Objectives have been used for decades in nursing education to set the stage for what is expected of students and to guide faculty in planning teaching and assessment. However, nursing education is evolving and the timeworn practices used to write objectives must evolve as well. This chapter focuses on how to write broad behavioral objectives to support learning in a constructivist, learner-centered online environment to guide teaching and learning that are in step with today’s innovations in education and that follow the call for radical transformation in nursing education. Objectives focused on the desired learning outcomes or intended behavior changes, termed performance. The psychomotor domain is the skills domain in the narrow sense of the word, in that this domain provides a means of identifying outcomes that involve fine, manual, and gross motor movements.

The creation of the online course in the learning management system (LMS) requires a certain comfort with technology, but more important, consideration of interface design, or the computer-user interface with the goal of making the interface as user-friendly or intuitive as possible. Success in this endeavor depends on understanding the relationship of the syllabus and organization of the LMS. This chapter focuses on expanding on that information to create consistent navigation in the LMS week after week, taking advantage of the efficiencies available in most LMSs, and basic interface design principles. Interface design is also referred to as the computer-user interface. The LMS design should be intuitive and easily navigated so that students can focus on learning and not spend an undue amount of time locating information. In a constructivist, learner-centered teaching paradigm, the lecture as the primary means of teaching has fallen out of favor, especially when teaching online.

The learning landscape continues to evolve as new technological tools enable teachers to deliver robust learning experiences. It is important to help teachers, administrators, and students know where to begin so that the transition to virtual learning is smooth, without educational loss. This chapter consists of two sections: current trends and issues in technology integration and technological pedagogical content knowledge. The first section briefly reviews the trends in instructional or educational technologies that are causing administrators, teachers, and students to reflect on and modify their thinking about learning and educational content delivery. The second section explores constructivism, the scientific underpinnings of nursing informatics, and ethics. Nurse educators must also address the ethical challenges brought about by this evolving learning landscape. After reading this chapter, one can understand current trends and issues, as well as the influence of nursing informatics and ways to approach new ethical dilemmas.

Simulation has many advantages for nursing education, some of which include creating safe learning environments for students and reinforcing information learned in the classroom; it also has the advantage of being available in inclement weather as well as 24 hours a day for student access. Simulation in nursing is one of many methods used for teaching students. Teaching and learning in a virtual learning environment has many advantages for administrators, faculty, and students. One of the advantages includes the use of other disciplines to help create or participate in a virtual world learning experience. The virtual learning environment can be created to look similar to real communities, disaster areas, or homes, with avatars populating that environment. The advantage to using virtual reality, rather than a real-life experience, is that in real life, students could be immersed in an environment that could cause them harm.

This chapter examines in detail the various components that are conducive to setting the stage for progressive, developing, and productive supervision to occur. It explores the characteristics of “good” supervisees, supervisors, and training sites that serve as templates for providing effective, research-based supervision. The chapter discusses other factors associated with setting the stage for the best practice of supervision, including: exploring the learning process, creating positive expectations, getting the most from supervision, and creating a framework for reflective and intentional supervision. One of the goals of clinical supervision is for supervisees to learn to think psychologically and to begin to develop awareness of what to pay attention to and work with from among the thousands of data points of information contained in each therapy session. The “Pygmalion effect” refers to the finding that leader expectations for subordinate performance can subconsciously affect leader behavior and consequently impact the performance of subordinates.

At its core, Kolb’s construct of experiential learning is more than simply a theory. Experiential learning theory (ELT) holds that learning is “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience”. Although ELT is often used in formal classroom settings, there are many out-of-classroom environments in student affairs that use and benefit from it as well. One way in which colleges and universities use experiential learning is through service-learning courses and projects. Several scholars have reported that using service learning in conjunction with ELT provides students with meaningful ways to engage not only with the community, but also to come to know more about diversity and social justice. Because out-of-classroom learning is such a key component in higher education and in the holistic development of students, using Kolb’s experiential learning model can aid students in meaning making as it facilitates personal growth.

This chapter offers a brief and focused review of human development, with specific emphasis on cognition and emotion. It is essential that the reader distinguishes between cognitive development, cognitive psychology, and cognitive therapy. Both short-term and long-term memory improve, partly as a result of other cognitive developments such as learning strategies. Adolescents have the cognitive ability to develop hypotheses, or guesses, about how to solve problems. The pattern of cognitive decline varies widely and the differences can be related to environmental factors, lifestyle factors, and heredity. Wisdom is a hypothesized cognitive characteristic of older adults that includes accumulated knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to practical problems of living. Cognitive style and format make the mysterious understandable for the individual. Equally, an understanding of an individual’s cognitive style and content help the clinician better understand the client and structure therapeutic experiences that have the greatest likelihood of success.

Social workers are committed to the protection and empowerment of weak populations, of those people who are least powerful. Gradually, social work started to rely more on problem-solving methods, client-focused therapy, family theories, and, more recently, cognitive behavior theories, constructivist theories, and positive psychology developments. Clinical social work today operates in a variety of settings in the statutory, voluntary, and private sectors. Clinical social workers have always been interested in helping clients change effectively. The importance of empirical study, valid information, and intervention effectiveness has always been accentuated by the social work field’s central objectives of increasing accountability, maintaining exemplary ethics and norms, and establishing clear definitions and goals. Cognitive behavior theory emphasizes several components. First and foremost, human learning involves cognitive mediational processes. Social workers need to look for effective methods for change, and CBT methods are very promising in this respect.

This chapter examines the theoretical underpinnings of goal setting and feedback, as well as criteria and measures for evaluation. It explores effective methods for providing feedback. Feedback is central to learning. Without feedback, mistakes can go uncorrected, bad habits can develop, positive behaviors might be dropped, and inaccurate assumptions about the quality of performance might be made. Supervisees and students also seem to recognize the importance of feedback, ranking receiving supervisor observation and feedback as the most effective factor contributing to their skill development. If goal setting, providing feedback, and selecting criteria and measures for evaluation are each done carefully and thoughtfully, evaluation should flow seamlessly as a result. The chapter also explores that feedback is the foundation for learning from experience; that is, supervisees need to know client outcomes. Client-outcome data can be used to inform treatment and discuss progress with clients, and also to inform supervision.

This chapter presents some of the educational strategies and implications of integrative teaching and learning. It describes two major types of integrative strategies that follow the logic of practice. First, multiple examples of how to coach situated learning in actual practice that have proven successful in developing embodied knowledge and skillful, intelligent performance, are detailed. Second, a Thinking-In-Action approach to integrating classroom with clinical teaching exemplifies how to teach learners to use extensive scientific, technological, and theoretical knowledge in the context of an unfolding patient situation that changes over time, while imaginatively responding to the patient’s multiple needs and other demands in the situation. In order to be effective clinicians, the student and developing nurse must progress to grasping the nature of whole clinical situations, developing an experience-based sense of salience and using multiple frames of reference that encompass patient and family-focused care.