Creating a Professional Development Plan

Assessment 4 Context

Nurse Educators As Leaders and Scholars

Learning never stops for the nurse educator; lifelong learning is necessary to stay current both

in the practice world and in education. Nurse educators need to have a plan for their own

continued professional development that will help them maintain and advance their skills both

as nurses and as educators. Part of professional development is also to be a reflective teacher,

to continue to do as Zorn advises us: to pause and reflect on who we are as people and as

educators.

The nursing profession needs nurse educators to educate more nurses, to introduce and

educate about evidence-based practice changes, and more than ever to join with our colleagues

in other health care disciplines to exchange ideas and engage in interdisciplinary learning. As

educators, we must continue to learn, be certified, and function at a high level to ensure

continued growth for the nursing profession. The Institute of Medicine has charged nurses to be

leaders in health care change, and that requires educators to be at the forefront of those

changes.

Nurse Educators As Leaders

Nurse educators are automatically leaders. The leadership role comes from being responsible

for changing behaviors through education. This may be academically by educating future nurses

and advance practice nurses. It may be clinically by educating staff on evidence-based practice

changes and patients on better health practices. It may be in the community setting, providing

knowledge on disease prevention and healthy lifestyles. Regardless of the setting, the

leadership role is part of the nurse educator designation.

An important aspect of the leadership role is the style of leadership. Some leadership styles

come more naturally to us as individuals because they fit our personality and our background;

sometimes, though, we have to develop a style that is a better fit for the setting that we are

working in. In this unit, we will look at various leadership styles and consider what the most

effective style is for each of as individuals. We are also going to look at the nurse educator as

part of the interdisciplinary team that provides education to other health providers. Increasingly,

this aspect of the educator role is becoming more prominent. As nurse educators we have to be

prepared to work across disciplines and in a variety of settings.

Nurse Educators As Scholars

An expectation for nurse educators is that they are both teachers and scholars. To be a scholar

means that the educator is both teaching others in the discipline of nursing and also adding to

the advancement of the profession. There are many ways that the nurse educator can be a

scholar. Sometimes this is thought of as conducting research and publishing articles and books

on research and evidence-based practice. This is certainly one major way to be a scholar, but

there are many other ways as well.

The Boyer Model

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In nursing, a widely used model for determining scholarship is the Boyer model. This model

classifies scholarship activities in the following four main areas:

1. Discovery, where new and unique knowledge is generated; this would include research.

2. Teaching, where the teacher creatively engages in partnerships with learners to

facilitate expanding knowledge.

3. Application, where the emphasis is on the use of new knowledge in solving society's

problems. An example of this aspect of scholarship is initiatives to introduce evidencebased practice changes.

4. Integration, where new relationships among disciplines are discovered. An example

would be efforts to engage in interdisciplinary education initiatives.