Exploring negative feedback – is there a positive side?

This article considers student feedback and its interpretation in relation to developing students' personal development planning. At the outset of professional education required values and behaviours might not be in evidence. Student feedback can be used as a point for learning so that values and preferences that are not a ‘given’ can be given the space needed to enable communication skills, empathy and compassion to grow. We should anticipate that not everyone has these at the outset of professional education and honesty in identifying through feedback what is lacking is a good starting point to develop individualised student support

Empowering students to promote independent learning: A project utilisting coaching approaches to support learning and personal development

With the publication of the UK White Paper (BIS, 2011) focusing onstudent experience, together with the increase in tuition fees and the changing landscape of higher education, there is an interest within the sector to explore initiatives that enhance the learning process. Coaching, as already used in management and some NHS settings, offers an approach which seeks to enable and empower learners and has the potential to contribute to their personal development, facilitating solution-focused approaches which are transferable to the workplace. Teaching staff in a Higher Education Institution were offered training in coaching techniques and formed a peer support coaching network. They were subsequently encouraged to use coaching skills in a range of student settings. This paper focuses on an evaluation of a teaching and learning initiative that used coaching approaches with two groups of healthcare students (totalling 19) over 2 semesters in the 2012-2013 academic year. The aim was to enhance the student experience in relation to self-motivation, personal development planning and the development ofsolution-focused approaches. The evaluation drew upon student feedback and conversations with staff in the coaching network.The evaluation highlighted the benefits of coaching; student preferences and expectations; new learning experiences of staff and the relevance of coaching approaches in other specific educational settings. The evaluation demonstrated how coaching adds value; providing students with the opportunity to develop workplace skills; and offering staff a solution-focused tool which may be particularly useful when facing change in workplace settings. Importantly it gives participants a creative space to engage with contemporary challenges and educators a ‘new’ tool to facilitate participation and nurture engagement in a non-directive way

SNUFKIN’S FLAG: MOOMINLAND IN POST GRADUATE REFLECTIVE LEARNING

Creativity in post graduate education with health students can tap into many sources of inspiration. One source demonstrated in this poster is Tove Jansson’s ‘Comet in Moominland’, a children’s book about Finnish Troll creatures in the forests of Scandinavia. It has value for an adult readership too. Story telling has an important place in many cultures and ‘gives permission’ to see the world through a different lens. Application to reflective practice begins with an excerpt from a narrative between two characters in the story about a flag that belongs to a tramp called Snufkin. Through the narrative the flag design is explained and the philosophy of life behind it. Snufkin’s flag thus provides (in this example) post graduate students with a useful tool to apply in personal reflection about vision and purpose in relation to leadership studies. Snufkin’s flag design represent the context of life –a life journey road represented as a horizontal line between sky and sea marked with and a current point, a future destination and a real world context.. It captures something of the free-spirited character of Snufkin who visits Moominland in the spring but migrates south during the winter: i.e. He is always living with purpose in mind and is never static for a prolonged period. With the text written during in the post World War 2 period and the Cold War spectre of nuclear warfare, this is possibly a device to help children have purpose and hope in an uncertain context. Likewise in a context of rapid and uncertain change that is a feature of modern UK healthcare, postgraduate students can be guided through a 4 step reflective analysis: Current position (A), desired destination (B), reading of the context and planned steps to move from A to B. Furthermore it facilitates a broader reflective discussion about self in relation to the social context and the values associated with the envisaged destination

Demonstrating nurses' clinical decision-making

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Exploring negative feedback – is there a positive side?

This article considers student feedback and its interpretation in relation to developing students' personal development planning. At the outset of professional education required values and behaviours might not be in evidence. Student feedback can be used as a point for learning so that values and preferences that are not a ‘given’ can be given the space needed to enable communication skills, empathy and compassion to grow. We should anticipate that not everyone has these at the outset of professional education and honesty in identifying through feedback what is lacking is a good starting point to develop individualised student support

Teaching innovation through collaborative learning to generate a model of motivation

Innovation and leadership education requires students to develop their creative approaches to thinking, especially in healthcare settings that are resource constrained, outcome focused and subject to continual change. Public healthcare settings are often complex, resource limited busy environments subject to workforce shortages that are challenging for front line healthcare leaders, especially when it comes to leading others through change. A leadership and innovation module undertaken by advanced practitioners included a segment on motivating others. A novel approach was designed to help students to move from surface learning through a lecture approach and towards gaining deeper learning through immersion in research activity to generate a model of motivation relevant to a healthcare setting. The intervention was a day long activity in which 30 students were invited to participate in research study to develop a model of motivation. This had three key steps: generating a description of motivation, inductively generating a model of motivation and finally representing that as a conceptual model and critically discussing it. The tutor role was as facilitator and the students co-produced a model. An individual semi-structured qualitative questionnaire about motivation was completed before the session and also an evaluation questionnaire on completion. Ethical approval was granted by the University of Bolton Faculty research ethics chair. The activity added value to the students' learning in several ways: research design, reflexivity and real world application. It introduced students to research enquiry, including identifying potential questions, devising a methodology and generating an answer to the question. This illustrated a process that they would encounter if they progressed to undertake an empirical dissertation. Students gained deeper insights into their standpoint and how they shaped data interpretation as well as triangulation to confirm meaning attributed to stages during data analysis. Deeper learning was developed through a critical discussion of the concepts, their interrelationships and application of the class generated model to the real world of healthcare practice. In this way students developed critical thinking skills about approaches to motivating others. Subsequent learning introduced existing motivation models and a focus for critical discussion of their merits in relation to the class generated version. Student evaluation demonstrated a range of benefits gained through the experience including peer learning, transferable skills and developing critical thinking. Learning about innovation demands tutor modelling of innovative practice - in this case facilitating healthcare students to learn through a collaborative research process, so that value is added to classroom sessions and students can take forward both subject knowledge and critical thinking development as well as a learning approach that could be used by themselves to develop this within their own teams

Demonstrating nurses' clinical decision-making

The study answers the question: 'How can nurses' properly considered decisions relating to patient care be demonstrated?' Nurses in the United Kingdom have a professional requirement to demonstrate': the properly considered clinical decisions relating to patient care' (UKCC, 1994; NMC, 2002). However, their decisionmaking has been reported as complex and poorly understood, and apart from nursing records, little evidence exists to demonstrate their decisions. The development of the nurses' role as a decision-maker is traced from an origin in Nightingale's text (1860) through to the present day. This role is shaped by organisational, nursing and medical profession influences. Having established that nurses have a role as decision-makers, a conceptual framework is used to examine different explanations about the decision process, outcome, context and how decisions are made. Before undertaking fieldwork, a survey of nurses' decision-making in general medical and surgical wards was conducted. The findings were compared with the conceptual framework to generate questions and avenues for enquiry. An ethnographic study was undertaken in 1999 - 2000 in four general medical wards in two English provincial NHS Trusts with registered nurses (general). A model of decision-making was developed as a mid range theoretical explanation of how they made decisions. This involved a narrative based approach in which nurses generated an account (narrative) of knowing a patient and used this to identify needs. The patient was known in a narrative through three categories of information: nursing, management and medical. These categories were constructed through nurses' information seeking and processing using a tripartite conceptual lens. These facets correspond to different aspects of the nurse's role as a carer, care manager and medical assistant. The patient is known in three ways in a narrative, as a person to care for, an object to be managed, and as a medical case. An oral tradition surrounded its use, and nursing records were not central to decision-making. The narrative was used to make decisions and influence medical decisions. Once it was established how nurses made decisions, a method was developed to show how they could demonstrate their properly considered clinical decisions relating to patient care. This involved using the narrative based decision-making model as an analytical framework applied to nurse decision narratives. Narrative based decisionmaking offers a development of existing descriptive theoretical accounts and new explanations of some features of the decision process. This particularly includes the use of personal note sheets, the role of judgements and the cycle of communicating the narrative to nurses and its subsequent development as a process of developing an explanation of how the patient is known. Having addressed how nurses can demonstrate their properly considered clinical decisions relating to patient care, conclusions are drawn and implications explored in relation to practice, professional regulation, education and method. Recommendations include a challenge to the assumption about decision-making underpinning existing NMC guidance on recordkeeping, and the need to recognise diversity of decision-making practice across different nursing sub-groups. The narrative revealed nurses' ways of constructing knowing patients and rendering this visible. Nurses' not only have a duty, but also a need, to demonstrate decisions so that they can render visible what it is they are and do

The ''Hidden Curriculum' for Invisible Students: Challenges of eLearning

Much has been written about the ‘hidden curriculum’, the so-called non-curricular learning which occurs as a by-product of the focus on another subject. Students on professional courses learn the identity and values of a practitioner, and those of Higher Education and study. Important skills for employability are learned beside the curriculum ensuring agile learners who utilise as well as accrue knowledge, Lyall, et al (2015). Multiple skills are acquired alongside subject specific learning: (including time management, IT skills, communication, teamwork, problem-solving) which employers seek and value, but are often developed in the spaces around the curriculum as well as within it. For remote and distance learners there is another facet of the hidden curriculum concerned with building rapport with someone they will not see, being part of a community which is never geographically together and managing the identity of student without inhabiting and having reference to the campus. Not only are they remote, but they are also potentially rendered invisible by the structures and processes of the university, always being the ‘exception’, the ‘outlier’ , or ‘other’ to the campus student. Tutors working with these students may also see themselves as ‘other’ to the tutor teaching in a visible classroom with students who are active consumers of all the campus has to offer. This paper provides insight into challenges faced by elearners and their teachers. Consideration is made of the strategies and initiatives to uncover the hidden curriculum of the elearning student and the staff who manage it, in addition to approaches and activities designed to focus the lens of inclusivity on an equitable and ‘visible’ elearning student experience. Discussion considers initiatives to address the hidden curriculum for elearners including an engagement strategy (DigiLearn), fostering collaboration between staff and services, developing a Community of Practice for Elearning (Lave and Wenger, 1991) , a whole university approach to inclusivity for all students and adoption of a ‘ community on line’ approach to e learning

Emotional intelligence in preregistration nurse education

Emotional intelligence (EI) is considered essential to nursing practice, but it is unclear how best to support nursing students to develop EI skills. This article details a literature review that was undertaken to explore EI in preregistration nurse education and to identify effective methods for developing nursing students’ EI skills. A total of 12 articles were included in the review, from which data were extracted, compared and categorised. Three main areas were identified regarding EI in preregistration nurse education: EI constructs, EI components and EI teaching methods. The review found that a range of EI constructs and components may be included in nurse education curricula, meaning that there is often inconsistency in the approaches used. Classroom teaching methods were primarily used, alongside online methods and experiential methods such as simulation-based learning. The findings of the review suggest there is a need for greater consistency in the EI constructs and components used in preregistration nurse education, as well as further research to determine which EI teaching methods are most effective

Learning to embody professional values among UK nursing associates

The Nursing Associate is a new role within UK healthcare that entails a two year vocational undergraduate diploma education pathway integrated with extensive front line clinical practice. The curriculum mirrors aspects of existing preregistration nursing programmes of which common features are regulation and development of professional attributes. Curriculum content includes teaching about such values with the intention of developing the students’ knowledge and translating this until it becomes embodied in their practice . A mixed methods survey study was designed to evaluate the extent to which this curriculum aim was being achieved to inform subsequent related teaching and learning interventions. The aim was to describe students’ perceptions of developing as an honest, caring, compassionate, conscientious and competent nursing associate. Enquiry also included exploring students’ perceptions of how this development is likely to impact on patient care as well as enablers and barriers to achieving fitness for practise in these 5 domains. Ethical approval was granted by the University of Bolton Faculty Research Ethics chairperson. Students from the first cohort of this new programme were invited to participate and complete the survey (n=68 with 57 participants). They were working in 4 different National Health Service Trusts. The survey had 4 dimensions – a self-rating scale of 5 professional domains and a free text counterpart in which respondents could explain why they had chosen that rating. A final section of the survey invited any further free text comment about factors enabling or posing a barrier to developing professional attributes. Thematic analysis of qualitative comments was undertaken to generate findings. These showed that students expressed these attributes as a sense of being (already embodied) and also development (becoming) in so far as they had learnt more about what each attribute was and could recognise steps they had taken to move towards embodying the attribute. Some respondents also identified praxis – where real world practice fell short of their expectations, and a positive aspect was that they reported being courageous enough to challenge such mismatches. Overall the findings suggest that the pedagogic design linking propositional knowledge to students'clinical work promoted reflection on real world practice experience was moving students towards developing professional attributes. It also highlighted differences in the degree of reflective insights students demonstrated about their own values, thus directing attention towards how this could be promoted as an essential skill within the curriculum. These findings provide the basis for informing tripartite (university student and service) working relationships, especially around challenging areas of concern to students and also how to draw role models from current practice into shared classroom teaching. Additionally it identified some factors that could be used to inform students decision making to overcome barriers to developing these professional attributes