Inspirational Teaching

Wynne R. Waugaman, CRNA, Ph.D.

Associate Professor and Interim Chair
Department of Nursing
University of Southern California
 What is teaching?

The intentional act of creating

conditions that can help students
learn a great deal or keep them from
learning at all!
 Teacher’s Roles
• Mentor • Philosopher
• Listener • Assessor
• Detective • Helper
• Scholar • Encourager
• Liberator • Coach
• Exciter • Counselor
• Community-builder • Advisor
• Explorer • Learner
• Facilitator • Humorist
Students who learn are the finest
fruit of teachers who teach.
 What inspired you to become a
teacher?

• I wanted to emulate a mentor/teacher whom

I admired!
• I could do a better job than those who
taught me!
• Other reasons????
 Grad Student Teaching Interest
• Teaching is not only
for the student; the
teacher benefits from
the student’s questions
and perspectives.
• Teaching helps to
propagate the field!
Grad Student Teaching Interest
• I will never forget how
tough it is to be a
student and will carry
these memories into
my teaching
• The best way to know
something is to be able
to teach it.
• Teaching motivates
one to keep updated.
 Grad Student Teaching Interest
• Being a student has
made me realize once
again how much fun
and how stimulating
learning can be.
• I would like to give
back to the profession.
Grad Student Teaching Interest

• Teaching helps to
carry on the tradition
of the educational
process I experienced
here at USC.
 The Power of Mentors

• To awaken a truth within us.

• Mentoring is a mutuality between the
“right” student and the “right” teacher.
 “Mentors and apprentices are
partners in an ancient human
dance, and one of teaching’s
great rewards is the daily chance
it gives us to get back on the
dance floor.”
P.J. Palmer (1998). The courage to teach, p. 24.
We must enter, not evade, the
tangles of teaching!
 Sources of the Tangles of
Teaching
• The subjects comprising nursing practice
are as large and complex as life, so our
knowledge of them is always flawed and
partial.
• The students we teach are larger than life
and even more complex requiring a
pedagogical style fusing Freud and King
Solomon.
 Sources of the Tangles of
Teaching

• We teach who we are!

– For better or worse, teaching emerges from our
inner self.
– Teaching holds a mirror to the soul!
– Knowing oneself is as crucial to good teaching
as knowing our students and our subject matter.
 Teaching can be a fearful
enterprise!
• Fear of students, fear of faculty colleagues,
and fear of administrators.
• Academe offers many ways to protect
ourselves from the live encounter (a
sequence of fears which begins in the fear
of diversity).
– Faculty can hide behind their podiums, their
credentials, their power, and their academic
specialties!
We fear change!
 Culture of Disconnection
• Undermines teaching and makes learning be
driven partly by fear.
• Our Western commitment to think in
polarities is a thought form that elevates
disconnection into an intellectual virtue.
 The Student from Hell!
Disconnection occurs when the
student’s fear shuts down the capacity
for connectedness.
Describe a student who fits this
description!
The Results of Disconnection
 Broken Paradoxes of Education
• We separate theory from practice. Result:
theories that have little to do with life and
practice that is uninformed by
understanding.
• We separate teaching from learning.
Result: teachers who talk but do not listen
and students who listen but do not talk.
Good teaching cannot be reduced
to technique; good teaching
comes from the identity and
integrity of the teacher.
P.J. Palmer (1998). The courage to teach, p. 10.
 The Good News
• We no longer need suffer the boredom felt
when teaching is approached as a question
of “how to do it.”
• We no longer have to suffer the pain of
having our particular teaching style forced
into the current teaching method du jour
(e.g. Web courses, Power Point
Presentations, etc.)
 The Bad News
• If we want to grow as teachers, we must
risk doing something alien to the academic
culture: we must talk to each other about
our “self”, our “identity,” our “inner lives.”
• We must experiment, stay open to new ideas
rather than protect ourselves behind the old
and familiar.
 Teaching Qualities Valued
• Openness and genuine
caring for all.
• Unequivocal fairness.
• One who is not afraid
to say when they do
not know the answer.
• Organized and
prepared.
• Subject expert.
Teaching Qualities Valued
• Consistency and
patience.
• The ability to trust the
student and give up
control.
• Approachability.
• Open to discussion.
• Sense of humor.
 Teaching Qualities Valued
• Enthusiasm and joy
for the subject matter.
• Take an extremely
difficult concept and
simplify it with
examples, drawings,
etc.
• Always questioning
authority should not
intimidate.
Teaching Qualities Valued
• Willing to teach
clinically without
giving the student the
sense of burden of
“having a student.”
• Faculty are only as
good as the “weakest
link.” Teach us to be
the best.
Characteristics of Good Teachers
• A strong sense of personal identity infuses
their work.
– Encouragement
– Enthusiasm
– Confidence
– Good listener
– Sharing personal experiences, especially
clinical examples
 Incorporating “real-life”
experiences into academic
learning
• Clinical practicum experiences
• Professional/organizational experiences
• Community experiences
• Others??
Characteristics of Good Teachers
• Possess a capacity for connectedness: they
weave a complex web of connections
among themselves, their subject, and their
students enabling the students to weave
their own fabric from what they’ve
received.
• Keep their hearts open to their students even
in difficult times.
Teaching that Inspires/Motivates
• Positive reinforcement
builds confidence.
• The enthusiasm of the
instructor and the
applicability of
information.
Teaching that Inspires/Motivates
• Sharing their own
personal experiences
during their time as a
RN or student which
reveals humanism.
• Seeing our alumni as
teachers and knowing
they are still thirsting
for professional
knowledge.
 Teaching that Inspires/Motivates
• When the clinical
instructor demands
student responsibility
and/or accountability
in the clinical setting.
• Involving the class in
discussion and
problem solving
 “Sex up” Your Teaching
• Encourage creativity
• Encourage the search for more than one
right answer
• Ask questions that solicit plural answers
• Encourage dialogue
• Ask “what if” questions
• Get in touch with “the art of nursing”
 Artist vs. Judge

Encourage students to have their

“artist” do its job before bringing in
their “judge.”
 “Sex up” Your Teaching
• Encourage creativity
• Encourage the search for more than one
right answer
• Ask questions that solicit plural answers
• Encourage dialogue
• Ask “what if” questions
• Get in touch with “the art of nursing”
“If you give students conflicting
interpretations, they get to use
their big, bright brains…Have
faith in the students’ ability to
think…”
W. Bateman, (1990), Open to question: The art of
teaching and learning by inquiry, p.10.
 “Sex up” Your Teaching
• Encourage creativity
• Encourage the search for more than one
right answer
• Ask questions that solicit plural answers
• Encourage dialogue
• Ask “what if” questions
• Get in touch with “the art of nursing”
 Vignettes: Clinical or didactic
experiences where a teacher had
a significant impact upon you as
the student.
They can be negative or positive.
 Inspirational teaching requires
the teacher to bring his/her gifts
to the classroom or clinical
setting!
 A Teacher’s Gifts
• A capacity to combine structure with
flexibility in both planning and leading each
class or clinical experience.
• A thorough knowledge of the material and a
commitment to facilitating mastery among
students.
 A Teacher’s Gifts
• Make curricular decisions that are guided
by the goal of student mastery and
achievement rather than an effort to cover
the content.
• A desire to help students build a bridge
between the academic text and their own
lives by providing a strategic approach.
 A Teacher’s Gifts
• Set the tone which explicitly and self-
consciously stresses values of unanxious
expectation (“I won’t threaten you but I
expect much of you.”), of trust (unless
abused), and of decency (the values of
fairness, generosity and tolerance).
 A Teacher’s Gifts
• An ability to personalize teaching and
learning to the maximum it is feasible.
• A respect for my students’ stories that is no
more or less than my respect for the
scholarly readings I assign them.
 A Teacher’s Gifts
• An aptitude for asking good questions and
listening carefully to my students’
responses, not only to what they say, but
also to what they leave unsaid.
• An ability to see my students’ lives more
clearly than they see themselves, a capacity
to help them look beyond the surface and
see themselves more deeply.
 A Teacher’s Gifts
• The ability to coach to provoke student self-
learning.
• A willingness to take risks, especially the
risk of inviting open dialogue, though
where it may take us is unknown.
 Giving Back to the Profession
• Try to be the kind of
teacher who is
knowledgeable,
enthusiastic, confident,
prepared, and
collegial.
• Serving as a motivated
clinical preceptor or
instructor.
Giving Back to the Profession
• Volunteer my services
in the clinical or
didactic area,
wherever I am needed.
• Attempting to be the
best educator and thus
leave a lasting
impression on the
students.
 Giving Back to the Profession
• Carry on the tradition
of advanced students
giving topical reviews
on the weekends, offer
a workshop to help
better prepare students
for clinical.
• Be a professional role
model.
Giving Back to the Profession
• Be actively involved
in the professional
organization to ensure
the future is bright for
my peers and
successors.
• Sponsor students to
professional events.
• Share knowledge with
others.
“One who learns in order to teach will
be granted the opportunity both to
learn and teach. One who learns in
order to do will be granted not only the
opportunity to learn and teach, but also
the opportunity to do and be fulfilled.”
Rabbi Ishmael, Pirke Avot, IV:6