How will you use your professional and educational experiences to enhance and promote learning in your classroom

Professional experience: As a young woman this RN set her career goals as a nurse midwife. His RN started at the University of Alabama in Birmingham as a student nurse in September of 1971. This RN worked exclusively for the next 5 years rotating through only the OB-GYN floors. At that time, as today, UAB was the best teaching institution in the Southeast and this RN gained tremendous confidence and love of this field of nursing. For the next two years this RN worked as 11-7 RN in High Risk L&D on night shift.

Educational Experiences: Working in all these areas of OB-GYN allowed this RN to learn not only L&D but scrub RN for all Caesarian cases, then  had to instruct her LPN how to scrub and this RN had to learn how to circulate. This RN learned how to give nitrous gas for light sedation in the delivery room, how to monitor all pregnancies which were all high risk, how to handle precipitous deliveries, of which there were twenty-six, among a multitude of other manual skills. However, it was there that both the art of triage and of critical thinking became of greatest importance and best asset to this RN career.

This RN aspires to use not only the hands on knowledge gained as a new nurse specific to OB-GYN/Maternal Child Nursing but also knowledge gained from all of this RN 35 years of nursing. This RN’s professional and educational experience is not of one type of nursing but of many and this RN wants to show by example to nursing students all that this RN has to offer.  Then, by showing through the example of this RN’s professional and personal life, how a service oriented profession can not only provide a meaningful career but will hopefully inspire student nurses to become passionate about the art of nursing. One cannot passion for the art of nursing. One can only inspire others to become passionate about their nursing craft.

Philosophy of Teaching Statement

By the very definition of philosophy, a teaching statement must continually evolve. The instructor must continually be on the path of education at all times, learning as much, no, learning more than the very students in whom she hopes to instill knowledge! The very definition of philosophy has several underlying sub-definitions such as basic instruction, underlying principle, schools of thought, viewpoint of different beliefs. Due to the rapid increases in technology and medicine today the nursing instructor must continually reassess the concepts and theories of nursing in order to prepare students to pass the NCLEX but also to nurture them in continuing their own education once they have earned the initials for registered nurse after their name!
barbara bethard