Community Teaching Plan: Teaching Experience Paper
Assessment Description
The RN to BSN program at Grand Canyon University meets the requirements for clinical competencies as defined by the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), using nontraditional experiences for practicing nurses. These experiences come in the form of direct and indirect care experiences in which licensed nursing students engage in learning within the context of their hospital organization, specific care discipline, and local communities.
Note: This is an individual assignment. In 1,500-2,000 words, describe the teaching experience and discuss your observations. The written portion of this assignment should include:
Summary of teaching plan
Epidemiological rationale for topic
Evaluation of teaching experience
Community response to teaching
Areas of strengths and areas of improvement
You are required to cite a minimum of three sources to complete this assignment. Sources must be published within the last 5 years, appropriate for the assignment criteria, and relevant to nursing practice.
Prepare this assignment according to the APA guidelines found in the APA Style Guide, located in the Student Success Center.
This assignment uses a rubric. Please review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.
You are required to submit this assignment to LopesWrite. A link to the LopesWrite technical support articles is located in Course Resources if you need assistance.
Sample Paper
High School Teaching Experience
Introduction
One of the most prevalent healthcare challenges affecting high school students in contemporary times relates to vaping. Vaping is the inhaling of vapor produced by electronic cigarettes or other vaping devices. Electronic cigarettes are smoking devices that have cartridges made up of a liquid that contains flavoring nicotine and other chemicals (Hamberger & Halpern-Felsher, 2020). Although vaping is not a practice that has been around for a long time, a lot of adolescents, especially high school students, have adopted the practice as a result of a generally lower perceived risk of the practice compared to traditional cigarette smoking. Most adolescents believe that vaping is generally less addictive compared to smoking traditional cigarettes. However, investigations by government organizations such as the FDA on the contents of e-cigarettes have revealed that vaping contains nicotine which is a highly addictive substance that can increase the risk of other types of addiction and slow brain development in teenagers and children while also affecting concentration, memory, self-control, attention, and mood (Jones & Salzman, 2020). Vaping has therefore become a significant public health challenge in the United States, with at least 1.73 million high school and middle school students reporting using tobacco products mainly through vaping by 2020 (FDA, 2021). There is a significant need for healthcare practitioners, including nurses, to teach high school students about the dangers of vaping in a bid to control the prevalence of negative health behavior. This paper considers the teaching experience of a registered nurse in a high school, including the summary of their teaching plan, the epidemiological rationale of the teaching topic, which included vaping, the evaluation of the teaching experience, community response to teaching, the areas of strength and areas of improvement.
Summary of Teaching Plan
The teacher began the session by asking the high school students to introduce themselves. This strategy was effective in helping to reduce any tension or anxiety that high school students would have towards discussing an important issue with a stranger. Allowing everyone in the classroom to introduce themselves helped to promote a sense of familiarity between the teacher and the students and to defuse any tensions related to unfamiliarity. The teacher then provided a bunch of cards to the students and asked them to either write yes or no to the question of whether they had ever been involved in vaping. Allowing the high school students to answer the question of whether they had been involved in vaping anonymously promoted more honesty in the students and also contributed to promoting more openness during the teaching session. The teacher realized that high school students who are normally in their teenage years might be quite sensitive to any forms of judgment on their behavior, with the right strategies being required to correct such students, especially when it comes to behaviors that can negatively affect their health. From the questionnaire related to vaping, the teacher realized that at least 30% of the students had been involved in vaping in the past month. The teacher then asked the high school students of their reasons for vaping, with different students providing different reasons on why they involved engaged in vaping behavior. Some students highlighted that they constantly vaped in a bid to appear ‘cool’ and to fit in with friends. Some students highlighted that they frequently vaped because it made them feel more relaxed, while some students highlighted that they vaped because they were not aware of any adverse health outcomes associated with vaping, especially when compared to smoking cigarettes.
Having understood the main motives of the high school students who were vaping, the teacher highlighted to the students that vaping was as dangerous as smoking cigarettes because one of the main components of the aerosol that is utilized in the e-cigarette is nicotine from tobacco. The teacher then provided short animation charts and videos which clearly highlighted the dangers of nicotine, including addiction and slow brain development (Park-Lee et al., 2021). The teacher also highlighted that nicotine affected concentration, memory, self-control, attention, and mood. The various visual materials that the teacher provided to highlight the dangers of nicotine, which was one of the main components of e-cigarettes, helped to bring different theoretical concepts to life and made it easy for high school students to understand the dangers of nicotine through visual and practical learning experiences. The use of different visual materials such as short animations, videos, and charts would also help the students to easily recall what they learned during the session. The teaching session on the dangers of nicotine only took 25 minutes as the teacher was aware of the short attention span of high school students. A longer teaching session directed to the students would have been ineffective. After presenting the session related to the dangers of vaping, the teacher posed different questions to the students to evaluate their understanding. The teacher presented an oral session highlighting the dangers of e-cigarettes which included being a gateway to other forms of tobacco use, such as smoking cigarettes irritating the lungs, and causing serious lung damage (Park-Lee et al., 2021). The teacher then challenged the high school students to abstain from vaping because scientific evidence had already proven the dangers of nicotine. The teacher also directed several high school students who were already addicted to vaping to seek help from professionals, including the school counselor and also other practitioners outside school. Finally, the teacher completed the teaching session by summarizing all the information that had been presented, including that E-cigarettes have nicotine as the main ingredient, the dangers of nicotine, and the health reasons why high school students should avoid vaping e-cigarettes.
Epidemiological Rationale for Topic
Relating to the issue of vaping among high school students, epidemiology will include a consideration of the respiratory harms associated with the use of e-cigarettes. According to the CDC, by 2021, at least 11.3% of high school students, representing at least 1.72 million students, reported the current use of e-cigarettes (FDA, 2021). Over the years, e-cigarettes have been found to have a significant proportion of dangerous chemicals such as nicotine which have negative health effects on adolescents. According to Jones & Salzman (2020), most modern
e-liquids that are used in e-cigarettes will have three main components, including chemical flavoring, solvent, and nicotine. Although previous scholarly studies suggested that the e-liquid solvents that are found in E-cigarette only contain propylene glycol, which is well tolerated if ingested, recent studies have clearly highlighted that propylene glycol can have different health effects on individuals, including experiencing minimal squamous cell metaplasia and oral and nasal irritation (Park-Lee et al., 2021).
Over the years, scholarly research has indicated the different adverse health effects of nicotine on virtually every organ system in the human body. After the inhaling of nicotine, the parasympathetic ganglia in the respiratory system of a human being will be stimulated, which will result in bronchoconstriction. Bronchoconstriction will eventually cause an increase in airway resistance in the lungs which will eventually affect the central nervous system function of breathing (Hamberger & Halpern-Felsher, 2020). Over time the inhaling of nicotine can therefore contribute to similar defects comparable to those that are witnessed during chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which include increasing of volume of alveoli while decreasing elasticin. The significant negative impact of nicotine on the breathing system and the lung tissue has therefore been demonstrated in different studies utilizing e-liquids (Jones & Salzman, 2020).
Scholarly studies have also shown significant negative effects of nicotine from e-cigarettes on immune function. Exposure to e-cigarettes has been shown to cause significant immunologic changes resulting from such as elevated macrophage numbers, arrangement of the inflammasome, and increased caspase expression, which can result in apoptosis (Jones & Salzman, 2020). The altering of immune function as a result of smoking e-cigarettes and vaping can make adolescents be more susceptible to preventable diseases. Vaping products also cause lung injury, which is a significant issue that has highlighted that vaping products increase the prevalence of lung injuries. In the recent past, a lot of acute respiratory failure cases among adolescents have been reported across the US as a result of recent vaping, with at least more than 55 reported deaths by 2019 (Jones & Salzman, 2020).
