Creating a Positive Learning Environment

1. Creating a Positive Learning Environment

2. Objectives • Integrate active learning best practices to: • Facilitate students’ critical thinking • Stimulate learning • Create a positive learning environment

3. Active Learning Strategies to Consider • Stories and Cases • Using Questions • Building on Reflection • Writing to Learn • Using Technology Tools • Affirming and Challenging (Feedback)

4. Model as Initial Coaching Guide • Social Significance, naming your product • Ultimacy, using best practices • Collegiality, using your resources (Who are you going to call when you don’t know what to do?)

5. Measures to Facilitate Critical Thinking & Clinical Reasoning • What do we already know? • What do we need to know about critical thinking and clinical reasoning?

6. Critical Thinking Concepts: • Purposeful, outcomes-directed • Driven by patient, family, community needs • Based on principles of the nursing process and scientific method • Requires knowledge, skills, experience, and commitment to developing CT • Is guided by professional standards and ethics • Makes the most of human potential • Re-evaluates and strives to improve - Alfaro-LeFevre, R. (2017)

7. Clinical Reasoning and Clinical Judgment • Critical thinking is a broad concept that includes clinical reasoning and judgment • Clinical reasoning refers to the ways we think about patient care issues • Clinical judgment refers to the conclusions we reach and decisions we make about patient care

8. Active Learning • What do we already know? • What do we need to know about active learning?

9. Active Learning • “Just do it” approach • Focus on making a good “fit” between student learning expectations and chosen assignments

10. Stories and Cases: Benefits • Engage and Convey Information • Promote Connectedness • Promote Problem Solving (what next?) • Share varying points of view (patient, family, healthcare provider perspectives)

11. Stories and Cases: Examples • Once upon a time…. • Stories, learning, change intertwined • Student stories • Cases • Using stories for difficult scenarios • What’s wrong with this picture?

12. Using Questions • Good teaching = good communication • Questions facilitate and assess learning • Questions bring life to critical thinking • Modeling inquiry promotes student inquiry • What if?

13. General Question Guidelines • Learning demonstrated as: • Cognitive learning • Psychomotor learning • Affective learning

14. Assessing Cognitive Knowledge: Bloom’s Taxonomy • Knowledge – Recalling • Remembering facts and learned information • Comprehension – Understanding • Explaining and describing • Application – Problem Solving • Using information in new settings

15. Assessing Cognitive Knowledge: Bloom’s Taxonomy • Analysis – Exploring patterns and meanings • Examining component parts • Synthesis – Creating • Combining ideas into a new statement • Evaluation – Judging • Making an evaluation based on criteria

16. Example: Using a Handout • Questions as a teaching tool • Sample strategies

17. Further Tools for Active Learning • Reflection • Writing to Learn • Technology Tools • Feedback

18. Reflection: Benefits • Students consider their experiences • Build on previous experiences • Gain self-evaluation skills

19. Reflection: Examples • Mental rehearsals • Cognitive framing • Hindsight 20/20 • Reflecting on what you have learned • Self-assessments • Goal setting

20. Writing to Learn: Benefits • Writing as thinking • Reflective component to discover and shape meaning • Build on what already know • Remember and process information

21. Writing to Learn: Examples • Selected tools and strategies • Benner’s model to create clinical narratives

22. Technology Tools: Benefits • Manage rapid information turnover • Rote memorization no longer adequate • Enhance clinical learning

23. Selected Tools and Strategies • Clinical learning labs • PDAs (getting started, expert of the day) • Web-based conferencing

24. Feedback: Affirming and Challenging • Communication of information that assists the student to reflect/interact with the information, construct self-knowledge relevant to course learning and to set further learning goals - Bonnel, W.

25. Feedback: Sample Strategies • Coaching students to seek and use feedback • Challenging students • Using qualitative tools to synthesize data for feedback (interview, observation, record review)

26. Summary: Facilitating Learning in the Clinical Environment • Integrate active learning best practices to: • Facilitate critical thinking in clinical settings • Stimulate learning • Create a positive learning environment

27. Active Learning Strategies to Consider • Stories and Cases • Using Questions • Building on Reflection • Writing to Learn • Using Technology Tools • Affirming and Challenging (Feedback)