NURS 617 Week 1 Written Assignment 1 on the Clinical Nurse Educator Role Example

Written Assignment 1: From Expert Clinician to Clinical Teacher, What Changes When a Nurse Begins to Teach at the Bedside

The Problem of the Expert Who Must Now Teach

Every experienced nurse has watched a skilled colleague try to teach and struggle. A nurse who can place an IV in a dehydrated patient on the first attempt may find it surprisingly hard to explain how the vein feels or why the angle changes. Expertise is often tacit; it lives in hands and habits rather than in words. When that nurse becomes a clinical educator, the work changes. The educator's patients are still the priority, but the educator's task is now to make another person capable of the work, which requires explaining, sequencing, questioning and holding back. This paper argues that the move from expert clinician to clinical educator requires a second kind of knowledge, knowledge of how to teach nursing, and that new educators should build it deliberately rather than assume it will follow from clinical skill.

Clinical Expertise Is Necessary but Not Sufficient

Billings and Halstead (2016) describe the clinical educator's role as more than supervising tasks. The educator selects learning experiences, connects classroom knowledge to patient situations, asks questions that develop clinical reasoning, gives feedback, and evaluates performance fairly. Each of these depends on clinical knowledge, but none is the same as it. Choosing a patient assignment that will stretch a student without overwhelming them, for example, requires judgment about the learner as well as the patient. Asking a question that makes a student think, rather than one that makes them recite, is a teaching skill that can be learned and practiced.

What Research Shows About Novice Clinical Educators

Recent research shows how often new educators rely on what they know clinically rather than on teaching methods. Huber (2026) spent 70 hours observing four novice nurse educators teaching in clinical areas and analyzed their teaching using a model of knowledge for teaching. The educators drew more often on their subject matter knowledge than on pedagogical knowledge, and they tended to underuse teaching methods that develop students' critical thinking and judgment. In other words, the new educators taught by doing and telling, which is what experts naturally do, rather than by questioning and coaching, which is what students need.

New educators themselves recognize gaps. Wan et al. (2026) held focus groups with 29 nurse educators at a large teaching hospital and organized their training needs using the Nursing Professional Development practice model. Among the needs they identified were adapting to teaching environments and analyzing what learners need, the starting point of any teaching plan. The study suggests that new educators want structured development rather than being left to learn the role on their own.

The challenge is not limited to beginners. In a multistate survey of 126 educators in baccalaureate programs, Pence et al. (2026) learned that only a small minority felt fully ready to teach the kind of clinical judgment the redesigned licensure exam now tests, while roughly one educator in three felt largely unready. If experienced faculty feel underprepared to teach judgment, new clinical educators should expect to work deliberately on this skill from the start.

Building Pedagogical Knowledge During the Practicum

The practicum in this course offers a protected setting to build the second kind of knowledge. My plan focuses on three teaching skills, each tied to a practicum objective and observable by my preceptor.

The first is questioning for clinical judgment. Instead of telling a student what to notice about a patient, I will ask a sequence of questions moving from noticing to interpreting to responding, such as "What changed since this morning?", "What could explain it?" and "What would you do first?" My preceptor will observe two of these exchanges each week and comment on whether my questions led the student to reason or simply to guess what I wanted.

The second is holding back. When a student is slow with a procedure that is safe to continue, I will resist taking over and instead offer a cue. This is harder than it sounds for an experienced nurse, and it is exactly the habit Huber (2026) observed missing in novice educators.

The third is planning assignments around learner needs, a skill that experienced nurses rarely practice because their own assignments are made for them. Before each practicum day, I will write one sentence for each student describing what that student needs to practice and choose patients accordingly, following the needs-analysis step identified by Wan et al. (2026). At the end of the practicum, I will compare my early and late plans in my clinical log to see whether my reasoning about learners has developed.

A Calling to Teach

Teaching nursing is a way of multiplying care, because every student taught well will care for thousands of patients the educator will never meet. Paul's instruction to Timothy to entrust what Paul had taught "to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, 2 Timothy 2:2) describes that multiplication. It also implies that teaching is a responsibility to be learned, not only a gift to be assumed.

Conclusion

Clinical expertise is the foundation of clinical teaching, but it is not the same as the ability to teach. Research shows that new clinical educators tend to rely on their clinical knowledge and underuse teaching methods that develop judgment, that they recognize their own training needs, and that even experienced educators feel underprepared to teach clinical judgment. A deliberate practicum plan focused on questioning, holding back and planning for learners is a practical way to begin building the second kind of knowledge the educator role requires.

References

Billings, D. M., & Halstead, J. A. (2016). Teaching in nursing: A guide for faculty (5th ed.). Elsevier.

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Huber, S. W. (2026). Pedagogical and subject matter knowledge of novice clinical nurse educators: An ethnographic investigation. Nursing Education Perspectives. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000001554

Pence, P. L., Brodersen, L. D., Chung, S. Y., Moran, V., & Kim, M. J. (2026). Study of nurse educators' preparedness to teach and assess clinical judgment in alignment with the Next-Generation NCLEX. Nurse Educator, 51(1), E78-E83. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000002024

Wan, F. Y., Cao, Q. L., Fan, H. M., Lao, Y. W., Li, S. J., Chen, T., & Wu, L. L. (2026). Competency development training needs of novice nurse educators: A qualitative study guided by the Nursing Professional Development model. Nurse Education Today, 167, Article 107242. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nedt.2026.107242