NURS 767 Week 1 Written Assignment 1 and Practicum Goals and Objectives Example

From Expert Clinician to Novice Educator: A Self-Assessment Against the NLN Core Competencies and Goals for a Maternal-Newborn Teaching Practicum

Starting Point

I have worked for eleven years as a labor and delivery nurse, the last four as a charge nurse who orients new graduates to the unit. I have precepted many nurses, but I have never taught a class, written an exam item or evaluated a student against a course objective. My practicum placement is a junior-year maternal-newborn course in a BSN program at a regional university, under a preceptor who has taught the course for nine years. The course has a classroom component, a simulation lab and clinical days on a postpartum and newborn nursery unit, so the practicum will put me in all three settings.

Oermann et al. (2018) describe teaching in nursing as a role with its own body of knowledge, not an extension of clinical practice. A nurse who can manage a postpartum hemorrhage at the bedside knows what students must eventually be able to do, but knowing how to help a novice reach that point, and how to judge whether they have, is a different expertise. This paper assesses where I stand against that second expertise and sets goals for the practicum.

Assessing Myself Against the NLN Competencies

The NLN competency statements for academic nurse educators describe eight areas of practice that together define the academic nurse educator's role (Halstead, 2019). I rated myself on each as a strength, partly ready or a gap, and named the evidence for each rating.

Two strengths stand out. I am comfortable helping new nurses become part of a professional culture, and I know the clinical content of a maternal-newborn course in depth. My unit's quantitative blood loss project also gave me experience leading a change and teaching staff a new practice. The gaps are concentrated where academic work differs most from clinical work: evaluation, curriculum, quality improvement of one's own teaching and the academic environment itself.

What the Research on Novice Educators Suggests

My self-assessment matches what the literature describes. Speck et al. (2025) reviewed 36 articles and other sources on the transition from expert clinician to novice faculty and organized what new faculty must learn into five categories: an introduction to academia, pedagogical approaches, academic freedom, the complexity of academic work and a personal teaching philosophy. Most of my gaps fall into the first, second and fourth of those categories. The review also notes that clinical expertise does not translate directly into academic appointments, which is a fair description of my situation: my title on the unit will mean little in a faculty meeting.

Mentoring is the most consistent support the literature identifies, but its form matters. Tufano and Summers (2025) interviewed nurse educators about formal and informal mentoring and found that formal institutional mentoring was often absent, while informal mentoring was what actually eased their transition and helped them stay in academia. Brennan et al. (2026) describe a competency-based onboarding program for new faculty at an urban school of nursing, combining asynchronous modules, mentorship and assessments aligned with competency-based education; although the sample was small, participants' teaching confidence trended upward, with modest gains in belonging and mentor support. For my practicum, these findings suggest that I should treat my preceptor as a mentor and not only as a supervisor, and that I should ask for regular, structured conversations about the academic side of the role as well as feedback on my teaching.

Doctoral preparation may help. Sebach (2021) surveyed 160 full-time nurse educators and found that PhD-prepared educators reported higher NLN core competency skill acquisition than DNP-prepared educators. That finding does not mean a PhD makes someone a good teacher, but it suggests that the coursework I have completed on curriculum, evaluation and learning theory should be put to use during the practicum rather than left in my papers.

What I Will Ask of My Preceptor

The research points to three requests. First, a standing thirty-minute meeting each week, separate from feedback on a particular class or clinical day, to talk about the academic side of the role: how the course was built, how decisions are made in the department and what the preceptor wishes someone had told them in their first year. Tufano and Summers (2025) found that informal mentoring of this kind is what new educators actually relied on, so I will not wait for it to happen by accident. Second, permission to watch my preceptor teach before I teach, including one class, one simulation and one clinical day, so that I have a model for each setting before I am observed in it. Third, honest feedback in writing after each teaching activity, even when it is uncomfortable, because I am used to being the experienced one on my unit and will need to hear plainly where I am a novice.

I will also look for a second, informal mentor among the newer faculty, someone who made the move from practice recently and remembers what was hardest. Speck et al. (2025) recommend that new faculty build a personal network rather than relying on a single assigned mentor, and a recent transition may be more useful to me than long experience on some questions, such as how to manage a first teaching load alongside clinical work.

Practicum Goals and Objectives

The four goals below address my largest gaps. Each objective names a product or an observed behavior that my preceptor can verify, and the evidence column shows where I will document it.

Goal 1: Facilitate learning in classroom, laboratory and clinical settings. Objective 1a: Plan and teach one 90-minute flipped class on postpartum hemorrhage, with a lesson plan approved by my preceptor one week in advance. Objective 1b: Co-facilitate two postpartum hemorrhage simulations, leading at least one debriefing. Objective 1c: Supervise two students on at least four clinical days on the postpartum unit. Evidence: lesson plan, simulation debriefing notes and Practicum Logs 1 to 3.

Goal 2: Use assessment and evaluation strategies. Objective 2a: Write ten exam items for the postpartum unit, reviewed by my preceptor before use, and interpret their item statistics after the exam. Objective 2b: Complete midterm clinical evaluations for two students with my preceptor, writing at least three dated anecdotal notes per student. Evidence: items, item analysis summary and evaluation drafts.

Goal 3: Pursue quality improvement in my own teaching. Objective 3a: Arrange one peer observation of my flipped class by a faculty member other than my preceptor, using the school's observation form. Objective 3b: Collect anonymous student feedback after the class and write a reflection comparing it with the observer's report. Evidence: observation form, feedback summary and Written Assignment 5.

Goal 4: Function within the educational environment. Objective 4a: Attend one curriculum committee meeting and one faculty meeting and summarize in my log how a decision was made. Objective 4b: Review the school's policies on clinical failure, academic integrity and accommodations with my preceptor and describe one case in which each applied. Evidence: Practicum Logs 2 and 3.

Conclusion

I begin this practicum knowing a great deal about postpartum hemorrhage and very little about how a student comes to know it. The self-assessment shows strengths in clinical knowledge and in helping new nurses into the profession, and clear gaps in evaluation, curriculum, self-evaluation and the academic environment. The four goals are designed to close those gaps in the hours available, and the three practicum logs will record, week by week and with evidence, whether they did.

References

Brennan, L., Sikes, A. T., & Brown, M. (2026). Competency-based onboarding: Strengthening organizational culture to support new nurse faculty. Nursing Education Perspectives, 47(5), 281-283. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000001578

Halstead, J. A. (Ed.). (2019). NLN core competencies for nurse educators: A decade of influence. National League for Nursing.

Oermann, M. H., De Gagne, J. C., & Phillips, B. C. (Eds.). (2018). Teaching in nursing and role of the educator: The complete guide to best practice in teaching, evaluation, and curriculum development (2nd ed.). Springer Publishing Company.

Sebach, A. M. (2021). Examining the influence of academic nurse educator doctoral degree preparation on National League for Nursing core competency skill acquisition. Nursing Education Perspectives, 42(5), 272-277. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NEP.0000000000000840

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

Tufano, V. C., & Summers, E. J. (2025). The nurse educator mentoring dilemma: Novice nurse faculty needs and outcomes. Journal of Nursing Education, 64(3), 177-184. https://doi.org/10.3928/01484834-20241120-03