Teacher Role Modelling Behaviour for Nursing Students
Many years ago, as part of my Master of Nursing Studies (Nurse Education), I carried out a study examining the effect of teacher’s role modelling on the formation of nursing students’ attitudes.
The thesis ‘An exploration of teachers as role models and the effects of humanistic teaching on students’/patients’ relationships’ investigated the teacher’s attitudes, communications and behaviours and how these influenced student nurses and their interaction with patients.
Now, as I did then, I believe that teaching involves a great deal more than passing on information.
Teaching also consists of showing students how to be.
In my early days as a teacher, I learnt very quickly, that teaching not only occurs in the classroom or the lab.
It also happens after the class when we are packing up and are approached by students, in spontaneous conversations that occur in the corridor and in other informal communications.
Today we have screen presentations, online teaching, blended learning and other teaching tools.
I now believe that being a role model to the students has become even more vital today.
The statement made by Davis in 1983 is especially relevant now.
“It would seem that, whatever nurse teachers say to student nurses regarding the value of communicating with patients is unlikely to be regarded by the students unless they see the advice put into practise. It has earlier been suggested that the only way in which student nurses could learn communication behaviour was by the use of role models, and that the first role model they encountered was the nurse teacher.”
The commitment that we have as teachers is to impart technical knowledge and attitudes that support the care of each individual. As Read and Simon said in 1975,
“Feelings and perceptions are not more important than thinking and knowing, but rather as important in the total educational program.”
Let us always be aware of our interactions with nursing students as the way we are with them will influence the way they will be with their patients.