ABSTRACT
This chapter describes an evaluation of a form of university teaching in nursing known as Clinical Facilitation. Clinical Facilitation takes place at the interface of higher education and clinical practice in nursing and involves the supervision of student nurses on their clinical placement. This supervision is undertaken by experienced nurses with educational qualifications who are known as Clinical Facilitators. The evaluation is relevant to the identification of quality in teaching in two ways. First, the evaluation model employed uses a three-pronged approach to investigate the process of teaching in relation to learning outcomes and the views of the various stakeholders involved. Second, the teaching itself was investigated and categorized using an innovative form of reconstitutive ethnography.
The Clinical Facilitators were asked to reflect on their teaching to identify representative examples and key features. These recollections were refined through an iterative process which eventually led to a categorization of the teaching involved. This categorization was then verified by the Clinical Facilitators themselves and other stakeholders including students, university faculty and fellow professionals. Using the trident framework, the teaching identified was related to learning outcomes and stakeholder perceptions. Both the trident evaluation method and reconstitutive ethnography have potential for the further identification of quality in teaching.
