Hello again!
Before we get into this week's newsletter about active learning, I wanted to let you know about a new active learning deck that is available. This deck was created with the help and expertise of a member of this community—thank you, Julie Robertson!
Clinical Decision Cards - OB edition!
This deck is a great way to add clinical judgment to any clinical day!
If students have a stable patient, they can choose a card and build a care plan around an unexpected scenario.
Beautifully illustrated and can be used every semester!
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Welcome to the fifth pillar in the series Pillars of Active Learning. If you missed the previous weeks, you can catch up here:
- Re-imagining the lecture as the final frontier
- Challenges of active learning
- Use story
- Incorporate physical objects
- Using micro-lessons
- Entice curiosity
- Incorporate movement
This week, the pillar is Building Community, and we will explore how we can utilize our social nature to create effective active learning.
🏠 What is included in a successful community?
A community is a supportive social group in which members feel a sense of belonging and share a common interest, experience, or goals. Within a higher education learning community, members (who are both students and instructors) engage in collective inquiry and provide each other with academic and social support.
In short, when we socialize with others while learning, the experience becomes deeper and more meaningful.
But building a community takes time, energy, and a bit of know-how. It is not as easy as being in the same room or sitting at the same table—especially in an online learning space. There needs to be a leader, an organizer, and a guide who sparks interaction and also moderates the discussion. Without this, it can quickly turn into a space where no one wants to hang out.
🔑 The key to student engagement
When educators join the Active Learning Strategies for Nurse Educators Facebook group that I facilitate, they are asked about what they find most challenging about active learning. The most common response is student engagement:
- Getting students excited and willing to participate
- Keeping the students active, engaged, and taking ownership of their classroom
- The students are very reluctant to participate
- Finding new ways to engage students
Community building is an essential piece of student engagement. Research shows that when students feel that they belong to their academic community, that they matter to one another, and that they can find emotional, social, and cognitive support for one another, they are able to engage in dialogue and reflection more actively and take ownership and responsibility of their own learning (Baker, 2010; Berry, 2019; Bush et al. 2010; Cowan, 2012; Lohr & Haley, 2018).
🏗️ Frameworks for Community Building in Nursing Education
Below are two helpful frameworks to use when thinking about building community in your course or clinical
Simple
Patty H. Phelps describes the three types of connections to make in a learning environment: Me (connect to instructor), Thee (students connecting to each other), and CC (connection to course content).
For each lesson, be intentional about creating opportunities for each type of connection. Choose learning activities based on creating a specific type of connection.
A more advanced framework
The Community of Inquiry framework (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) is also a useful model for creating a deep, meaningful learning experience through community. It includes three interdependent elements: social, cognitive, and teaching presence.
🤝 Social Presence
This is the ability of the learner to connect within the community, share their personal characteristics, and present themselves as “real” people. When facilitating learning in this presence, the learning activities' only purpose is to build rapport between students and the instructor. These types of activities may feel as if they serve no academic or instructional purpose. Instead, they relieve inhibition and tension around a new classroom environment. When the anxiety of meeting new classmates eases, they are more likely to participate in class and actively engage.
Here are a few ideas to enhance the social element:
💛Make personal connections. Share a bit about yourself. Share a photo from your younger nursing days. Tell the students about your hobbies. Take them on a walking field trip to your office. Self-disclosure can increase our feelings of vulnerability, but it creates a stronger connection with students when they see you as a human.
🧊 Natasha Nurse-Clarke's blog has excellent icebreaker ideas. You can check it out HERE. One of her most popular is “Getting to Know You Bingo.”
👩🏫 Check out the app AskClass from Damon Moon. It uses a simple setup to connect students to one another and build lasting relationships.
🗫 Ask students to learn each other’s names. Provide name cards on the first day and ask students to bring them to the first 3-4 sessions. Include a name-learning game in every class session. If you have a larger class section, ask students to learn the names of their assigned discussion cohorts.
🌳Check out this Community Building Check-In website for more ideas. My favorite is the Blob Tree.
📝NOTE: This element is needed before cognitive and teaching presence can occur. This is why the first day of class is essential to the foundation of an active learning classroom. On the first day, you will have the highest level of engagement. Please do not waste this valuable time on reading the syllabus. Instead, dive into an interesting problem, case study, or community-building project to set the tone for the rest of your course and build a community of learners.
🧙♂️ Teaching Presence
This is the ability of the instructor to design, facilitate, and give direction to the learning. All of your “teaching” work lives in this element. It includes developing learning activities, facilitating an active learning classroom, and evaluating learning outcomes. Here are a few ideas to improve this model:
📏 Set clear expectations - Give students crystal clear guidelines for group work, email communication, testing procedures, late assignments, etc., early and often.
🧪 Actively experiment - Make a commitment to your teaching practice to experiment and try a new activity at least once a semester. Explain to students that you are a life-long learner as well and tell them that you will be evaluating this activity for improvements. They will likely be excited to participate.
🔄 Build content connections outside of class- If you have an academic coach, encourage students to attend the sessions to meet study partners. Connect with other disciplines on projects (i.e., collaborate with the physical therapy instructor for a class on the musculoskeletal system). Hold online space in discussion boards where students can create or connect on a deeper level with the content.
🗃️Organize the content - Disorganized modules, resources and assignments are confusing and take away from the learning. Simplify wherever you can. If you can, send someone with no knowledge of your course the welcome email, LMS login and course syllabus and see if they can navigate through the information. Try to look at the structure of your course as if you have never seen it before.
📚Connection to Course Content
This is the ability of learners to construct meaning from the learning. In short, this is the classroom-to-clinical connection that can be challenging to create. The more relevant the content, the stronger the connections will be. The problem is that students with limited clinical experience often struggle to “see” these connections. Here are a few ideas to help bring them to the surface:
💥 Last word activity - A type of “cool-down” activity for small groups at the end of a class session. The first student will share an idea or concept that they found interesting or relevant to clinical practice. The other participants have one minute to respond, offering further connections and sharing their personal experiences or additional questions. The first student who began has one minute to close the discussion with a reflection or synopsis. This repeats for each member of the group.
⚡Connect-Extend-Confuse framework - For this example, imagine you just finished a curriculum section about acid-base balance. Ask students, either independently, in pairs, or in small groups, to answer the following questions.
- How is this information connected to what you already know?
- How can you use this information to extend into your future nursing practice?
- What is still challenging or confusing about this topic.
These simple questions can create scaffolds for students to build on foundational knowledge, imagine possibilities for knowledge in the future, and investigate concepts they do not understand completely.
Final Thoughts
The puzzle of student engagement is confusing and multi-faceted. But I believe 100% that one piece to cracking the code on student involvement is building community. The social aspects of learning are evident in the literature as well as many of our lived experiences. Humans are social creatures, and learning in a community is just more fun!
Let me know: how do you build community in your classroom or clinical? Do you have a trusted icebreaker? Do you intentionally build community in every session? Do you feel like you have time to do these “non-academic” activities that build rapport between students and yourself?
Stay tuned for next week’s pillar, where we will review setting clear learning expectations and group norms.
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