A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

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Teaching in the disciplines
Across the wide range of healthcare settings, nurses and midwives assess individual
clients’ needs in order to identify appropriate and effective care. They engage in clinical
reasoning founded on theoretical knowledge and experience of clinical practice. Within
resource constraints, they plan, coordinate, deliver and evaluate care that should be
informed by the best available evidence. These core professional activities dictate most
of the content of nursing and midwifery curricula, although there is scope for a variety
of learning, teaching and assessment strategies to achieve these outcomes.
Healthcare professionals need to spend much of their time listening, informing and
negotiating, all of which must be conducted sensitively and respectfully. Good
communication skills are essential, along with attention to diversity and ethics. The
complex needs of clients are best met through effective interprofessional collaboration,
which requires knowledge of professional roles and responsibilities in addition to good
communication. Students should learn to practise in a range of settings, learn to be
effective members of multidisciplinary teams and learn to educate and support relatives
or volunteers.
Interrogating practice
• In light of the knowledge, skills and attitudes desired in the healthcare
professions, which approaches to learning, teaching and assessment are
likely to be most effective?
• How does your programme seek to help students achieve the required
knowledge, skills and attitudes?
LEARNING, TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT
Nursing and midwifery, in common with medicine, dentistry and the allied health
professions, are practice-based disciplines. ‘Hands-on’ practical skills combined with
clinical judgement based on professional experience, underpinning theory and the best
available evidence are key to professional competence. This shapes learning, teaching
and assessment, and a number of key issues are examined below.
Developing practical skills and professional judgement
In a spiral curriculum (Bruner, 1966), higher-level skills and more complex professional
judgements are gradually mastered through repeated experiences of a variety of episodes
of care. Experiential learning in clinical or simulated environments should be designed
and supported so that the full learning cycle is completed: concrete experience,
observations and reflections, formation of abstract concepts and generalisations, then
testing implications of concepts in new situations (Kolb, 1984).