Our Goals for Teaching

In the last video, we talked about how one of the main purposes of a pedagogy is to establish goals for the teaching/learning experience. In this video, I want to share what our goals are for the teaching/learning experience within our pedagogy and our system. Of course, we’ll share goals for our learners AND for our teachers.

The reality is that all of our goals for the learners, and therefore the teachers by default, are rooted in our mission – which is to end the nursing and allied health shortage by creating a highly educated and engaged workforce.

So, based on our mission…when we thought about what we wanted for our learners who utilize our content, we came up with 5 primary goals. First, the learner should always feel like they’re part of the family! You’ve heard us say already multiple times “Welcome to the NRSNG family!” and we mean it! Our users feel like they’re loved, appreciated, and that they are part of a community. And they are! We have a facebook group where our users can collaborate with each other! When we do our videos, we talk to them like they’re a friend and like they’re in the room with us. Like they’re…family! Our learners should feel supported when they make mistakes. You know, I had a student look at me once and say “you’re the first instructor I’ve ever had who didn’t make us feel stupid when we didn’t know something” – and she was a senior! We never want them to feel that way, we always support and encourage.

After using our materials and going through our lessons, users should feel a peace of mind, like they’ve been given the trick to being successful and taking all the stress out of it! Learners should NOT experience content overwhelm. We’re going to talk about this a lot when talking about our pedagogy, because we see it WAY too often in nursing and allied health education. Telling students they have to know EVERYTHING is not only discouraging, it’s also totally unrealistic. And finally our learners should feel that they are heard and that they are capable. We take feedback and apply it. We tell them they can do it. We tell them they’re going to be great nurses or allied health professionals – RTs, PTs, whatever it is. They need to know that they can do anything. It’s amazing how powerful a simple “you can do this!” can be!

So, you’ll see that the goals for our teachers parallel the goals for the learners. Again, the goals we have for our teachers are also founded in the idea that we, as educators, can make such a powerful impact in healthcare education that it could effectively END the nursing and allied health shortage!

First – we want them to feel like they’re part of the family, so we viciously protect them like a mama bear! Obviously this doesn’t mean supporting dangerous or unsafe behavior, but we make sure our learners know we have their back! That being said – part of that and part of making THEM feel supported when they make mistakes – is making sure WE admit our faults and practice intellectual humility. That means that we admit when we’re wrong or when we’ve made a mistake and – I know this is insane, but… we apologize for making mistakes! We are all lifelong learners and we want to encourage our users to do the same. We’re not perfect, we don’t know everything, but we know how to say “okay, we screwed up on this one – but we looked it up at these reputable sources and we’ve corrected it for you”. You are MORE likely to admit a mistake to someone that you know would also admit their mistakes. If we present ourselves as this perfect authority, we elevate ourselves to an unapproachable level.

In terms of content creation, we want to present materials in a way that helps it click, something we’ll talk more about in the next lessons, and we want to make sure we’re only giving the KEY, MOST IMPORTANT information – that’s how we help to eliminate content overwhelm. And finally we listen to feedback, we acknowledge learners where they are, and we constantly tell them how much we believe in them and their abilities. We expect our teachers to be constantly encouraging learners – even in a pre-recorded video. We say things like “Okay guys, I know you can get this” or “You’re gonna be awesome nurses”. It makes a massive difference to their readiness and ability to learn, so we want you to implement this as well!

These are the goals that will guide everything you do as a teacher using the NRSNG pedagogy. As you go through the next two modules, you’ll learn about the pillars of our specific pedagogy and some practical ways to apply it as you begin to develop courses and content for students. Now, with that said, go out and be your best self today. And, as always, happy nursing!