April 2010 Articles
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A Day in My Life as a Clinical Nursing Instructor by Dilyss Gallyot
Your Five Minutes Today - for the IEA! by Karin Evans
What Motivates Us? by Jason Ertz
I Heart My Union: Newbie on the RA Floor by Karin Evans
A Day in My Life as a Clinical Nursing Instructor by Dilyss Gallyot
The alarm goes off at 4:30am. I am questioning if God is awake yet as I attempt to shut it off. My
second thought is, "Let's have a good day so that the students have a good experience along with
the patients." I am out the door at 5:10 and at the hospital at 5:30. The night shift is happy to see me—a
signal that their shift is ending. A comfort is seeing that three out of the five night shift nurses are
graduates from COD.
My first task is to review a "shift report" on each patient with their history and all medications. I keep in mind that I have first year nursing students: too many medications and a complicated history can send them into a panic. As I complete my list of ten suitable patients who are up to having student nurses, I see the sleepy starched white uniforms walking down the hall. Backpacks on and Starbucks in hand, they are ready for their assignments.
We find a small, well-lit conference room and glean any data that appear to be vital from our sheets. The students look up each medication that they are giving: the average for our 9am medications is about seven medications per patient. Quick math: approximately 70 medications will need to be given out between 8:30 and 9am. I have my running shoes on and have to organize 10 students. As I give each student a time to meet me to pass medications, I have to take a deep breath. The countdown to 8:30 begins and I am ready. As the hour passes, the students finish the required "three checks for each medication."
Next they assist the patients with morning care and basic hygiene needs. The pace is a little slower. Between 10am and 11:30 we have to give several injections, and the students get the pep talk about building confidence. "No shaking" is our motto. The students take a deep breath and follow me. I talk with the patients and thank them for allowing us to care for them. The injections go relatively smoothly and my role as the primary distractant is complete. We start to document the assessments (observations) of each patient and the responses to treatment. The students are growing in their level of confidence and the patients like to report to me that "this is a good one and you should give him/her an A." I thank them for their input.
Some students are still rushing around, while others have found a place to finish their charting. I attempt to ask questions about each patient's treatment and how that relates to their medical diagnosis. I notice that some students no longer want to make eye contact, but say, "I'll get back to you." They huddle together to figure out the "correct" answers. One individual is usually sent out of a conference room to offer an answer and clarify what I am really asking.
As we reach the magic hour of 3pm, post-conference begins, and the students share highs and lows as well as insights about what they observed the real nurses doing. I reinforce that all experiences can give us an opportunity to learn. I hope that I was able to model compassion in the midst of all of our activities. At 3:50pm I am in my car, thinking about starting this process again with a new group the next day. Each day I am surprised and amazed at the energy and genuineness in the clinical setting. It is a very good day.
Your Five Minutes Today - for the IEA! by Karin Evans
Try this. Really, it will only take you five minutes. Go to the IEA link for
Contacting Your Legislators. See those Take
Action buttons? Click one. You will see how easy it is to contact your
legislators—and the talking points are already written for you. Just click on the red arrows to
select the points you want use. Then edit them, add your own comments, make any changes you like. All
you need to know to get started is your zip code.
Here's something else you can do in five minutes: Read an article or news release on the web site to get up to date on a current issue. This week's Capitol Report is a good place to start—you'll find it front and center on the IEA home page.
Got a little more time? Make an appointment to see your representative during Back Home Lobby Days. Once again, IEA has all the contact information and talking points you need.
IEA's web site is constantly updated with information we can use to make a difference. Even if you've only got five minutes, you can pitch in!
What Motivates Us? by Jason Ertz
I have been stewing on the idea that educational institutions provide "customers" with a "product"
and how this idea affects learning relationships or student motivation. Fitting the business model
over an educational institution seems counterintuitive. First, our institutions do not hand over any
"thing" to anyone. The relationship between a student and the educational institution is not at all
like buying a grill, a hamburger, or a flat screen from a retailer. The relationship is not even like
many service businesses. A customer brings a car to the auto mechanic and passively waits for it to
be fixed. The same goes for the tax preparer, or the internet service provider. The customer doesn't
need to know how it works or why, only that it does work or it has been done well.
In my opinion, all of this is incredibly different from what goes on in an educational institution. Standards are set by experts and practitioners as to what a student should know when they earn a degree. Students are not given a degree. Learning seems to be more of a relationship or collaboration rather than a product. Also, a lot of the talk about how much money a person earns with an associates or bachelors degree versus someone with a high school diploma seems to be focused on the degree itself, not what a degree symbolizes. The degree seems to be the goal, or "product," not the learning opportunity, quality of learning, or the very act of learning itself.
This thought exercise encouraged me to look more into motivation. Education is a service providing the means and opportunity to learn, but the student (customer) must bring their own motivation, self-discipline and desire. The student must be actively engaged in the process of learning, or else success will be minimal at best, no matter what improvements the institution may make to pedagogy, curriculum, or support services. I am sure the question of how to motivate college students has always been asked. Do students have too many things going on in their lives to be self-motivated to learn; are they conditioned to need extrinsic motivating goals?
Maybe the question is better asked like this: How do we allow students to motivate themselves? I came to this idea from a new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel H. Pink. Though it is not an academic book, it serves as a spring board for investigating the topic further. I do recommend it.
Pink discusses a motivation style that goes beyond some of the conventional theories of motivation like rewards and punishments. He calls it Motivation 3.0. He discusses various experiments conducted by psychologists like Edward Deci, Richard Ryan, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that illustrate how Motivation 3.0, based on the ingredients of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, could be a better way to motivate people.
Motivation 3.0 fosters behavior that "concerns itself less with the external rewards an activity brings and more with the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself" (206). Ideas like intrinsic motivation, self-determination theory, and "flow" all help Pink illustrate his Motivation 3.0 theory for the 21st century. Even though the book is geared toward running organizations, which in itself is interesting, I felt it had some potential in a learning relationship between teacher and student. Pink even has a section of the book for educators.
I am on a journey to understand this issue better, looking to learn more from my colleagues here at COD who might be experts on the subject, or just interested in it as I am. Is Motivation 3.0 a feasible idea in an educational setting? Has anyone attempted it? Would the behavior be better introduced in a K-12 setting? For me, this question has resulted in many more questions to explore, study, and understand. Isn't that the joy of learning? I would love to continue a discussion on this—how about a summer book discussion group? Please let me know if you're interested!
I Heart My Union: Newbie on the RA Floor by Karin Evans
I ran for IEA delegate for a combination of selfish and unselfish reasons. I am deeply grateful
for our faculty association and for the larger union we're part of—especially since I've been
in a full-time
faculty job at a college where there was no union. (Believe me, those dues are worth every
penny.) So I was glad for the chance to give something back to the union, but I was also ready for a
new experience: please, I thought - get me out of my rut.
So last month I found myself in one of the largest hotel ballrooms I have ever seen, seated in the largest meeting I have ever attended. It's weird at first. To manage such a large gathering, a great deal of ritualized behavior is necessary. I sat next to Jackie McGrath who frequently interpreted strange parliamentary customs for me. I was surprised at how quickly I caught on to the discussions, debates, proposals, amendments, and so on—but it makes sense: everyone there is a teacher. They are all articulate, they can all speak in front of a group, they understand that they have to give reasons and evidence for their positions.
If I had had any doubts about the value of IEA's activities, they were put to rest by what I saw of the work of the professional staff. For example, one of the most interesting reports we heard was from our brand new Executive Director, who stepped into her role and straight into negotiations on the Race To The Top (RTTT) legislation. RTTT is the Obama administration's competitive process to bring federal funding to statewide school systems. With Illinois's budget in crisis, lawmakers were eager to get us into the running, and fortunately, IEA was able to work closely with them to make Illinois's legislation both competitive and effective for teachers and schools.
Another amazing event was IEA President Ken Swanson's heart-to-heart talk with the gubernatorial candidates, in front of thousands of teachers who hung on their every word and witnessed every promise they made. Both candidates pledged to fund the pension plans. But they diverged significantly on how they plan to provide operating money for schools in the future. Governor Quinn favors income tax increases in the short run as well as the long run, and he favors changes that will make education spending more equitable across districts. Senator Brady stated that he would not sign a bill increasing the state income tax; he believes that by bringing private sector investment back to Illinois, we will be able to balance our budget and fund our school districts.
These are a few tastes of the Regional Assembly. It was quite a buffet, all in all (and the food wasn't bad either!!). I highly recommend being a delegate as a great learning experience as well as the opportunity to participate in an enormous democratically run organization. But you might have to beat me in the election if you want to go!
