivery of patient care (Landeen, 2016).

As a healthcare professional who has spent a substantial and almost two decades of my life in class as a student,

My Educational Philosophy

2.1. The Educator

“Teaching is not a natural by-product of clinical expertise, but requires a skill set of its own” (Cangelosi, Crocker and Sorrell, 2009, p. 371). Being an ‘expert’ nurse does not automatically make one an ‘expert’ teacher. It is essential that nurse educators must prepare themselves for the role. Not only as a ‘content’ expert, the nurse educator must also essentially possess pedagogic skills and competencies that will help them become effective teachers, mentors, coaches and facilitators. All these require relentless and significant hours of learning, training, and practice, coupled with discipline and maturity.

2.2. The Learner

Every student is unique and all students learn in different ways. The diversity within the graduate/post-graduate nursing student population is well-documented (Meehan-Andrews, 2009). With this diversity comes different learning styles of students. In practice, nurses deliver care to their patients in different ways, from reading charts, interpreting blood results, keying data on patient electronic records, listening to clinical handover reports, calculating IV drug concentrations, to transferring and moving patients, etc. (Stirling, 2017). It is then equally important that we cultivate an environment where students engage in different ways of learning making it more meaningful, practical, and worthwhile when these learnings are brought to the clinical setting (Spies and Botma,

Healthcare education should integrate evidence-based practice (EBP) supported by rigorous research and clinical expertise (Stevens, 2013). While learning content maybe constrained by what the curriculum requires, it is imperative that an educator considers the applicability and relevance of the knowledge and concepts that are being put across. It should be pragmatic, yet allows critical thinking; it should inspire, yet never a profligate wisdom. By integrating EBP in healthcare teaching, we can encourage students to discover information independently, to critically assess research, and to question