This week, I attended a curriculum meeting within the department. Our department chair announced to the faculty that she will be hiring a nursing consultant to evaluate the curriculum. The consultant will evaluate the University’s and department’s mission statement/philosophy, program objectives, and course objectives. After the evaluation, the consultant will present his findings and recommendations to the faculty. I was very excited to hear this because evaluating the University’s and department’s mission statement was one of this week’s class assignments.
At this meeting, the faculty decided to make another change within the curriculum. In the sophomore year, we have the students complete a comprehensive demo prior to entering clinical. In this demo, the students are required to demonstrate fundamental skills such as physical assessment, vital signs, sterile dressing changes, etc. The students had a positive learning experience while completing these comprehensive demos, and the faculty decided to have them complete one every semester while they are in the nursing program. The reason for this curriculum change is to encourage students to transfer knowledge from previous semesters and promote their critical thinking, prioritization, and delegating skills.
The final curriculum change made at this meeting was to change the senior level clinical course. Currently, the senior students complete this clinical at the nursing home, but the course provides the students with minimal leadership experience. The faculty plans to change the focus of this course so the students will receive more leadership experience, for example, delegating and supervising nursing care.
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It's too bad you aren't in the NURS 5283 (Program Evaluation) course. You could have saved your College some money!
If you really want to make the most out of those skills trainings, have the juniors supervise the sophomores and the seniors supervise the juniors. Stress to all groups that it's an evaluative process, but that it should also be an instructional process. If you get this fine-tuned, it can do some amazing things for the sense of community in your program and is usually more effective than having faculty do the supervising. Give it some thought.
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