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| navigate: home: magazine: spring/summer 1998: article | |
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Health care providers Nursing instructor fosters active learning environment in her courses | ||||||
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What used to be a boring study of the history of nursing for some students has been transformed into an exciting Internet quest under the guidance of Dr. Dee McGonigle, associate professor of nursing at Penn State New Kensington. “Taking the same topic I used to present as a lecture and making it a scavenger hunt on the World Wide Web got students charged up,” McGonigle said. “A quest is a way to energize a boring topic.” She asks students to search the Web for information about nursing. They must find several different sources, locate the author of the information, evaluate the credibility of the information and report their findings to McGonigle. She described how she creates an active and collaborative learning environment in her courses during the conference on Strategies for Successful Education of Health Care Providers, held in 1997 at The Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel. The conference drew 126 allied health educators and educators who teach in vocational, technical and nursing schools in Pennsylvania and four other states. The School of Nursing in the College of Health and Human Development and the Center for Vocational Education in the College of Education sponsored the conference. By integrating computers into her courses, McGonigle has become an educational guide for her students. She and Dr. Kathleen Mastrian, assistant professor of nursing at Penn State Shenango, revamped the course Nursing 290, Nursing Transition and Professional Role Development. They use Internet quests, small teams and collective goals to engage students in working collaboratively to identify issues and come up with solutions. A key component of their strategy is to teach students how to think critically. In one exercise, Mastrian and McGonigle ask each student to think about a nursing situation they have experienced that they wish they could do over again. The whole class discusses these situations. This process starts the students thinking critically, she said. McGonigle is an expert on maternal child health. She has been instrumental in teaching both Penn State students and faculty members how to use computers and in developing distance education programs. She has a Web site at http://milkman.cac.psu.edu/~dxm12/deehome.html. Other conference workshops dealt with nurturing student aspirations, dental education and research issues, the employment outlook for 2000, coping with personality types, workplace issues and employee skills, nursing curricula, the power of visual images in health care, staff development issues, using games as a teaching tool, and curriculum development in infection control. an outreach program of the colleges of Health and Human Development and Education | |||||
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