NURS 764 Week 1 Discussion Board Forum 1 Example

Discussion Board Forum 1: A Learning Theory for My Teaching Topic

NURS 764 Learning Theories and Teaching Methods for Nurse Educators, Discussion Board Forum 1

Thread by [Student Name]

The course, the students and the classmate are composites; the theories, textbook and journal articles cited are real.

My topic for the teaching project is the golden minute, the first sixty seconds after birth in which a newborn who is not breathing should be dried, stimulated and, if still apneic, ventilated with a bag and mask. Guidelines estimate that about one in ten newborns needs some help to begin breathing (Aziz et al., 2020), so every maternal-newborn nurse will face this moment. My junior BSN students practice the steps on a manikin and pass the checklist. Yet when a limp baby is delivered on the unit, I have watched those same students step back from the warmer and wait for someone else to move.

Priyanti et al. (2026) help explain what I see. In interviews with twenty preregistration nursing students who had witnessed neonatal resuscitation in tertiary units, the authors found five themes, including feeling overwhelmed, uncertainty about their role, emotional burden that lingered after the event and a gap between simulation and the real situation. The students knew steps but did not know where to stand or what was expected of them, and few had been debriefed afterward. That is a problem of experience and meaning, not of missing content, which points me toward an experiential theory rather than another lecture.

Kolb's experiential learning theory treats learning as a loop with four stages: something is experienced directly, the learner steps back to reflect on it, ideas are formed to explain it, and those ideas are then tried out in action (Kolb, 2015). My current teaching starts with the abstract stage, a slide of the algorithm, and ends there. Under Kolb, I would reverse the order: students first watch a short recorded simulation of a limp newborn, then reflect in a guided debriefing on what they noticed and felt, then review the algorithm as an explanation of what they saw, and finally run the scenario themselves in assigned roles. Billings and Halstead (2016) describe how theory should drive the choice of strategy, and here it changes the order of the class.

The NLN Jeffries Simulation Theory supplies the design detail. Jeffries et al. (2015) describe a simulation experience shaped by context, background, design, the facilitator and the participant, and they stress an environment that is experiential, interactive, collaborative and learner centered, with trust established before the scenario begins. Two of Priyanti's themes, role uncertainty and unspoken emotional burden, map directly onto the theory's design and facilitator elements. So my scenarios will give each student a named role with a card describing it, and every run will end with a debriefing that asks how it felt before it asks what went wrong.

A student who has stood at the warmer in a named role, and talked about it afterward, has a place to stand when the real baby arrives. The outcomes I will measure follow the theory's levels: participant outcomes first, such as time to first ventilation in simulation and confidence, with patient outcomes left to clinical partners.

Reply to Hannah

Hannah, your plan to use Knowles's adult learning principles for new graduate orientation on insulin pumps fits learners who are self-directed and want immediate application. I wonder whether self-efficacy theory could add a measurable piece. Bandura (1977) argued that people's belief in their ability to perform a task predicts whether they attempt it and persist, and he identified four sources of that belief: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion and physiological states. New graduates often hesitate with pumps because a single error feels dangerous, which is a self-efficacy problem as much as a knowledge one. Building in a supervised first pump setup, a recorded example from a peer and a brief pre and post confidence rating would let you show whether orientation changed both skill and belief. Which of the four sources do you think your orientation currently neglects?

References

Aziz, K., Lee, H. C., Escobedo, M. B., Hoover, A. V., Kamath-Rayne, B. D., Kapadia, V. S., Magid, D. J., Niermeyer, S., Schmölzer, G. M., Szyld, E., Weiner, G. M., Wyckoff, M. H., Yamada, N. K., & Zaichkin, J. (2020). Part 5: Neonatal resuscitation: 2020 American Heart Association guidelines for cardiopulmonary resuscitation and emergency cardiovascular care. Circulation, 142(16 Suppl. 2), S524-S550. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000902

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.84.2.191

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

Jeffries, P. R., Rodgers, B., & Adamson, K. (2015). NLN Jeffries simulation theory: Brief narrative description. Nursing Education Perspectives, 36(5), 292-293. https://doi.org/10.5480/1536-5026-36.5.292

Kolb, D. A. (2015). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development (2nd ed.). Pearson Education.

Priyanti, R. P., Hidayah, N., Asri, A., Dianita, E. M., Lin, S. C., & Tonapa, S. I. (2026). The lived experience of nursing students witnessing neonatal resuscitation in Indonesia: A phenomenological study. Journal of Hospice & Palliative Nursing. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1097/NJH.0000000000001255