The BSN Partnership consists of Bachelor of Science in Nursing faculty members and students who have formed a collaborative team (representing all four years of the program) focused on finding new ways to engage students in thinking critically about nursing issues.  The Partnership is designed for faculty and students to work together to collaboratively design solutions to identified learning challenges in the BSN program.

History of the Partnership

In 2015-16, nine BSN faculty and eleven students met regularly throughout the year.  The Partnership team members participated in Professional Development/Learning sessions to inquire about the challenges students experience and how faculty might respond to help them. Faculty and students co-designed specific new in-class learning activities and learning sequences in response to those challenges.  The team was particularly interested in developing such activities in ways that gave BSN students opportunities to learn more deeply, and make more meaningful connections between theory and practice. Faculty piloted the new activities in their classes, and then the Partnership faculty and students shared lessons learned with the whole team during the Partnership meetings.

Through this process, faculty received feedback on their new activities, in preparation for future activities in the following semester. During the Spring semester of academic year 2015-2016, BSN students also mapped how they see their learning journey throughout the 4 years of the program.  This “BSN student experience and learning map” fed directly into the Nursing Programs efforts (April – May 2016) to streamline learning outcomes for the entire program and for each course, and to begin discussing aligned assignment design.

What specifically will we do this year?

BSN Partnership Team Members (BSN faculty and students, and CIEL staff) have committed to attend six, 2-hour, “Inquiry and Planning” sessions throughout the academic year.  Inquiry and Planning sessions, and activities between the scheduled meetings will include:

• Collaborative critical reflection on BSN’s curriculum efforts, and teaching and learning innovations for the past year to determine what has been successful, what needs attention
• Co-development of research methods/inquiry strategies to collect data from BSN students across all years about their experience in the program
• Student-led data collection (surveys, focus groups, etc.)
• Reports of the data collected to the Partnership team for discussion of next steps
• Report of data collected and recommendations brought back to whole BSN faculty in November 2016 and April 2017