NURS 767 Week 5 Clinical Faculty Role Development Paper Example

Becoming a Clinical Teacher on a Postpartum Unit: The Clinical Faculty Role, Its Tensions and One Novice's Development Plan

A Moment on the First Day

On my first clinical day as a faculty member in training, a student was assessing a patient six hours after a cesarean birth. I could see from the doorway that the student had not checked the incision dressing or asked about pain before moving to the fundus, and I knew from eleven years in labor and delivery what the next assessment should be. I stepped forward to say so, then stopped. My preceptor told me afterward that stopping was the most important thing I did all day. In my old role, my job was to make sure the patient got the right care as quickly as possible. In this one, my job is to make sure the patient gets the right care while the student learns to give it. That difference is the subject of this paper.

The Clinical Faculty Role and Its Purpose

Oermann et al. (2018) describe clinical teaching as a distinct form of teaching with its own responsibilities: preparing for the clinical day, selecting patient assignments that match the course objectives and the student's level, supervising care, guiding students' thinking through questions, supporting them through the emotions of real practice and evaluating their performance against the objectives. Clinical faculty also act as a bridge between the school and the unit, and they carry responsibility for patient safety alongside the nurses who are assigned to the patients.

The purpose of all this activity is not always clear. Chan et al. (2025) argue that confusion about the goal of clinical experiences wastes clinical time, leads to objectives that focus on tasks rather than competencies and creates a mismatch between clinical experience and simulation. Drawing on Benner's writing, they propose a common goal for clinical education: practice readiness, meaning that students develop the clinical reasoning and situated knowledge needed to practice, not only the ability to complete tasks. That goal changes how I see my role. If the aim were task completion, I should have corrected the student's assessment order immediately. If the aim is practice readiness, my job was to help the student discover what was missed and why it mattered.

Preparing for a Clinical Day

Much of the clinical faculty role happens before students arrive. The evening before each clinical day, my preceptor and I review the unit census and choose patients for each student. Oermann et al. (2018) describe patient selection as a teaching decision, matching each assignment to the course objectives and the student's current level, and on a postpartum unit that means choosing deliberately among mothers recovering from uncomplicated vaginal births, those recovering from cesarean births, those with hypertensive disorders and those whose newborns need extra monitoring. Early in the rotation, students receive straightforward vaginal births so they can learn the normal assessment; later, they take patients with complications that test their ability to recognize change. I also check that each student will meet the key situations at least once over the term, and when the unit does not provide one, such as a patient with heavier than normal bleeding, the simulation lab fills the gap.

Preparation includes the students' preparation. Each student researches their patient's history and medications the evening before and arrives with a brief plan. My first task each morning is to review those plans with each student for five minutes, which tells me who is ready to work more independently and who needs closer supervision that day.

Tension 1: Teacher and Evaluator

The same person who coaches students through their mistakes must also decide whether they pass. Students know this, and some hide their uncertainty from me for that reason. One student in my group did not ask about an unfamiliar medication because, as she later admitted, she did not want me to write it down.

The research on clinical judgment assessment offers a partial answer. Jacobs et al. (2026) followed 53 prelicensure students through four semesters, evaluating them 35 times with the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric in clinical and simulation settings, and found that clinical scores rose significantly across semesters, with the largest gains between the second and third. Students are expected to grow, which means early mistakes are not failures but data points on a trajectory. When I share that view with students, explaining that midterm ratings are about where they are now and final ratings about where they have reached, the evaluator role becomes less threatening. My preceptor and I now separate the two roles in time: daily feedback is formative and spoken, and only patterns, documented over several days, enter the evaluation.

Tension 2: Patient Safety and Student Learning

Learning requires students to act, think and sometimes make mistakes; patient safety requires that mistakes not reach patients. Clinical faculty must decide, many times a day, when to let a student continue and when to step in. Medication administration is where this tension is sharpest. Lanz and Davis (2026) followed students from supervised laboratory validation into their first clinical medication administrations and the following semester and found no significant differences in performance across settings, though problems with patient identification and timing recurred. That finding helps me decide where to stand. Students who passed lab validation can be trusted with more independence in most steps of medication administration, but I check patient identification and timing every time, because those are the steps the evidence says are likely to slip.

For assessments, my preceptor's rule is now mine: if the patient is not at risk in the next few minutes, wait and ask a question afterward; if the patient is, step in, then debrief. On the first day, the patient was stable and the incision could be checked a few minutes later, so waiting cost nothing and taught the student more.

Tension 3: Faculty and Unit Staff

Clinical faculty are guests on the unit, and students learn from the staff nurses as much as from their instructor. When those relationships are strained, students feel it. Chen et al. (2026) studied second-degree BSN students who had been taught by more than one kind of clinical educator and found that those supervised by both clinical instructors and preceptors reported significantly higher communication competency than those supervised by a single type of educator; students described how different teaching styles deepened their reasoning and adaptability. The finding suggests that the staff nurse working with my student is not a competitor for the student's attention but a second teacher.

In practice, my day on the unit now begins with a five-minute huddle with the charge nurse, who pairs each student with a nurse willing to teach; tell each nurse what the student is working on and thank them at the end of the day. When a staff nurse does something differently from the textbook, I ask the student to find out why rather than correcting the nurse, which teaches students that practice has reasons behind it.

The Clinical Conference

The post-clinical conference is where the day's experiences become shared learning. My preceptor ran the first conferences; I have run two. The temptation is to lecture on what students saw, but the conference works better as structured reflection. Each student presents one moment from the day in which they were unsure what to do, and the group discusses what cues were present and what options existed. In my second conference, a student described a mother who seemed withdrawn and tearful on the second day after birth, and the discussion moved from normal postpartum emotional changes to screening for depression and how to ask about it respectfully. That conversation taught more about psychosocial assessment than any slide I could have prepared, and it came from the students' own practice.

Tension 4: From Expert to Observer

The hardest tension is personal. I am an expert in the care these patients need, and every instinct tells me to do it myself. Speck et al. (2025), reviewing the literature on expert clinicians who move into faculty roles, point out that a nurse's standing as an expert at the bedside carries no equivalent rank in a university and how new faculty must learn academia, pedagogy and the complexity of academic work. Brennan et al. (2026) found that a structured onboarding program combining modules and mentorship moved new faculty toward greater teaching confidence. My expertise is still useful, since I know which questions reveal whether a student understands a boggy fundus, but its use has changed from doing to asking.

My Development as a Clinical Teacher

Three NLN competencies are most involved in my clinical teaching: facilitating learning, using assessment and evaluation strategies and facilitating learner development and socialization. For the remaining weeks, I have set three goals. First, I will ask at least two questions before giving any answer during clinical conferences, and my preceptor will count, on one day, how often I give answers first. Second, each week I will record no fewer than three dated observations on every student, describing behavior rather than impressions, and review them with my preceptor before the midterm evaluations. Third, I will help each student identify one staff nurse whose practice they admire and ask that nurse one question about how they learned it, which supports socialization into the profession.

A Biblical Perspective

Paul told Titus, "Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned" (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Titus 2:7-8). Clinical teaching happens in front of patients, families and staff as well as students, and students learn from how their instructor speaks to a frightened mother or a busy nurse as much as from what the instructor says in conference. On a postpartum unit, the clinical teacher's example is part of the curriculum whether or not anyone writes it down.

Conclusion

The clinical faculty role asks a nurse to hold together teaching and judging, safety and learning, the school and the unit and expertise and restraint. The literature does not dissolve those tensions, but it shows ways to manage them: treating early evaluations as points on a trajectory, focusing vigilance where evidence says errors occur, welcoming staff nurses as second teachers and turning expertise into questions. My first clinical day taught me to stop before stepping in. The rest of the practicum is for learning what to say instead.

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

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

Chen, L. A., Wang, S. Y., Gau, B. S., & Yang, C. F. (2026). Clinical educator combinations and their impact on second-degree nursing students' learning: A mixed-methods study. Nursing Open, 13(7), e70632. https://doi.org/10.1002/nop2.70632

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

Jacobs, L. A., Bussard, M. E., Niedzwiecki, E., Lasater, K., & Lavoie, P. (2026). Tracking clinical judgment development in clinical education with the Lasater Clinical Judgment Rubric. Nurse Educator, 51(2), 81-86. https://doi.org/10.1097/NNE.0000000000002068

Lanz, A. S., & Davis, R. G. (2026). Lab to bedside transfer: Evaluating medication safety competency in nursing students. International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, 23(1). https://doi.org/10.1515/ijnes-2025-0127

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.

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