Teaching outside of your "specialty"

CraigB-RN, MSN, RN · Jul 10, 2015

Unless you were hired to specifically teach a specialty area, as nurse faculty, your a generalist and nursing IS your specialty area. That's one of the hidden things to being faculty, the time you spend researching and preparing so you look like it's your specialty area. It's a lot harder to pull of if it's a last minute lecture. But in general, if you've got 10 hours before a 1 hour lecture, you've got plenty of time to become an expert. :)

walkingdeadhead · Jul 10, 2015

Thanks for your reply! I definitely am doing a lot of reading and research. I think my fear is not having the experience to back up what I'm teaching.

CraigB-RN, MSN, RN · Jul 10, 2015

welcome to teaching. That's one of the parts of the job that people don't realize. I made the assumption that you are teaching initial nursing candidates and not APRN which may have been an error on my part. With ADN and BSN students, remember your not trying to make them experts, your giving them didactic information for them to build a nursing practice on.

If it's an area you don't have a lot of experience in, and you've got the time and flexibility, you can use that as a teaching tool, learn together, and set an example of how to build on what you know, to move into a new area. I teach clinical reasoning in an interproffesional education manor. I have RN's, PA Students and Med Students. They are given scenario's and they have to figure it out together. My role as a mediator is to use my experience to help them find and utilize the evidence to come up with an integrated plan. I know very little about OB, but can show them how to look it up and figure it out.

Lecture might be harder, but remember, to think about is as a "basic" RN, not as if your trying to make them OB nurses, or Cardiac Rehab nurses or whatever.

I think if you ask around and people answer you honestly, you'll find that your not the only one who had this question. :)

There are many days where I felt like an imposter.