N580 Module 1 assignment: paper on the scholarship of teaching and the nurse educator role, a full sample

From Good Teaching to Scholarly Teaching: The Scholarship of Teaching and the Nurse Educator's Role

Student Name

Master of Science in Nursing Program, Aspen University

N580: Issues in Nursing Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From Good Teaching to Scholarly Teaching: The Scholarship of Teaching and the Nurse Educator's Role

For three semesters, a composite clinical instructor on a medical-surgical unit noticed that her students arrived for their first medication pass knowing drug facts but unable to decide which medications to hold. She replaced the traditional pre-clinical drug card quiz with a 20-minute case in which students reviewed a real, de-identified medication administration record and decided, with reasons, what to give and what to question. Students' performance at the bedside seemed better, and other instructors asked to borrow the case. The change was good teaching. Whether it was scholarship depends on what she did next.

The scholarship of teaching is one of the foundational ideas of nurse education, and Aspen places it at the start of this course as the basis for examining the educator's role in academic, clinical and community settings. This paper explains where the idea came from, how scholarly teaching differs from good teaching, the standards by which teaching scholarship can be judged, and how a nurse educator, including one who teaches in clinical or community settings, can demonstrate it.

Boyer's Expanded View of Scholarship

In Scholarship Reconsidered, Boyer (1990) argued that universities had narrowed scholarship to the discovery of new knowledge through research, undervaluing other intellectual work of faculty. He proposed four related forms of scholarship. The scholarship of discovery is original research. The scholarship of integration draws on several disciplines to interpret findings and show what they mean together. Application, which later writers often call the scholarship of engagement, puts knowledge to work on to address real problems, such as a nurse's work with a community. And the scholarship of teaching treats teaching itself as a subject of serious intellectual work, in which educators study how students learn and make their findings public.

For nursing, Boyer's framework was influential because so much of nursing faculty work is teaching, much of it in clinical settings, and because nursing is a practice discipline where application is central. It gave nurse educators a way to argue that careful, studied improvement of teaching belongs in the same family as research.

Good Teaching, Scholarly Teaching and the Scholarship of Teaching

Three levels are often distinguished. Good teaching is effective instruction that helps students learn. Scholarly teaching adds a deliberate, evidence-informed approach: the teacher consults the literature on learning, chooses strategies for reasons, gathers evidence about their effect and reflects on it. The scholarship of teaching goes one step further: the educator makes the work public, in a form that peers can review, critique and build on, such as a presentation, publication or peer-reviewed teaching resource.

Kreber (2003) compared conceptions of the scholarship of teaching held by experts in the field and by regular academic staff and found that the two groups did not always agree on what it involves, which helps explain why the term is used loosely in practice. The practical test is simple: if the work stays inside one classroom and one person's memory, it may be excellent teaching, but it is not yet scholarship. The instructor's medication case becomes scholarship when she frames a question about it, gathers evidence systematically, compares it with the literature and shares the results for others to judge.

Standards for Judging Teaching Scholarship

Glassick et al. (1997), writing after Boyer, proposed six standards that apply to all forms of scholarship: clear goals, adequate preparation, fitting methods, results that matter, communication that reaches others, and critical reflection on the work. Applied to the medication case, they suggest a path. Clear goals would state what students should be able to do, such as identify medications to hold and justify the decision. Adequate preparation means reviewing the literature on teaching clinical reasoning and medication safety. Appropriate methods might compare students' decisions on a standard case before and after the new approach, or across sections that did and did not use it. Significant results are findings that matter to other educators. Effective presentation means sharing the case and findings at a conference or in a nursing education journal. Reflective critique means examining what did not work and what the instructor would change.

Nursing education has its own reasons to hold teaching to these standards. Oermann (2022) urged nurse educators to adopt educational approaches supported by evidence rather than habit, which requires that someone generate that evidence. The scholarship of teaching is how the evidence base for nursing education grows.

The Scholarship of Teaching in Every Setting

The educator's role extends beyond the university classroom, and so does the scholarship of teaching. A clinical instructor can study how students learn at the bedside; a staff development educator can evaluate a new orientation method; a community health educator can examine which approaches help a population learn to manage a chronic condition. The competencies expected of nurse educators include engaging in scholarship and functioning as a change agent, alongside facilitating learning and assessment (Halstead, 2019). Demonstrating the scholarship of teaching in any setting typically involves a teaching portfolio that documents questions asked, evidence gathered and changes made; peer observation and review; and dissemination through presentations, publications or shared teaching materials.

For a practicing educator, the first project need not be large. The clinical instructor in the opening case could write a one-page question, whether students who analyze a medication administration record before clinical make fewer hold-or-give errors on a standard case, gather scores from two semesters, compare them with the literature on teaching clinical reasoning and present the results at a regional nursing education conference. That modest project meets every one of the six standards. It also builds the instructor's teaching portfolio, supports promotion in academic settings and gives other instructors something better than an anecdote to decide whether to adopt the approach. Many nursing programs now offer small internal grants and mentoring for exactly this kind of work.

Conclusion

The scholarship of teaching asks nurse educators to treat their teaching as seriously as researchers treat their studies: to ask questions about student learning, gather evidence, judge it against the literature and share it for others to review. Boyer's framework gave this work legitimacy, and the standards that followed give it rigor. For the clinical instructor with the medication case, the next step is not a better case but a better question about it, pursued in a way that other educators can learn from. That step is what turns a good teacher into a scholar of teaching, and it is the foundation on which the rest of this course builds.

References

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T., & Maeroff, G. I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. Jossey-Bass.

Halstead, J. A. (Ed.). (2019). NLN core competencies for nurse educators: A decade of influence. Wolters Kluwer.

Kreber, C. (2003). The scholarship of teaching: A comparison of conceptions held by experts and regular academic staff. Higher Education, 46(1), 93-121. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1024416909866

Oermann, M. H. (2022). Adopting evidence-based educational approaches in nursing. Nurse Educator, 47(5), 259-260. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000001257