Embracing Your Role as a Change-Maker in NP Education

There is a moment (and maybe you've already had it) where you're sitting across from a student who finally gets it. The clinical reasoning clicks. The hesitation lifts. You watch something shift in them, and you think: I had a small part in that.

That moment is not incidental to your work. It is your work. That feeling and that moment is powerful beyond what most days in the trenches of grading, curriculum committees, and course revisions will let you feel.

Summer has a way of slowing things down just enough to let you breathe as a chance to reconnect with why you stepped into this role and what you are actually capable of doing with it.

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The Quiet Influence You May Be Underestimating

The demand for nurse practitioners continues to grow. The complexity of the patients NPs will care for is only increasing. The clinical and educational gaps that exist in things like in health equity, in rural access, in trauma-informed care, in clinical reasoning for complex presentations will be addressed, in large part, by the quality of NP graduates we send into the world.

And who shapes those graduates? You do!

I’m not talking about influence in a grandiose, lone-hero way. This influence happens in the quiet, consistent, deeply human way that good education works. Through the feedback comment that helped a student reframe how they think about a differential diagnosis. Through the discussion board post you wrote that modeled intellectual curiosity. Through the course redesign you fought for because you knew the previous version wasn't serving students well.

This is not small work, but really foundational work. And the summer is an opportune time to let yourself believe that again without the noise of a semester pressing in from every side.

Change-Making Doesn't Require a Title or a Task Force

A persistent myth in academic nursing is that meaningful change requires a committee appointment, a research agenda, or an administrative role. That influence lives at the top, gets distributed downward, and arrives in the form of policy memos and curriculum revisions. Thinking like that fosters the imposter syndrome that so many newer (and even experienced) nursing faculty feel.

Instead, let’s acknowledge that change moves through a faculty member who mentors the adjunct instructor who was about to quit. It moves through the faculty who brings a new framework for clinical teaching into a faculty meeting, not because it was assigned, but because they found something that works and wanted to share it. It moves through the preceptor who creates a learning environment where NP students feel psychologically safe enough to say “I don't know” and, in doing so, shapes clinicians who are humble, curious, and self-aware.

You don't need a title to do any of that. You just need intention.

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Three Shifts Worth Making This Summer

These are not tasks or deliverables. I am not looking to add any more to your faculty to-do list. Instead, look at these as perspectives. And sometimes a shift in perspective changes everything.

1. Move from surviving to contributing.

Most faculty spend the academic year in survival mode, and for good reasons. The workload is real, the boundaries need constant reinforcement, and the emotional labor of clinical education is chronically underestimated.

This summer, what if you let yourself think about contribution instead? Not in an overwhelming way like a new research project or a grant application, but in a simple, grounding way.

Ask yourself: What is one thing I want to contribute to my students or my program next year that I haven't been able to get to yet?

One idea, one intention. Let it take up some space.

2. Reclaim your professional identity beyond the to-do list.

Somewhere between the LMS notifications and the accreditation documentation, it can be easy to lose the thread of who you are as a clinician-educator. Think about your expertise, perspectives, and the specific lens you bring to nursing education that nobody else brings in quite the same way.

Use this summer to reconnect with that. Read the book that's been on your nightstand for two semesters. Attend a webinar or conference that actually excites you, not just the one that satisfies a professional development requirement. Write something (even if it's just for yourself!).

Your professional identity deserves some tending to, too.

3. Let your vision for NP education be a little audacious.

What do you wish NP education looked like? Not just in your program, but in the profession as a whole? What do you believe about how NP students should be taught clinical reasoning, cultural humility, or leadership? What frustrates you about the way things have always been done?

Those frustrations tell you something about what you value and where your energy wants to go. Change-makers are rarely people who have everything figured out. They're usually people who got tired of a problem and decided to do something about it, however imperfectly.

You can be that person.

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The Permission You Didn't Know You Needed

You do not have to wait until for whatever qualification you deem is the entry into meaningful change like a terminal degree, a tenure track position, a national platform, or 20 years of experience.

You can influence the direction of this profession now. You create a positive change in the way you show up for your students. In the conversations you have with colleagues. In the way you design a case study, write a discussion prompt, or give feedback on a clinical narrative. In the blog post you share, the mentor you become, the idea you pitch in a faculty meeting that nobody else was willing to say out loud. All of those actions are meaningful.

NP education needs faculty who are energized, feel a sense of purpose, and believe their work matters beyond the mechanics of course management. Students feel the difference between an educator who is just going through the motions from one who is genuinely invested. Those students will carry your belief in them and your intellectual energy into their clinical practice.

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So, What Now?

There is no action item at the bottom of this post. No worksheet, no five-step plan, no challenge to complete by Friday. Just an invitation.

This summer, let yourself rest and let yourself dream a little. The educator who never stops moving will never get the perspective to see what they're actually building.

I want you to know that you are building something. Your students will go on to care for thousands of patients. They will precept their own students someday. They will make clinical decisions in rooms where you will never be present, using reasoning skills and professional instincts that were shaped, in part, by what you gave them.

That is not a small thing. That is a legacy, quietly accumulating, one course at a time.

You are a change-maker in NP education. This summer is your chance to remember it.

Jacklyn DelPrete, EdD, CRNP, FNP-C is a family nurse practitioner, full-time graduate nursing faculty member, and founder of The Elevated NP. Questions or topics you'd like covered? Reach out at elevatednpteam@gmail.com.