Featured Faculty
March 2007
Dr. Maggie Davis
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Dr. Davis |
Background
I have been a registered nurse since 1989. I graduated from Armstrong Atlantic State University (Armstrong State College) at that time with an Associate's degree in nursing. After completing my degree, I worked in a variety of healthcare settings including hospitals and home health agencies. I returned to Armstrong in 1994 and completed my BS in nursing in June 1995. Since I was already adjusted to school, work, and family, I went ahead and obtained my Master's degree in nursing in 1997.
During the nursing programs, the nursing faculty made teaching look so easy. Nursing faculty seemed to get so much joy out of our successes and worked with us to help us be successful. One of the nursing faculty in the BSN program was particularly influential. Barabara Dunn charged each of her students with our role as professional nurses. She encouraged us to be active in our local, state, and national nursing organizations. Barbara made me understand that my responsibilities as a nurse extended beyond my patients to the nursing profession.
Teaching & Learning Narrative
My desire to transition from a clinical and administrative role to teaching came from my experiences in nursing school, patient education, and the encouragement of my husband to try teaching. When we moved in 2000 from Tybee Island, Georgia to Florida, I decided to take a leap of faith and obtained a position at the local community college teaching in their Associate degree nursing program. I was overwhelmed with the idea of how to organize the material I was assigned to teach. At first, I thought I needed to cover all of the content. Needless to say, the students were overwhelmed as well.
At this point, I realized I needed to learn as much as I could about teaching adult students. I read books, attended as many educational seminars as possible, and learned from my colleagues. In 2002, I enrolled in a Ph.D. in Education program at
During this time, I explored the use of online materials to enhance student learning. I have been developing online content for my nursing courses since 2002. I have followed a similar pattern of researching and trying to learn as much as possible about effective online course development. Several excellent resources are available to assist with development of online content. SLOAN-C is an organization that is dedicated to providing resources and information on the development of online courses.
Over the years, I continue to grow and explore my role as a nurse educator. I think I have learned as much from the mistakes I have made as from my successes in the classroom. Since coming to Georgia Southern in August, 2006, I have participated in many of the workshops offered at the CET. The staff at the CET (Ludy, Steve, and Raleigh) have been wonderful resources as I have explored my new role at Georgia Southern. I would encourage any faculty interested in exploring any aspect of their teaching or student learning to attend the seminars offered at the CET, participate in one of their faculty retreats, or engage them in conversations about your courses. I don't think this journey will ever end as I learn from my experiences with students and from my colleagues.
My philosophy of teaching is that I am a facilitator of student learning. I believe that every student has a desire to be successful. In my role as facilitator, I design opportunities for the students to demonstrate successful accomplishment of the course objectives. As a result, the courses I teach are constantly evolving based on my experiences with the students. As you can see, the students are at the center of my teaching philosophy.
In the Adult Health course, students are required to learn about management of a variety of disease processes which affect all of the body systems. Last semester, I found the students were struggling to manage the volume of information included in the course. They also struggled to identify the critical information about nursing care of patients who were experiencing these problems. Based on their feedback, I redesigned the course to address these areas without compromising the academic rigor of the course. I also wanted to incorporate elements in the course which would accomplish two goals. First, I wanted to collect evidence that students were accomplishing course objectives through the tests and assignments. Second, I wanted to have a fluid context to the course where I could make changes and adapt the course based on student feedback.
In order to achieve these goals, I have organized the content so that course objectives are clearly linked to every unit of content as well as the unit tests. I also have the students complete a unit evaluation in the week following the unit examination. In class, all of the activities require the students to be actively engaged with the content through course discussions and case studies. The class is focused on application of the unit content so that students learn how to interpret the information from their assigned reading materials and apply it to nursing management of patients. In this unit evaluation, I ask the students to evaluate whether they met the unit objectives, the effectiveness of in-class and online course materials, suggestions for improvement, consistency between the unit examination and the unit objectives, and how much effort they put into learning the unit content.All of the information I have gathered from these evaluations has allowed me to make "just in time" changes to my course.
Based on the student feedback, I have made several changes to the course to enhance student learning. For example, I have added presentations on diagnostic testing and medications to the online content for each unit because students indicated that they were struggling to understand how to determine what information was essential for them to learn about these two areas related to the focus of the unit. I also made a change to the in-class activities based on their feedback. I changed from the student groups working on different variations of a case study to all groups focusing on the same case study so that everyone could benefit from the work. We still work through the case study variations, but students are feeling more comfortable with this change. Finally, I have posted a synopsis of class activities online so that students can focus on the class discussions instead of trying to write down everything that was covered in the class.
At this point, I have been pleased with the changes I have made to the course. Based on student feedback and the more objective measure of student results on the examinations, I feel that the changes have been effective. As always, I plan to continue to adapt my courses so that student learning is enhanced. I would love to talk with other faculty who are interested in sharing their experiences.