Emily McIntire is the Simulation Lab Coordinator for the College of Nursing (CON) at Michigan State University. As a registered nurse, Emily was able to experience fulfillment in educating others early in her professional nursing career, and has been steadily increasing her own personal education obtaining a Master of Science in Nursing Education in 2013. She’s held positions as a registered nurse in acute care hospital settings, home care environments, and outpatient dialysis clinics. Emily began her nursing education career as a clinical instructor at Lansing Community College, before accepting the Simulation Lab Coordinator position at MSU. Her research interests involve best teaching/learning practices in the nursing curriculum, and she is broadly interested in simulation, student-centered active learning methodologies, and use of technology in the classroom. Emily was recently awarded the “Billie Gamble Undergraduate Faculty Teaching Excellence/Enrichment” award, and is dedicated to preparing future nurses to meet complex demands in healthcare.
Project:
Traditional teaching utilizing lecture as a teaching methodology has been a gold standard in nursing education, though studies support that interactive learning and technology have the potential to promote deeper learning and the development of critical reasoning necessary for nursing practice (Hessler, 2017). Newer instructional methods are becoming more popular amongst many disciplines, nursing being one of them, to enhance the student learning experience, with less of a focus on teaching-centered strategies, such as lecture delivery (Scheckel, 2009). For this Lilly Fellowship project, I will conduct pre and post assessments of faculty and student conceptions and preferences for active learning/student engaged classrooms. An online nursing-centered learning platform known as CoursePoint+ will be utilized in a systematic fashion to help facilitate a flipped classroom, defined as “… a pedagogical approach in which direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space, and the resulting group space is transformed into a dynamic, interactive learning environment…” (The Flipped Learning Network, 2014). Data will be collected before and after flipped classroom implementation to aid in planning future initiatives to disseminate information and enhance the teaching culture in the College of Nursing.