April 12, 2022, by hayleychipman

The School’s interns teach our students!

Welcome to our third blog dedicated to our teaching experiences.

Teaching after only being students for two years? Yes, you read that correctly! Jumping from being a student to a teacher was a weird but wonderful transition. It was something which we knew we were going to be doing (as it’s part of the job description) but we didn’t acknowledge the difference in roles until we fully stepped into it ourselves.

We have mainly been facilitating in clinical skills sessions with the BSc first year Undergraduate and Graduate Entry Nursing (GEN) students. We have taught across all three fields of the nursing course which includes mental health, adult and child nursing. These clinical skills sessions give students the opportunity to take what they have learnt from theory sessions and practice the skills in a practical context for placement. Some topics we have been able to teach students include the A-E assessment, breaking down the components and understanding how to properly document and escalate if necessary. We have also taught medicines management, stoma care and MH assessments in these sessions too.

We have been learning about the principles and theory behind why we educate others and why we teach the way we do. However, even with learning the theory, nothing quite prepares you for when you are stood at the front of the room facing all the students and suddenly get the realisation that you are there to help them learn and not the other way round. We kept saying to each other that we were supposed to be sat with the students and not stood at the front. However, since moving past the imposter syndrome feeling (even though we still sometimes feel this from time to time), we began to reflect on the teaching we experienced as students and tried to understand how we could incorporate it into our own teaching.

Working with various staff members also helped us with our teaching styles as we have been able to observe their teaching methods and approaches and reflect on what we would choose to do/change. The staff were fully supportive enabling us to teach our own group of students and allowing us the space to grow in our teaching approaches and philosophies. The development of our teaching philosophy has been a core part of our teaching, learning and development programme. This programme has offered us the chance to use our teaching experiences to obtain a teaching qualification as we’re hoping to be Associate Fellows of the Higher Education Academy. When we heard about this we thought it sounded very fancy!

Overall, teaching the students has been a rewarding and meaningful experience. We know that what they are learning will benefit them for future practice and it has been brilliant to be part of their learning process.

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on Google+
• Share on LinkedIn