What No One Tells You About Teaching Graduate Nursing Students

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. Their prior knowledge is not at the same depth, their professional identity is not the same, their relationship to authority and expertise is not the same, and their tolerance for being treated like a novice is decidedly not the same.

This heterogeneity is not a challenge to be managed. It is a gift to be used. But only if you understand the two theoretical frameworks that should be at the heart of every graduate nursing course: andragogy and constructivism.

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Andragogy — The Science of Teaching Adults

The term "andragogy" first appeared in the 1830s as a way to describe lifelong learning through vocational training, personal growth, and self-reflection. The concept was later revived and modernized by Malcolm Knowles, whose 1968 article "Andragogy, Not Pedagogy" transformed how we think about adult education. According to Knowles, andragogy is the art and science of adult learning and encompasses any form of learning aimed at adults (Pappas, 2025).

At its core, andragogy is a learner-centered framework built on the recognition that adults learn differently from children. Unlike traditional pedagogical models, andragogy gives control to the learner. These learners are here because they want to be, not because they have to be. In our examples here, graduate nursing students are making the decision to return to school to become better nurses in a particular role (Pappas, 2025).

Knowles proposed five key assumptions about adult learners:

• Self-concept: As people mature, their self-concept shifts from dependence toward self-direction. Children need a lot of direction and guidance to move them towards their learning goals. Adults have already have variety of life experiences and now want flexibility and freedom to learn how and when they want to. (Pappas, 2025).

• Experience: Adults have a lot of personal and professional experiences that serves as resources for their learning. These learners will challenge new information based on the experiences they have had. Effective educators recognize that and use those challenges as key moments of learning. (Pappas, 2025).

• Readiness to learn: Because these students are learners who are making their own decisions to be present in the program and wanting to advance their careers, they come with a desire and readiness to learn. (Pappas, 2025).

• Orientation to learning: Adults shift from subject-centered learning toward problem-centered learning. They want solutions, and nurses are already great at this! Structure your course content to engage higher levels of learning and problem-solving to keep them engaged, instead of a more passive approach to teaching. (Pappas, 2025).

• Motivation: Adults typically possess internal motivation. As mentioned, they want to learn for self-improvement, career advancement, or because of another type of meaningful interest. (Pappas, 2025).

In a graduate nursing program, your students are nurses with clinical identities that are already formed, from patients they have already cared for, and understanding the professional stakes of nursing and healthcare practice that are entirely real. These are learners that need to know the “why” but also the “how.” When a nurse practitioner student asks why they need to understand pharmacokinetics at a graduate level, they need to understand the application of it and that prescribing safely at this level requires a different cognitive model than administering medications from a Pyxis machine.

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Constructivism — Knowledge Is Built, Not Delivered

Constructivism can be used as a learning theory as well as a philosophy of teaching. Its central claim is that learners are not passive recipients of information. Instead, they actively build knowledge by relating new ideas to prior experiences and existing frameworks. As McLeod (2025) describes it, understanding must come from making meaningful connections between prior knowledge and new knowledge.

Constructivism draws from several key theorists. Piaget focused on how learners actively construct knowledge through interaction with their environment. Vygotsky introduced the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) which is the space between what a learner can do independently and what they can do with support. Bruner contributed the concept of the spiral curriculum, or the idea that concepts should be revisited at increasingly complex levels, allowing learners to continually build on what they already know (McLeod, 2025).

Importantly, constructivism does not mean students learn entirely on their own and the theory really recognizes the critical role of structured support. Our main responsibility as educators is to create a collaborative environment where learners are active participants in problem-solving. This means understanding students' preexisting conceptions (what knowledge they bring with them), guiding activities to address the new knowledge (discussions, case studies, and other active learning strategies), and then using scaffolding to learn to apply that new knowledge (McLeod, 2025).

In a graduate nursing program, this means recognizing that your student who has managed septic shock at three in the morning has already built a complex cognitive model of pathophysiology, hemodynamics, and clinical decision-making. Your job is not to replace that model, but to design ways to extend it, challenge it, refine it, and connect it to theoretical frameworks that will make them a better advanced practice clinician.

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Where Andragogy and Constructivism Meet in Your Classroom

You may have noticed that these two frameworks are really two complementary lenses that produce a coherent approach to graduate nursing education. Andragogy tells you who your learners are and what they need from the relationship. Constructivism tells you how learning actually happens once that relationship is established.

Andragogy asks:

• What experience does this learner bring?

• What problem are they trying to solve?

• What internal motivation is driving them here? (Pappas, 2025)

Constructivism asks:

• What do they already know?

• How do we bridge the distance between their current understanding and a more sophisticated one?

• How do we help them actively construct (not passively receive) what comes next? (McLeod, 2025)

Together, they produce an approach to teaching that is collaborative, problem-centered, and cognitively demanding in the best way.

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What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

Start with experience, not content. 

Begin every new concept by asking students to bring what they already know. Ask questions like, "Who remembers [insert topic] from pathophysiology?" or "Have you cared for a patient with [insert condition] as a nurse?" This will help to activate prior knowledge, surface misconceptions, and position you both as co-constructors of understanding.

Design for relevance, not coverage. 

The graduate nursing student, as a learner, is asking “what does this have to do with the nurse practitioner I am becoming?” Your curriculum design should be able to answer that question for every major learning objective. If it cannot, the objective may not belong at the graduate level, or it needs to be reframed.

Teach to the heterogeneity, not despite it. 

The wide variation in clinical experience in a graduate nursing cohort is not a problem to be equalized. It is a pedagogical resource. The nurse with two years of experience and the nurse with twenty are both right about some things and incomplete about others. A well-facilitated discussion between them is worth more than an hour of lecture to either one.

Create productive dissonance. 

Constructivism teaches us that learning requires cognitive dissonance, or that friction that occurs when new information does not fit the existing model. Do not smooth that friction away. Cultivate it carefully. The experienced nurse who has always managed a condition one way, confronted with evidence suggesting a better way, is at a very powerful learning moment of their graduate education. When handled well, that dissonance produces long-lasting conceptual change.

Use reflection as a formal pedagogical tool. 

Graduate nursing students have experience worth analyzing. Structured reflections in written journals, debriefing conversations, and case analyses can transform experience into learning. Use that to your advantage.

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A Note for New Graduate Nursing Faculty

You were probably hired because of your clinical experience or research expertise. No one told you that teaching graduate nurses is a discipline of its own, with its own theory and its own demands. Use the principles of andragogy and constructivism to support your teaching philosophy.  Once you understand them, and begin to use them, it will make you a better teacher and will make your students better clinicians.

Start by asking what your students already know. Then build from there.

References

McLeod, S. (2025). Constructivism as a theory for teaching and learning. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/constructivism.html

Pappas, C. (2025). The adult learning theory: Andragogy of Malcolm Knowles. eLearning Industry. https://elearningindustry.com/the-adult-learning-theory-andragogy-of-malcolm-knowles