NURS 8546 Week 7 Faculty Preparation Plan Example

Four Things Each Person Must Be Able to Do: A Faculty Preparation Plan for the Flipped Skills Course, Built on a Capability Floor and Paid Release Time

Student Name

College of Nursing, Walden University

NURS 8546: Strategies for Innovation in Nursing Education

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Four Things Each Person Must Be Able to Do: A Faculty Preparation Plan for the Flipped Skills Course, Built on a Capability Floor and Paid Release Time

The Change and the People

The first-semester skills course will move to a flipped arrangement in stages beginning next fall, after a successful one-unit trial this spring. Learners will watch recorded demonstrations and complete short quizzes before each laboratory session, and laboratory hours will go to coached practice in pairs and to skills checks. The course is taught by eleven people, of whom six are adjuncts paid by the section and five hold full-time appointments. This plan sets out what each of them must be able to do before teaching a flipped section for the first time and how the program will get them there.

Faculty development is more effective when it involves practice and application rather than presentation alone, and when it is linked to the participant's own teaching (Steinert et al., 2016). This plan is designed on that basis. It is not a workshop.

The Capability Floor

Before their first flipped section, each of the eleven faculty must be able to do four things, each stated as an observable action.

1. Run a laboratory session in which learners practice in pairs while the instructor circulates, without a whole-group demonstration at the start.

2. Conduct a skills check against the course checklist and give the learner specific feedback on one error in under two minutes.

3. Read the pre-laboratory quiz report for their section and adjust the first ten minutes of the session to address the most-missed item.

4. Respond to a learner who has not watched the recorded demonstration, following the course's agreed procedure, without repeating the demonstration for the whole group.

The floor is deliberately minimal. Faculty are not required to record demonstrations, since the two early adopters have already recorded all twelve. The floor describes what every person teaching a section must do, not what the most enthusiastic will do.

Preparation Designed Backward From the Floor

Preparation consists of three sessions, each attached to capabilities on the floor. Each session includes practice and ends with an artifact the participant produces.

Session 1: Running practice-based laboratory sessions (capabilities 1 and 4), three hours. Faculty run a fifteen-minute practice segment with colleagues playing learners, including one playing a learner who has not watched the video. Artifact: a written plan for the first fifteen minutes of their own first laboratory session.

Session 2: Skills checks and brief feedback (capability 2), two hours. Faculty watch three short recorded skills performances, each with one planted error, and give feedback to the camera. Colleagues time them and compare the feedback with the checklist. Artifact: a one-page note of feedback phrases for the three most common errors in their assigned skills.

Session 3: Using quiz data (capability 3), one and a half hours. Faculty receive a real quiz report from the spring trial and plan the first ten minutes of a session around it. Artifact: the plan.

Sessions are offered twice, once on a weekday afternoon and once on a Saturday morning, because most adjuncts work clinical shifts during the week. Guskey (2002) argued that teachers' beliefs about a new practice often change after they see it work with their own learners, not before. The plan therefore asks faculty to practice the new routines before forming a final view of them, and saves discussion of the change's merits for after the first term.

Paying for Adjunct Time

Adjunct time is purchased, not assumed. Six and a half hours of preparation for each of six adjuncts, at the college's non-instructional adjunct rate of $45 an hour, costs $1,755. The plan requests this from the faculty development line controlled by the associate dean. Full-time faculty complete preparation within their existing professional development hours. Without paid time, adjuncts would be asked to prepare on their own time for a change they did not choose, which the earlier adoption analysis identified as the main barrier for the late majority.

Readiness Check Before Go-Live

Two weeks before the term, the course coordinator observes each faculty member running a ten-minute segment of a laboratory session with volunteer learners and records whether each capability is shown. Anyone not yet at the floor on a capability receives one-to-one coaching from an early adopter and is observed again before the term starts. If a faculty member is still not at the floor, they are paired with an early adopter for their first three sessions rather than teaching alone. No one is removed from teaching on the basis of the check, because its purpose is to find who needs support, not to sort faculty.

Support After Go-Live

During the first term, faculty meet for thirty minutes every second week to share problems and quiz reports. The early adopters hold open hours in the laboratory during the first four weeks for anyone who wants to observe them. At the end of the term, each faculty member completes a short survey on which capability was hardest to sustain, and the results shape refresher sessions for the second term. Hall and Hord (2015) describe implementation as a process that continues well after launch, as teachers move from managing a new practice to refining it. Support is planned for two terms for that reason.

The plan will itself be judged by a simple measure: the share of faculty who meet all four capabilities at the readiness check on the first attempt. If fewer than eight of the eleven meet the floor on the first observation, the preparation sessions will be revised before the next group of faculty, usually new adjuncts, completes them. The coordinator will also record which capability most often required coaching, since a capability that many experienced teachers struggle with may be poorly defined rather than poorly taught. Every faculty member who completes preparation will be asked, at the end of the first term, whether any of the four capabilities was unnecessary or whether a fifth was missing, and the floor will be revised on that basis.

References

Guskey, T. R. (2002). Professional development and teacher change. Teachers and Teaching, 8(3), 381-391. https://doi.org/10.1080/135406002100000512

Hall, G. E., & Hord, S. M. (2015). Implementing change: Patterns, principles, and potholes (4th ed.). Pearson.

Steinert, Y., Mann, K., Anderson, B., Barnett, B. M., Centeno, A., Naismith, L., Prideaux, D., Spencer, J., Tullo, E., Viggiano, T., Ward, H., & Dolmans, D. (2016). A systematic review of faculty development initiatives designed to enhance teaching effectiveness: A 10-year update: BEME Guide No. 40. Medical Teacher, 38(8), 769-786. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2016.1181851