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.

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

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.

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.

My qualitative study on academic nurse leader (ANL) role development was published in Nursing Education Perspectives. I interviewed 18 nurse leaders across the country — program directors, chairpersons, assistant and associate deans, and deans — to understand how they actually developed in their roles. What I found was equal parts validating and sobering. Here are five strategies drawn directly from the findings of this study.

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

If you've been in a faculty role for more than five minutes, you've probably realized that the wheels of academic change move slowly. Very slowly. And yet, without a formal title, it might feel like you just don’t have the power or influence to help and make a difference. But here's the thing: you do.

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.