nursing profession

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Assessment 4 Context

Nurse Educators As Leaders and Scholars Learning never stops for the nurse educator; lifelong learning is necessary to stay current both in the practice world and in education. Nurse educators need to have a plan for their own continued professional development that will help them maintain and advance their skills both as nurses and as educators. Part of professional development is also to be a reflective teacher, to continue to do as Zorn advises us: to pause and reflect on who we are as people and as educators.

The nursing profession needs nurse educators to educate more nurses, to introduce and educate about evidence-based practice changes, and more than ever to join with our colleagues in other health care disciplines to exchange ideas and engage in interdisciplinary learning. As educators, we must continue to learn, be certified, and function at a high level to ensure continued growth for the nursing profession. The Institute of Medicine has charged nurses to be leaders in health care change, and that requires educators to be at the forefront of those changes.

Nurse Educators As Leaders Nurse educators are automatically leaders. The leadership role comes from being responsible for changing behaviors through education. This may be academically by educating future nurses and advance practice nurses. It may be clinically by educating staff on evidence-based practice changes and patients on better health practices. It may be in the community setting, providing knowledge on disease prevention and healthy lifestyles. Regardless of the setting, the leadership role is part of the nurse educator designation.

An important aspect of the leadership role is the style of leadership. Some leadership styles come more naturally to us as individuals because they fit our personality and our background; sometimes, though, we have to develop a style that is a better fit for the setting that we are working in. In this unit, we will look at various leadership styles and consider what the most effective style is for each of as individuals. We are also going to look at the nurse educator as part of the interdisciplinary team that provides education to other health providers. Increasingly, this aspect of the educator role is becoming more prominent. As nurse educators we have to be prepared to work across disciplines and in a variety of settings.

Nurse Educators As Scholars An expectation for nurse educators is that they are both teachers and scholars. To be a scholar means that the educator is both teaching others in the discipline of nursing and also adding to the advancement of the profession. There are many ways that the nurse educator can be a scholar. Sometimes this is thought of as conducting research and publishing articles and books on research and evidence-based practice. This is certainly one major way to be a scholar, but there are many other ways as well.

The Boyer Model

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In nursing, a widely used model for determining scholarship is the Boyer model. This model classifies scholarship activities in the following four main areas:

1. Discovery, where new and unique knowledge is generated; this would include research. 2. Teaching, where the teacher creatively engages in partnerships with learners to

facilitate expanding knowledge.

3. Application, where the emphasis is on the use of new knowledge in solving society’s problems. An example of this aspect of scholarship is initiatives to introduce evidence- based practice changes.

4. Integration, where new relationships among disciplines are discovered. An example would be efforts to engage in interdisciplinary education initiatives.