Learners …
Come in all shapes and sizes
People do have preferences about how they like to learn. What the evidence doesn't support is sorting them into types and teaching each type differently. That idea has been tested for decades and hasn't held up.
What does hold up is matching the method to the material. A clinical handover is a sequenced performance, so you learn it by doing it. Professional judgement can't be captured in a checklist, so you learn it by watching someone think out loud and then thinking it through yourself. The question worth asking isn't what kind of learner are you?, it's what does this particular thing demand?
Get that right and people understand, rather than remember.
Different content needs different ways in
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Some things you have to think through
Judgement won't fit in a checklist
QUT: "The Facilitator Files"
Supporting a struggling student is a judgement call, not a procedure. Narrative gives people a situation to reason about before they meet it for real.
Created by Naomi Malouf
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Some things you have to hear
Reasoning is modelled out loud
CDU: "Thinks critically and analyses nursing practice"
Critical thinking is invisible on a page. You learn it by hearing someone work through a problem, hesitate, and change their mind.
Created by Naomi Malouf
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Some things you have to do
A handover is a performance
ISOBAR: "Teaching a skill"
You can read the mnemonic in a minute and still fumble your first real handover. Sequenced physical tasks are learned by rehearsing them under pressure.
Created by Naomi Malouf
See it working
Three pieces of work, made a few years and a few thousand kilometres apart, one for each of the problems described above.
Some things you have to think through
Supporting a student who is struggling is a judgement call, not a procedure, so The Facilitator Files doesn't explain it. It dramatises three situations a clinical facilitator will eventually meet, and lets you reason about each one before you have to do it for real.
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Insufficient comprehension of health care language
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Not responding constructively to feedback
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Compromising patient safety
Written and produced by Naomi Malouf for Queensland University of Technology. Presented at the 6th International Conference of Education, Research and Innovation, Seville, and published in the conference proceedings.
Some things you have to hear
Critical thinking is invisible on a page. These two walk through the assessment standards out loud: what each one is actually asking for, and what it looks like when a student meets it.
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Thinks critically and analyses nursing practice
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Engages in therapeutic and professional relationships
Created by Naomi Malouf for Charles Darwin University.
Some things you have to do
There is no film for this one, and there shouldn't be. Watching someone hand over teaches you roughly what reading the mnemonic teaches you, which is not much. What works is doing it badly in front of a peer who has been given four specific questions to ask you about it, and then doing it again.
So the artefact here is the session itself: two hours of clinical laboratory on handover and documentation, timed to the minute, where the proportion of the session given to each activity is the whole argument.
15 minutes being told, 105 minutes doing it.
Created by Naomi Malouf for Charles Darwin University. NUR343 Simulation Block, 2017.