III: SOME PRINCIPLES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSE EDUCATION In Sections I and II we outlined approaches to the specification of educational objectives and mentioned some issues that have been raised regarding their specifiability, practical effects, and general educational implications. We now wish to consider the possible implications for their intelligent use, particularly in nurse education. An intelligent approach is one that is flexible and adaptive, and this flexible adaptability is based on an awareness and understanding of the matter in question. In particular, the intelligent use of any theory or set of ideas requires us to be open to its strengths, but also to be critically aware of its limitations and weaker points. In other words, it requires what we would term an 'open-critical' or 'reflective' approach: reflective, because we also need to remain willing to check our ideas continually to see whether they are still the best perspective in possibly changing circumstances. The brief review of various issues in the previous sections seems to confirm that, as usual in human affairs, clarity of meaning and communication is highly desirable for various reasons, but that, since there are also other things to take into account, extreme emphases on clarity in defining educational goals can be misplaced. Thus we saw that the more extreme behavioural specification viewpoints tend to involve more shortcomings than do moderate approaches. Eventually we come to the more practical question: what role should the specification of objectives play in the actual practice of nurse teaching? First, let's deny any apparent implication in this question that there might be just a single role for objectives. We have been looking at various particular uses of specification and have seen that the various levels of precision with which goals can be described have different values according to what one is doing: designing a whole course, planning tomorrow's lesson, devising an informal check on whether an idea has been grasped within a session, and so on. Nor is the idea that every nurse teacher should spend a lot of time analysing subject-matter and carry around enormous lists of cross-referenced educational goals, to which he or she makes constant reference while teaching.... Generally speaking, teachers should have become aware of what capacities and skills are entailed at various levels of their particular subject during their own nursing education and experience. By the time they are teaching they will, hopefully, have become familiar enough with their subject to be able, without much conscious working out, to plan various levels of a course in their particular field. And where there is a set syllabus they may not even need to do that. But so far as the nurse teacher wishes to remain a responsible agent and not to fall into the various pitfalls we have previously touched on, and in particular where the various levels of the assessment function are concerned, he or she will want to stop and get quite clear about various levels of precision at which the relevant subject skills may be specified. This reflective checking will tend to occur at various 'natural breaks', such as between lessons, between topics within a module, between modules, and so on, when _chances to reappraise occur, though what is a 'natural' break varies according to persons, subjects, and circumstances. And reflective checking, like other aspects of teaching skill, will also become more naturally and easily achieved with experience. Nevertheless, though a reflective comparison of intended achievements with actual results may alert the teacher that some sort of change is needed in his or her teaching, can this analysis of goals say anything positive about what sort of means or teaching approach to adopt? The answer to this must, we think, be that it may be able to help in a partial way, but that on its own it will not be a sufficient basis for understanding and recommending particular teaching strategies. The reason, simply put, is that, as we have seen, the educational process is an interaction, involving a number of elements, of which the topic or learning outcome and its possible structure of sub-skills are but one aspect. Education
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Mar 1, 2010
James Mckernan 
