At 9 am on June 6 in 2019, a lecture entitled "Learning Nursing and the Implications for Educators" was successfully launched in Class 457 of Xiaoqian Building at Xiangya New Campus.
The lecturer is Dr. Linda Honan, a professor of Yale School of Nursing, a clinical tutor of Yale New Haven Hospital and a clinical preceptor on Yale New Haven Hospital. Dedicated to nursing education and academic and practical interdisciplinary cooperation, she was elected as Fellow of American Academy of Nursing in 2017.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Linda shared how she inspired and enlightened her students by asking them to write clinical diaries, a special teaching method created by herself. Having collected 132 dairies, she sorted them out with subject index and interpreted the content with specific methods for class discussion. In doing so, she had a better understanding of how her students felt during clinical practice, pondering over the essential elements of being a nurse. Of all those elements, Professor Linda elaborated on the ones such as “learn to understand others” and “learn to take care of others”. In addition, according to Professor Linda, these elements concluded from the dairies also pointed out the challenges facing nursing educators.
Professor Linda then move on to stress the importance for educators to ask themselves the following questions. What kind of class you want to create? How would you like to use your faculties to inspire your students? The answers to these questions were of great significance because the teaching position could be replaced by others at any time, but being able to stimulate the potential of students constitute an irreplaceable ability of teachers. And also, she emphasized that teaching is an art to be learned where educators should constantly contemplate how they could better impart knowledge to their students.
In the third part of the lecture, Professor Linda mentioned classroom teaching, sharing with the audience 11 pieces of valuable advice gained from her teaching experiences. To explain how the heart valves open and shut when pumping blood and why cardiac souffle occurs, she illustrated it with the opening and closing of the door on spot, vividly demonstrating the teaching method which helps lay a solid foundation for students aiming high.
At the end of the lecture, Professor Linda recommended, from her own perspective, some of the admirable educators and their works, encouraging teachers to explore their own teaching styles, upgrade their teaching methods through hard work and persistent trials, and equip themselves with multiple skills besides the skill of teaching.