NURS 325 Week 1 Discussion Board Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: Locating My Practice in the Novice-to-Expert Stages

NURS 325 Nursing Concepts, Discussion Board Forum 1

Thread by [Student Name]

The clinical examples and classmates are composites; the textbook and journal articles cited are real.

After eight years on a medical-surgical unit, I assumed I would place myself at the top of Benner's scale. Reading the first chapters made the answer more interesting. Benner (2001) borrows the Dreyfus brothers' account of skill acquisition and traces five levels in nursing. Beginners lean on rules that ignore context; advanced beginners start to spot recurring features; competent nurses plan consciously and set priorities; proficient nurses perceive the situation as a whole and notice what is missing; and experts read the situation intuitively, acting without stepping through rules. The stages describe performance in particular situations, not a title earned by years.

In some situations I function as an expert. Last spring, a woman recovering from colon surgery told me on her second postoperative day that she was "just tired." Her vital signs were within normal limits, but something in her color and the way she held still made me call the surgeon. Her hemoglobin had dropped four points; she was bleeding internally. I could not have named a rule I was following. Benner (2001) describes exactly this kind of perceptual grasp, which experts often struggle to explain.

In other situations I am clearly proficient, recognizing patterns but still working through them deliberately, such as with patients on new oral anticoagulants. And when I was floated to labor and delivery last year, I was an advanced beginner at best, holding tight to every protocol. Drawing together decades of Benner's writing, Chan et al. (2025) propose that the goal of clinical education be readiness for practice, grounded in knowledge of real situations, rather than a list of completed tasks. That fits my own experience: my expertise lives in my unit's patients, not in nursing in general. It also explains why my first week in labor and delivery felt so humbling. None of the patterns I trusted on my own unit applied there, and I had to rely on the charge nurse's guidance and on protocols, exactly as a beginner does. I found that humbling but also reassuring, because it means expertise can be built again in a new place. Expertise is not a rank I hold but a way of seeing that I have earned in particular places with particular patients.

Reply to Kaitlyn

Kaitlyn, you wrote that as a nurse licensed eight months ago you feel "stuck following checklists" and worry that you will never think like your preceptor. Benner (2001) would say that relying on rules is exactly what novices and advanced beginners need to do, because they have not yet met enough patients to know which details deserve their attention. The rules are a scaffold, not a weakness. You can speed up the growth, though. In one hospital program, 152 recently hired and novice nurses spent 90 minutes in two short simulated emergencies designed around the NCSBN judgment model, and afterward they rated themselves highly confident in spotting cues, ranking problems and acting, while observers scored them well across every Lasater domain (Fabry et al., 2026). Simulated deterioration lets you build some of the experience that your unit provides only occasionally. Does your hospital offer simulation for new graduates, or could you ask your educator about it? You might also ask your preceptor to think aloud during a complex admission, since hearing how an experienced nurse weighs what she sees is another way to borrow experience you have not yet had.

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, your post about becoming a clinical instructor and suddenly feeling "like a beginner again" fits Benner's point that the stages describe performance in a situation. Benner (2001) notes that an expert moved into a new domain may function at a lower level until experience accumulates there, and teaching is a new domain even when the clinical content is familiar. In their integrative review, Speck et al. (2025) describe how seasoned clinicians who join a faculty must learn a new world, from academic structures and teaching methods to a personal philosophy of teaching, because their standing at the bedside does not carry over automatically. That might be reassuring: feeling like a novice teacher is not a sign that your clinical expertise was illusory. It is the normal starting point in a new domain. Have you been assigned a mentor in your faculty role? If not, an informal mentor among the newer faculty may be just as valuable, since they remember what the first semester felt like.

References

Benner, P. (2001). From novice to expert: Excellence and power in clinical nursing practice (Commemorative ed.). Prentice Hall.

Chan, G. K., Benner, P., Burns, E. M., Orozco, R., Bowman, M., Escobedo-Wu, E. L. G., & Vallejo, E. (2025). Establishing the "north star" for clinical education to accelerate practice readiness: Implications for leaders, faculty, educators, nursing professional development practitioners, and preceptors. Nursing Administration Quarterly, 49(3), 206-225. https://doi.org/10.1097/NAQ.0000000000000684

Fabry, D., Mann, C. M., Rhinehart, M., Maggio, S. L., Yu, J., & Foltz-Ramos, K. (2026). Use of high-fidelity simulation to improve the clinical judgment of nurses in critical situations. Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing, 57(6), 269-276. https://doi.org/10.3928/00220124-20260325-02

Speck, P. M., Milligan, G. W., Hammond, S. A., Hallman, M. G., & Steadman, L. A. (2025). An integrative literature review for the clinical expert transitioning to a nurse faculty role. Journal of Professional Nursing, 59, 78-87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2025.04.003