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You’ve just posted exam grades, and the numbers are not what you hoped. A third of the cohort missed the same cluster of questions on heart failure management. The discussion board posts last week were thin. Two students emailed to say they “studied everything” and still don’t understand what went wrong. When nursing students aren’t learning, we need to find out where something in the system broke down. Let’s look at how to diagnose the problem.

Nursing faculty are clinicians at heart. We were trained to notice suffering and respond to it. That instinct doesn’t switch off when we trade a stethoscope for a syllabus. It just gets pointed at a new population, often without the structures that made it sustainable in practice: shift ends, handoffs, a team down the hall. That’s how compassion fatigue settles in.

When I accepted my first faculty position, I thought I understood the job: I would teach. Then I received my first workload assignment. There was something about credit hours, clinical ratios, and committee meetings, and I stared at it the way a new grad stares at a 12-lead EKG for the first time. I recognized the words, but not in those particular combinations. Nobody explains faculty workload to clinicians before they make the jump.

This post will break down what concept-based curriculum is, how it differs from competency-based curriculum, and why the two actually work better together.

Most of us were educated in a traditional, content-based model, and then we taught the way we were taught. Now the ground is shifting under the entire discipline of nursing education, and it's happening fast. Chances are you are doing some sort of a curriculum update, whether it’s a total overhaul or course-specific updates. So, let's break down what competency-based curriculum actually is, why nursing education is moving toward it, and what it means for you as a faculty memb

Maybe your clinical practice is required for accreditation or certification, maybe your institution expects it, or maybe you love patient care too much to give it up. The reason doesn't change the reality that each role has its own pace, its own demands, and its own kind of mental load, and nobody hands you a transition plan for moving between them.

Academic meetings are where a huge amount of institutional work happens, but clinician-turned-educators often walk into this world without any preparation for it.

Teaching students how to think isn't a vague, feel-good aspiration. It's a specific instructional shift, and it looks different depending on where your students sit developmentally.

If you've ever caught yourself grading discussion posts while only half-reading them, you're not a bad teacher. You're likely a busy one and feeling a little trapped working within a format that is often built for compliance instead of thinking. The good news is that discussion boards can actually do what they're supposed to do without eating your grading time or turning into a box-checking exercise for anyone involved.

You've pulled your item analysis report. You've found the question that students have already email you about and you stare at the ugly discrimination score. But no one ever taught you how to decide to actually do about it. Once you know what the numbers mean, the real skill is knowing what to do with them.

As fall semester ramps up and planning for next year creeps onto the calendar, I want to talk about a skill that gets far less attention in faculty development than time management or productivity hacks: the skill of doing less, on purpose. At the very least, I hope this post provides a new point of view you may not have considered. Maybe it will give you some permission to explore the idea that doing less can still be enough.

Course alignment in nursing education means intentionally connecting what students are expected to learn, what faculty teach and provide opportunities to practice, and how student learning is assessed. When those connections are intentional, faculty can make more informed decisions about content, learning activities, and assessments. Students are also more likely to understand why they are learning particular concepts and how those concepts contribute to their development as

In this post I have three full examples across different levels of nursing education so you can see nursing case study design in action. I want this to feel like a tangible recipe to follow so that you can walk away feeling ready to create.

The concentration names vary, but the underlying assumption that a DNP degree, dressed up with the right electives, is the terminal degree you need to become the best prepared nursing faculty. I want to gently push back on that assumption. Not because the DNP isn't valuable (because it absolutely is!), and if you already have one, you can absolutely pursue a position as a nursing faculty. But because the conversation around terminal degrees for aspiring educators has gotten m

Here's how to craft rubrics for nursing faculty that hold up to student appeals, to accreditation site visits, and to your own sense of "did I grade this fairly?"

Whether you're writing lesson-level objectives for a single module, building out a course from scratch, or sitting on a curriculum committee reviewing program outcomes, learning objectives at every level can be more than accreditation requirements. When they're written well, they're one of the most powerful tools a faculty member has. Let's talk about how to write learning objectives for nursing courses that actually drive clinical thinking.

Boundaries aren't the opposite of good teaching. They're what make good teaching sustainable. And setting them doesn't make you a less caring NP educator. It makes you one who's still standing at the end of the semester and wants to get ready for the next one. Let's talk about how to hold the line with warmth, clarity, and zero guilt.

If you're applying for a nursing faculty job, your CV is doing more work than you think. It's not just a list of where you've been. It's the first bit of evidence that a hiring committee sees that you understand what the role actually requires. Formatting choices, section order, and what you choose to highlight all signal whether you're thinking like a clinician or thinking like an educator. Let's work on that, section by section.

This post is specifically for APRNs who are maintaining a clinical practice and a faculty role simultaneously. Whether you're adjunct faculty teaching one clinical course, a full-time faculty member maintaining a part-time clinical practice, or somewhere in between, this one is for you.

There is simultaneously a documented nursing faculty shortage and a competitive job market for faculty positions. These two things are not mutually exclusive, and understanding why they coexist is the first step to navigating the search more strategically.