Nursing Education Concept By Pamela Ironside

Who is Pamela Ironside

    Pamela Ironside is an Assistant
Professor of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned a BA in
nursing from Luther College, an MSN from the University of Minnesota, and the
PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She teaches a variety of nursing
education courses including curriculum development, instruction, and clinical
education.

    Dr. Ironside’s current research uses interpretive
phenomenology to explain how new pedagogy
influences thinking in classroom and clinical courses, reforming practices in
nursing faculty, and the experiences of nursing doctoral students. 

    She is a
member of the Board of Governors of the National League for Nursing (NLN) and
served as an invited member of the NLN’s think tanks on graduate preparation
for the Nurse Educator Role and on Standards for Nursing Education. She was
recently appointed as a site evaluator for the Commission of Collegiate Nursing
Education. 

    She is associate editor of the book series, Interpretive Studies in Healthcare and Human
Sciences and is the editor for Volume IV, entitled Beyond Method: Philosophical
Conversations in Healthcare Research and Scholarship. In addition ,
her work is widely published in health care and nursing journals.

Journey to Education

    Dr. Pamela Ironside moved to nursing
education after rising through the ranks of nursing administration. She
believes in a non-structured approachto the teaching/learning session and likes
to begin class involving students in discussion of questions, thus inspiring a
spirit of inquiry. She views students as partners in learning.

Interest in Teaching

    She has always been interested
in teaching. When she graduated with her baccalaureate degree, she worked in a
surgical trauma/intensive care unit. She was often asked to work with students
who would come to the unit for an observation experience. 

    Even though these
experiences were for observation, she tried to explain everything that was
going on and to help them make links between what they were seeing and what
they were learning in their program. She found that this felt like a natural
thing to do and she found she looked forward to these experiences. 

    Then she took
the position of Assistant Head Nurse and in that position, she was in charge of
staff development and orientation. This experience was delightful. she found
teaching was the part of her job that she really liked, in part because it kept
her learning new things. 

    After rising through the ranks of administration, she
found that she missed teaching. When her family decided to relocate, they
decided to move to a place they wanted to live rather than to a job. So, they
relocated to Minnesota and there happened to be a position open at the College
of St. Scholastica (CSS) School of Nursing.

Willingness for Teaching

    At first, she was not prepared;
her master’s degree was in nursing administration. She was very fortunate that
the school she was teaching at was very good. She was able to spend an entire
quarter with the faculty, watch them teach, and talk with them about teaching. 

    They were very generous with their time and ideas
as she planned for her first course. So, it was not as if she had no preparation,
but the preparation was not formal preparation. At CSS, they provided courses that were interdisciplinary for all new faculties
on writing exams. There were a series of four each year. 

    That got her started
in developing skills in teaching. It was not until she went back for her
doctorate that she decided her wanted to do more in nursing education. Even
though her think she did OK in her role at CSS, she knew there was so much more that she didn’t know. 

    She really wanted a background in education, to do
research in education, and to learn about research and design issues so she
could make a difference to nursing students and teachers. She earned her
doctorate at the University of Wisconsin Madison. It was in her doctoral
experience that she really focused on learning about nursing education.

Training For Teaching

    When she
came to work with Nancy Diekelmann , she
had taught for 3 years. Her work in using Heideggerian her meneutics to study
nursing education really engaged her in thinking about teaching and learning in
a new way. At first, she observed and taught
along with her. 

    She would respond to various situations and we would talk about
what was going on. She started teaching graduate courses using Narrative
Pedagogy, even though she had never
taught that way before. They would talk about
her concerns, how the class might go, what kinds of questions might come up,
and things that she needed to think about. 

    They never talked about content
issues. This was very helpful to her. The most important thing to me about her
mentoring her as a teacher was that she had undying faith in me she
persistently communicated her belief that she could do it. She never once was harsh, condescending, or
critical. 

    She was always positive with
specific examples of what might work in a given situation. She instilled in her
the spirit of inquiry encouraging her to try new things or ideas, sees what
happens, and then they would talk about what worked and what didn’t. 

    This is
something that she tries to instill in every student she works with. Still
after all these years, she can watch her teach and learn something new about
how she engages with students and gets them thinking together about new
possibilities for teaching and/or research.

Developing as a Teacher

    When she first began teaching, she
was teaching as she had been taught. She constructed lectures and had every
aspect of the class pre-planned. She was very clear about where she would be at
any time throughout the lectures. 

    When she was really new to teaching, she
would time the lectures and practice them at home. She would put little sticky
notes on her lecture notes so she could monitor where she was related to what she
had planned. As she became more comfortable, she “let go” of her notes a little
more. 

    Then she realized how much more interesting the class became and how much
more engaged the students were when she would start talking about her own experiences
in caring for patients in different
situations. This approach started creeping in more and more into the class. 

    It
took her a while to get confident enough that her knew what she was talking
about to begin relying more on discussion and engaging students’ thinking. She
soon began to realize how she had a lot to offer and that the students had a
lot to offer too. 

    She began to worry less about whether or not she could not
answer every question. Then she was able to try more new things and really
follow the students’ questions and concerns. She tells new teachers now that
when you are most unfamiliar with the content, you really want to hang on to
control in the class. 

    Now she likes to start out the class with questions that she
have and don’t know the answers. She brings her questions to class and have
students investigated them. This approach has been really helpful. At this
time, her classes are non-structured. 

    She deals a lot with drawing from the
students’ experiences and questions and they collectively work on interpreting
and reinterpreting these experiences throughout the course. It is more
meaningful and engaging for me and she think for the students as well.

Level Comfortable as a Teacher

    Her comfortable feeling is best
described on two levels. After the first couple of years, she was comfortable
enough that she could teach a course well. Yet, with every new class, she is never really comfortable even when it
is a course, she has taught many times. 

    There is always both
excitement and worry with every new class. She works very hard to stay mindful because she want to hold on to how difficult it is for students to learn. She often reflect on her
own experiences as a student. 

    She thinks she is a better teacher when she keeps
herself learning something new and remembers how overwhelming learning can be.
Therefore, she is always a little uncomfortable. This experience helps me
appreciate how hard students are working.

Challenges she Faced

    Probably the biggest challenge
is in clinical instruction that involves being moved to units that are not in
your area of expertise. When schools were trying to secure clinical
sites, we had to move to wherever the sites were cated. 

    She worked hard as a teacher to help students learn new skills and how to
think in rapidly evolving situations. She
was worried about the patients, and what she
was not picking up on, because she did not know the specialty like she knew
other specialties. That has been a significant challenge that clinical teachers
continue to face.

Embarrassing Event

    She was using an overhead
projector when teaching her first large lecture class, and for whatever reason, She always had it backwards so that it projected
the image on the ceiling. In the end-of-year celebration at this school the
students did skits. 

    They came in and projected the overhead onto the
ceiling, and said, “What teacher is this?” It has kind of followed me around.
Every once in a while, students will make you aware of your little mannerisms
that you do not know you are showing in class. 

    Another thing was in one of her
nursing education courses she taught where
we were talking about student evaluations of faculty. The students were
master’s students so they had been students for a long time. They did not
believe that faculty ever really saw what they wrote on their
evaluations. 

    So, the entire class wrote on their evaluation, “I wish she was taller.” Sure enough, the student
comments report came back with 10 identical comments, “I wish she was taller!”

Rewards of Teaching

    She am rewarded when She see teachers teach in ways that are more
student centered and that create warm,
receptive environments for learning nursing. She am also rewarded when she see
students thinking in ways that challenge underlying assumptions and
create new possibilities. 

    She like
seeing students of develop confidence in their
intellectual abilities and to begin seeing themselves as nursing scholars.

Least Rewarding Aspects

    It is least rewarding when
arguments persist about the curriculum and what content goes where. Too often,
at the end of the day, it is really not different in any substantive way. This
creates tensions among faculty and takes an incredible
amount of time and energy.

Maintaining Excellence 

    She tries hard to listen very
well to students. Students will really help you out about what is a good idea,
what is not working, and what you can do to fix it. When she was a new teacher, it was easy to become
defensive with students and to spend time
trying to explain all the reasons why she was doing what she was doing. 

    But she has learned that when you listen to students, really listen to them, they will not let you down. They just make
you a better and better teacher and they help you make your courses more and
more compelling. 

    She also tries to take continuing education classes and put herself
in situations where she is a learner. She does a lot of reading and try a lot
of new things in her courses. She
is lucky to be able to do research in teaching and learning because what she learns in her research helps her be a
better teacher.

Advice for Teachers

    The best advice she could give
is to see students as your partners in learning. Pay attention to how they are
experiencing your course, and listen to what they have to say. Do every assignment
you ask students to do. Y

    ou will gain a lot
of insight into which ones work well and which ones don’t, and which ones
are compelling and which are either too difficult or are busywork. Talk to students a lot. She really believes that
students will not let you down. 

    They will step up and go beyond your
expectations and be creative. If you have a really good idea, try it.
And last, but not least, she would stress the importance of research in nursing
education. 

    If we want an inclusive science of nursing education to guide our teaching practice we must all get involved in
making that happen.