Focus Less on Knowledge & More on Doing

Patrick Luna:

I would say one is shifting our focus to teaching and evaluating what our students can do rather than what they know, and this is a mantra of mine. This is something that I stand in front of my groups of students and literally have to tell them is that they are not in school, they are in training, and their familiarity with training is different than what they all know as academia. So it’s something I have to keep on repeating. I am more interested in what you can do rather than what you know. And this is a systemic change, and our focus and our energy needs to go toward creating functional nurses, nurses who can succeed in practice. So that’s the shift. And so it’s not only me telling them, it’s something I have to continually tell myself, “Is this assessment, is this evaluation based on what they can do, or is it just something that’s knowledge-based?” So I think this is a question we all need to ask ourselves.