Teaching Students to Teach Health Care to Others

Abstract

The trend toward delivery of new kinds of health services in new ways requires that we provide for creative approaches to teaching students to utilize a wellness-illness health concept of teaching. Curriculum patterns and teaching approaches must be flexible enough to allow for a broad-spectrum approach to health teaching in a variety of kinds of contemporary settings. Health teaching of others, being an integral part of nursing, must be dealt with within the context of daily involvement with patient care and/or community health activities. There is a need to understand some of the conditions that facilitate learning, if we expect to teach students to teach preventive and therapeutic health measures. The teacher must convey a deep and enthusiastic commitment toward teaching, and must show sensitivity to and genuine respect for and acceptance of the learner as an individual. Learning must start at the particular stage of the learner's capabilities, experiences, and readiness. Motivation to learn arises from the learner's perceived needs and desires, and learners tend to retain only that content that is visibly relevant to their personal needs and life styles. They need frequent reinforcement regarding their progress, particularly in times of failure. There is need for teachers to reexamine their teaching approaches to identify those new methods that provide more flexibility in the use of humanized processes leading to creative learning. A number of teaching approaches using some of the current and projected kinds of communications media can be used to assist students to teach health care to others. Not all approaches can be guaranteed to provide automatic achievement of the desired behavioral objectives. For teaching that is authoritative rather than authoritarian there is a need for teachers who use their imagination, courage, knowledge, and ability in the selection and use of creative teaching approaches in teaching students to teach health care to others.