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Thursday, September 20, 2012
Learning Objective 1: The learner will understand how student goal development can facilitate autonomy, integrated learning, and student communication with the nurse mentor and faculty.
Learning Objective 2: The learner will understand how student goal development can facilitate autonomy, integrated learning, and student communication with the nurse mentor and faculty.
Nursing education programs are challenged to produce competent graduates in an increasingly complex and rapidly changing health care environment. Quality clinical experiences must be provided in order to more effectively prepare students for professional nursing practice. New strategies of nursing education are emerging to promote structure and increase learning in the clinical setting. Faculty at the University Of Michigan School of Nursing designed a mechanism in which integrative learning and situated coaching could more readily occur in the clinical setting. The development of Student Weekly Goals reflecting 3 apprenticeship areas as identified by Benner, Sutphen and Leonard (2010) was implemented during the winter 2012 semester for sophomore, junior and senior level students in their clinical practicums. The students were required to develop goals pertaining to cognitive knowledge, skilled know-how/ clinical reasoning, and ethical comportment/relational formation each clinical week. These goals were to be shared with faculty and staff nurse mentors at the beginning of the clinical day in order to help guide students and mentors with planning for learning experiences. After six weeks of implementation, faculty and students were surveyed to evaluate the projects’ effectiveness. Faculty indicated that student goal development facilitated clinical learning by providing more engagement, direction and focus for the students. Students reported the goal development project allowed them to optimize clinical learning opportunities, as well as track their growth and progress. In addition faculty and students indicated that the goals promoted student self-learning, autonomy and increased student communication with nurse mentors and faculty.