You can make a valuable human connection with any of your patients, if you just put in the attempt. Their care will be so much more effective and your time at work will be all the more richer. How do you build awareness of the personal attributes of your students (Clark, 2008)?

I try and see my students outside the classroom to get to know them. I need to be aware of their personal attributes and how those can benefit them as nurses to be. Thus, I try to arrange picnics, pizza parties and other outings with my students so that we can all relax and get to know each other better.

How do you make some of the more intricate educational theories more attainable for your students?

I try to bring everything back to a real-life example that they'd encounter in nursing. This way even the most intricate theories seem relevant if you can constantly apply them to something concrete and real.

Learning Experience

I would organize an ethical decision making scenario where I would hire actors to act out a scene where a patient had suffered a stroke and was on a ventilator and blood pressure stabilizer. The act-out would demonstrate how his condition was deteriorating as his family gathered around him. His will have a "do not put on life support" clause. The family considers withdrawing life support while the patient's youngest child says she felt him squeeze her hand. Students would then have to take turns engaging with the actors and role-playing with the actors as they help the family deal with this ethical decision. This activity would be designed to address the gap the students have in ethical decision-making. This activity taught me to think outside the box when it comes to engaging my students (Utley, 2011). This new knowledge would force me to continue to tweak teaching situations so that they better...

Best practices generally support theory based and structured teaching processes, which even creative approaches like these can more fully embody.
Learning Experience #2: Self-Designed Learning

• Describes what you learned from this experience that you will be able to apply in your future teaching practice.

All in all from this experience, I have learned the value of employing emotional intelligence when working with other people in a health care scenario. From the interview that I conducted I truly was able to realize the importance of being able to connect with colleagues and students on a human level and being able to adjust to the unique learning needs that each of them have. People are distinct and it's crucial to treat them as such, particularly in the classroom.

• Provides one specific example of how you would include the new knowledge in a teaching situation.

This new knowledge would force me to try "something else" over and over if my students were having trouble understanding a concept. While some students are visual learners, others are more hands-on learners. If my students were having difficulty understanding a process of the body's intricate physicality, then I better realize now that I have the duty to make those concepts attainable to them, by trying new methods of instruction all the time.