Education & Teaching

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Content overload is one of the most common challenges in nursing education, and it doesn't discriminate. It shows up in courses and program across all nursing levels and in all course formats. It plagues first-year adjuncts and seasoned full-time faculty alike. The concern with content overload is that it's costing your students cognitively, emotionally, and academically. The good news? You can teach well with less. Let's talk about how to get there.

AI tools have gotten very good at helping with the kind of work that used to eat up entire evenings and weekends working on DNP projects. Not the thinking part (that still belongs to you and your student) but the organizing, the formatting, the synthesizing, and the tracking. This post breaks down which AI tools are actually worth your time for DNP project work, whether you're a faculty advisor or to share with a student.

A 2022 article published in Medical Education Online titled "When Students' Words Hurt: 12 Tips for Helping Faculty Receive and Respond Constructively to Student Evaluations of Teaching" by Cornes and colleagues offers evidence-based guidance for exactly this moment. I'm breaking down their key recommendations here through the lens of NP faculty life, because this research is too good not to keep sharing.

You open the gradebook. There are 24 discussion posts, 18 SOAP notes, or a stack of concept maps waiting for your feedback. You take a breath, open the first submission, and (if you're anything like most graduate nursing faculty) you feel the familiar pull to just fix it all. Here's the truth no one says loudly enough: you are not responsible for fixing everything, and trying to do so doesn't actually help students learn. In this post, we review how to give feedback that supp

Your graduate nursing students are the not the same “blank slates” that they used to be in their undergraduate programs. These students are nurses. Some of them will have twenty years of professional nursing wisdom, while others will be fresh from a BSN program, and they can all be admitted together in the same cohort. This heterogeneity is not a challenge to be managed. It is a gift to be used. But only if you understand two theoretical frameworks: andragogy & constructivism

Research on higher-order learning consistently shows that students rise to the level of the task they are given. If the task is to post a thoughtful summary, that is what they will do. If the task is to reason through a complex clinical situation, differentiate between competing diagnoses, and defend a management decision — well, that is a fundamentally different cognitive experience. The format of discussion boards is not the barrier. The design is.

If our goal is to prepare safe, competent, entry-level nurse practitioners, then the exams must reflect the cognitive work of practice, not just the cognitive work of memorization.

The moment I started rethinking assignments was the moment I asked myself this question: Would this help a student on their first day as an NP? Not pass boards. Not earn an A. But could it correlate to a real patient encounter?

Item analysis reports are packed with numbers, short on explanation, and often dropped into your inbox with zero guidance. But buried in that spreadsheet is information that can make your exams fairer, clearer, and easier to defend—once you know what to look for. Below are the five item analysis statistics that matter most, what they actually mean, and how to use them without spiraling.

Stepping into a faculty role as a nurse practitioner is both exciting and overwhelming. You bring years of clinical expertise, professional judgment, and real-world insight—but teaching requires an entirely different skill set. The good news? Most teaching missteps new NP faculty make are completely normal , highly fixable, and often rooted in trying too hard to do things “right.” Whether you’re teaching face-to-face, online, or a blend of both, here are the most common mist