NURS 617 Week 2 Reflection Paper 1 on the Clinical Educator I Want to Become Example

Reflection Paper 1: The Clinical Instructor Who Made Me Belong, and What It Means for the Educator I Want to Become

Introduction

I remember my clinical instructors more clearly than almost any classroom teacher. One of them made me feel that I belonged on a hospital unit before I believed it myself. Another made me so afraid of making a mistake that I hid one. As I begin the nurse educator track and plan my first practicum hours, I find myself returning to those two people, because they showed me, in opposite ways, how much a clinical educator shapes a student. This reflection examines both experiences, interprets them through recent research on clinical teaching, considers the more difficult evaluative side of the role, and sets out commitments for the kind of educator I want to become.

Two Instructors

The Instructor Who Made Me Belong

In my first medical-surgical rotation, our instructor met each of us at the unit doors on the first morning, introduced us by name to the charge nurse, and told the staff, "These are my students, and they are here to help you and learn from you." She asked each of us what worried us most and checked on that worry during the day. When I froze while giving report, she stood beside me and asked one question that unlocked my thinking: "What is the one thing the next nurse needs to know about this patient?" By the end of the rotation, the nurses on the unit called me by name and asked me to help with their patients. I felt like a nurse in training rather than a visitor.

The Instructor Who Made Me Afraid

Two semesters later, a different instructor corrected students loudly in hallways and at bedsides, sometimes in front of patients. Students learned to avoid asking questions. One afternoon, I realized I had documented a blood pressure on the wrong patient's record. I fixed it quietly without telling anyone, because I was more afraid of the instructor than of the error. Nothing bad happened, but I learned the wrong lesson: that mistakes should be hidden rather than reported. It took me years as a staff nurse to unlearn it.

What Research Says About These Experiences

Belonging and Leadership

My first instructor gave me a sense of belonging, and research suggests that this is not a small thing. In a cross-sectional study of 253 undergraduate nursing students at two nursing schools, Namdari et al. (2026) measured students' perceptions of their clinical instructors' leadership styles and the students' sense of belonging in clinical placements. Belongingness was moderate overall, transactional leadership was the style students saw most often and transformational leadership the least, and the two styles together explained 18% of the variation in students' belonging. The authors recommended preparing clinical instructors in leadership approaches associated with greater belonging. My first instructor's introductions, her interest in our worries and her presence when we struggled sound very much like the individual consideration that transformational leaders show.

Resilience and Support

My second instructor made clinical learning more stressful than it needed to be. A recent scoping review helps explain why that matters. Gilmer et al. (2026) screened 3,039 citations and found four studies on how clinical instructors affect students' resilience. Their themes were that instructors can equip students with coping strategies, that instructors' teaching characteristics matter, that instructors can support students' growing capacity, and that instructors influence the clinical learning environment. The small number of studies limits what can be concluded, but the direction is clear: instructors can make students more resilient or less. Looking back, my second instructor's public corrections taught me to cope by hiding, which is the opposite of resilience in a profession that depends on reporting errors.

The Harder Side of the Role

A tempting conclusion would be that the best clinical educator is simply the kindest one. My own nursing experience tells me that is not true. As a preceptor, I have seen how hard it is to tell a likable new nurse that their practice is not yet safe. Adkins and Aucoin (2022) studied this difficulty in clinical faculty, surveying 327 instructors about the social pressures involved in giving a failing grade. The instructors who admitted passing weak students reported feeling the sting of bad-news conversations more sharply than colleagues who had never done so, and the authors described a direct link between those pressures and passing students who did not meet the criteria. My first instructor was kind, but I now realize she was also honest; she told me plainly when my report was disorganized, and her kindness was what made the honesty bearable.

Self-assessment may help hold kindness and honesty together. Wilgenbusch et al. (2026) adapted a clinical judgment rubric so that students could rate themselves at two points in an academic year and found that students' self-assessed judgment grew significantly, with weaker students also rating themselves lower. If students and instructors use the same criteria, a difficult conversation becomes a shared look at the evidence rather than a verdict delivered from above.

What My First Practicum Planning Has Shown Me

Planning my practicum with my preceptor this week has already tested these ideas. My preceptor teaches a group of eight second-semester students on a medical unit, and when we discussed how I would begin, my first instinct was to describe the skills I could demonstrate. My preceptor asked instead how I would learn what each student was afraid of. The question stopped me, because it was exactly what my first instructor had done on that first morning, and I had not thought to plan it. We agreed that on my first practicum day I will meet each student briefly before the shift, ask what worries them, and note one thing I can do to help.

The conversation also showed me how easily the evaluative side of the role can be postponed. When I asked how students are evaluated on the unit, my preceptor explained that concerns are documented weekly on a shared form and discussed with the student the same week. I realized that this routine, not any personality trait, is what allows my preceptor to be both supportive and honest. A weekly record makes a difficult conversation a matter of evidence rather than impression, and it protects students from the kind of surprise that a final evaluation can bring. I plan to adopt the same routine and to ask my preceptor to review my first two entries with me.

Commitments for My Practicum

These reflections lead to four commitments for my practicum hours this term. First, I will introduce every learner I work with to the staff by name and explain their purpose on the unit, as my first instructor did, so that belonging begins on the first day. Second, I will correct errors privately and frame them as learning, while making clear that errors must be reported, so that learners learn honesty rather than concealment. Third, I will use one clinical judgment rubric with my learners from the first week and ask them to rate themselves before I give my own rating. Fourth, I will document any concern about safe practice the same day, so that honest evaluation does not depend on how I feel about a learner. My preceptor will review my notes on each commitment at the midpoint of the practicum.

A Sense of Calling

My first instructor once told me that she taught because someone had once believed in her. I want to offer that same belief to learners while holding them to the standards their patients deserve. Paul pictured a church growing up together as its members spoke "the truth in love" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Ephesians 4:15), and I can think of no better summary of clinical teaching. Truth without love produced my hidden error. Love without truth would produce nurses who are not ready. The educator I want to become holds both.

Conclusion

Two clinical instructors taught me what belonging and fear feel like to a student. Research on leadership, resilience, evaluation and self-assessment helps me understand why they had such different effects and shows that the qualities I admired in my first instructor can be learned and practiced. In my practicum, I will begin practicing them deliberately, beginning with the first morning I meet my preceptor's students and ask what worries them. I expect to make mistakes in the role, and I intend to treat my own errors the way I hope my learners will treat theirs: as something to report, examine and learn from.

References

Adkins, D. A., & Aucoin, J. W. (2022). Failure to fail: Factors affecting faculty decisions to pass underperforming nursing students in the clinical setting: A quantitative study. Nurse Education in Practice, 58, Article 103259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2021.103259

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

Gilmer, C., Woods, P., & Murdoch, N. H. (2026). How clinical instructors affect resilience in undergraduate nursing students during clinical education: A scoping review. The Journal of Nursing Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20260708-02

Namdari, S., Mousavi, S. K., Kamali, M., & Mollaei, F. (2026). Clinical instructors' leadership styles and their relationship with clinical belongingness among nursing students: A cross-sectional study. BMC Medical Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-09845-w

Wilgenbusch, B. A., Jurevic, V. D., Gilb, K. E., Jeanmougin, C. E., Zehler, A. R., Cole, B. S., & Osborne, J. (2026). Adapting the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric for student self-assessment. The Journal of Nursing Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20260227-05