Taking the Risks of Eagles

Abstract

Just being at the NLN Education Summit is to soar with the eagles of our profession for a few special days in the academic year. At each Summit, we are privileged to learn from colleagues across the United States what they are doing that is new and exciting. Here are a few highlights from Summit 2006. * Brother Ignatius Perkins reminded us that implosion is the best course of action for some curricula and compared the process of changing curricula to moving a cemetery. * Dr. Patricia Benner presented preliminary findings from her work for the Carnegie Foundation on the signature pedagogy for nursing. We cheered at the finding that lectures focused on taxonomy, that also lead to taxonomy, are deadly, while situated learning brings students to new understanding. * We also learned that while we continue to exhort students to come to class prepared, the data indicate that those who do so are actually our weakest students. As these students struggle to keep up, they fall further behind in an already challenging curriculum. Those students who use their assigned reading after class to explore areas they do not fully understand or to attain greater depth of understanding are the most successful. Eagles soar to 10,000 feet and can stay aloft for hours on the winds and thermal updrafts. With skeletal structures weighing less than half a pound and their more than 7,000 feathers weighing fewer than 21 ounces, these birds travel light. However, eagles build enduring nests of twigs and branches formed into interlocking triangles that can hold the weight of a person. Similarly, faculty innovators soar in their thinking because they travel light. Unencumbered by the past, their thinking is improved by their strong foundations in nursing and in nursing education. Like eagles, faculty innovators have been on the endangered species list, but their numbers are growing. Despite limited resources for nursing education research, they are building solid foundations of data to support their work. While offering new ideas is fraught with risk, deciding to implement newfangled notions is also risky. How in the world can we tell students not to prepare for class? If the world does not stop turning with that idea, certainly it will change its axis. Those who bring us new ideas and those who hear them face the dilemma faced by Alexander Graham Bell and the Western Union Company in 1877. Having invented and patented the telephone. Bell offered the patent to Western Union for $100,000. …