Nursing and health care perspectives
-
Nurs Health Care Perspect · Sep 1999
Thinking in nursing education. Part II. A teacher's experience.
Across academia, educators are investigating teaching strategies that facilitate students' abilities to think critically. Because may these strategies require low teacher-student ratios or sustained involvement over time, efforts to implement them are often constrained by diminishing resources for education, faculty reductions, and increasing number of part-time teachers and students. In nursing, the challenges of teaching and learning critical thinking are compounded by the demands of providing care to patients with increasingly acute and complex problems in a wide variety of settings. ⋯ In addition, teachers are often not able to accompany each student to the clinical site. Thus, the traditional strategies for teaching and learning critical thinking common to hospital-based clinical courses are being challenged, transformed, and extended (5). Part II of this article describes findings that suggest how many teachers and students are challenging the conventional approaches to schooling and creating pedagogies that are more responsive to the contemporary context of health care.
-
Nurs Health Care Perspect · Sep 1999
Thinking in nursing education. Part I. A student's experience learning to think.
Learning to think critically is a central commitment of nursing education. There is a substantial body of literature describing nursing educators' attempts to define critical thinking (1-3) to differentiate critical thinking from other kinds of thinking (1,4), and to measure students' ability (and changes in ability) to think critically (2,5-7). These efforts were facilitated when the National League for Nursing Accrediting Commission (NLNAC) identified critical thinking as an outcome criterion for the accrediation of undergraduate and graduate nursing programs. ⋯ This two-year study, which was undertaken to reveal common contemporary approaches to teaching and learning critical thinking in clinical courses, analyzes the lived experiences of 45 students and teachers. Part I describes a typical student's experiences of learning "nurse thinking" in the context of clinical practice. Part II describes a typical teacher's experiences creating opportunities for students to learn and practice critical thinking in a community clinical course.