Welcome to Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga where we use stories to connect the past to the present and then our future as we reimagine our teaching and learning. As we celebrate the NLN Year of the Nurse Educator we pay tribute to extraordinary nurses who have made significant contributions to nursing education we dive into the stories of nurse educators who recognized a need, challenged traditional customs,
and influenced transformative change. Welcome to part two as we honor Dr. Christine Tanner: scholar, innovator, and leader of the NLN's curriculum revolution. In part one, we explored how she created a new consciousness for the transformation needed in nursing education and now in part two, we'll explore Dr. Tanner's call to revolutionize the teaching of clinical judgment.
The Practice Mandate, published in 1988, Dr. Tanner acknowledged that the formalization of the nursing process was revolutionary in the early 1960s . The nursing process affirmed that nurses were thinkers, not just doers, but 30 years later she asked nurse educators to question if the nursing process captured the essence of clinical judgment.
Does the nursing process, she inquired, a rational, sequential, model of problem solving, operationalized as the nursing care plan, provides students with the practical know-how to respond to rapidly changing practice situations? Challenging the nursing process was truly revolutionary. At that time, use of the nursing process and written care plans were the educational standard for knowledge application
and clinical evaluation in nursing programs. Yet, Dr. Tanner recognized that the nursing process fostered linear thinking and failed to capture, in some ways obscured, what students need to learn to be able to think like a nurse in context. Simultaneously, Dr. Tanner questioned the ways in which faculty brought the realities of clinical practice - situated knowing, the deep understanding of the patient's needs and expectations - to the
classroom. She wondered how faculty had time to teach contextually when they were continually asked to add additional content to their courses. Dr. Tanner recognized that faculty are under tremendous pressure to "cover" content Of course, she suggested the verb "to cover" means a variety of things. It can refer to the way nurse educators use the phrase to mean content included in a lecture. But, she added, to cover can also mean
to hide from view or conceal. Dr. Tanner reasoned that the more we try to cover content in the first sense the more we also cover content in the second sense. She explained that as a result , little is gained or retained as nurse educators try to cover ever increasing amounts of content. She concluded that deep learning requires more than superficial content coverage; students need time with the expert teacher to think, to reflect, and to connect to previous learning.
Twenty years later, following years of research about the nature of nursing knowledge and clinical judgment in nursing practice, Dr. Tanner published her groundbreaking integrative review providing a new framework for teaching thinking: Dr. Tanner envisioned a new order.
The Tanner Clinical Judgment Model is now overwhelmingly accepted to teach thinking as a way in which the concerns of practice can be addressed by our educational activities, where classroom learning is informed by practice and students are engaged in the application of
practice situations. She led the early days of the NLN Curriculum Revolution, and for years after, with tenacity and persistence, asking nurse educators to no longer be aligned solely to content and to move away from passive teacher-centric models of
knowledge transfer. Today, as nurse educators embark on a journey to integrate knowledge from learning science and incorporate models of experiential, situated, and constructivist learning into our teaching encounters with students, we honor and applaud Dr. Tanner for her ground-breaking research. As she so often said, "Let the revolution continue!" And so the saga continues and may our saga continue as we bring to a close this episode
of Nursing EDge Unscripted Saga. Thank you for joining us