Mentorship Matters: Empowering New Nurse Educators

Hosts Dr. Raquel Bertiz and Dr. Kellie Bryant welcome Dr. Lisa Seldomridge, professor at Salisbury University, to discuss faculty mentoring and the nursing workforce shortage. Dr. Seldomridge highlights the importance of structured mentoring programs to support new and experienced nursing faculty, ensuring their success in academia. The conversation explores the impact of the nursing shortage, emphasizing how mentorship can help retain faculty and strengthen the pipeline of nursing educators. Strategies for faculty development, including professional growth opportunities and peer support networks, are discussed as key solutions. The episode concludes with a call to action for institutions to prioritize mentoring programs, fostering a stronger and more resilient nursing education workforce.

Learn more about the Faculty Academy and Mentorship Initiative of Maryland (FAMI-MD):
www.salisbury.edu/academic-offices/health-and-human-services/nursing/fami-md-academy/

Dedicated to excellence in nursing, the National League for Nursing is the leading organization for nurse faculty and leaders in nursing education. Find past episodes of the NLN Nursing EDge podcast online. Get instant updates by following the NLN on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and YouTube. For more information, visit NLN.org.

Transcript

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Welcome to this episode of the NLN podcast Nursing EDge Unscripted. I am the host of today's episode  Raquel Bertiz and with me co-hosting is Dr. Kellie Bryant and we are from the National League for  Nursing and today we are excited to have with us Dr. Lisa Seldomridge. She is a professor  at Salisbury University she is the director of the FAMI and I will have her to spell that out  and talk to you about it and our conversation for today is a very interesting one and we are going  to go into conversations of faculty mentoring and of course the ongoing nursing workforce shortage  that has affected not just Maryland but the entire country. So welcome Lisa. Thank you so much. I'm  happy to be here so let's go ahead and dive right in into this interesting conversation really just  kind of explore what is going on with nursing workforce shortage and faculty mentoring so if  you could share with us your current initiative of faculty mentoring and tell us how that all started  and where are you at this point. Okay well I am at Salisbury University in Maryland and  we are located on a peninsula called the Eastern Shore of Maryland and even though people  may not think of us as being somewhat isolated and rural we have the Chesapeake Bay between  us and Baltimore Washington corridor and we have for over a decade been experiencing a shortage in  nursing faculty and in particular clinical faculty individuals who are interested in some kind of  part-time teaching initiative or gig we call it. And so this initiative, the Faculty academy and  Mentorship Initiative of Maryland, which we call FAMI-MD, actually began in 2011 as a collaboration  between our university a local community college and a historically black college and university.  And it was very much centered around how we could work together to meet our own needs for  clinical faculty. We were finding actually that we were sharing people across the employment setting  and we also were noticing that the folks who were expert clinicians who really had in their  heart a desire to teach needed some more skills and they needed more knowledge and they needed  support and we thought you know we can do this together. And that's really how it began. In 2011  we wrote a grant proposal to the Maryland Higher Education Commission they have a program called  the Nurse Support 2 program and we received a four-year grant to get our program started.  And I'll stop there for a second. I don't know if you have another particular question or I should  keep rolling on because there's been a lot of water under the bridge since 2011. No, I think  you should continue tell us some of the components of this FAMI. It's called FAMI, I want to make sure  I'm pronouncing it correctly. Tell us some of the components. What did your learners, what did they  receive in this program? Yeah, so thanks for that's a great question. So when we started the program  our plan was to design a curriculum and deliver that through teaching teams or facilitator teams  that represented each of those three entities. We really wanted sort of a blended ... we didn't  want it to be the Salisbury version or in that time it was Sojourner Douglass College  was our partner, so we had representatives from each of the three and we were calling ourselves  facilitators because we wanted to establish this collegial environment where we were welcoming  these expert nurses into the fold, you know, as new educators and as colleagues. So in those  days we were not as skilled at delivering things online and so we actually were meeting in person  and developed this curriculum which was really designed to keep to give people kind of, oh, I  don't know, sort of a broad brush, a bird's eye view of some of the things that they might need to know  to be successful. Things like, you know, curriculum designs and what were the differences between our  three programs. And remember we were doing this very much in self-serving way, and you know, what  was the difference in terms of program outcomes versus course outcomes and in some cases we had  clinical outcomes and then we had theory course outcomes. So how do all those things, you know, align?  We talked about accreditation, the difference in accreditation standards, the different professional  standards that we use to guide our programs and then we really rolled up our sleeves and got  into I think sort of probably for our learners more interesting things like what are the legal  aspects that you need to consider, how do you set expectations for your students in terms  of you know your response time to them or you know expectations for contacting you if for some reason  they couldn't come to a clinical experience. How do you even set up a clinical experience? How do you  identify patient care experiences? And we were also trying to be mindful of you know having  meaning across clinical settings so not just for a hospital-based how do you keep track of your eight  or 10 students you know when you may have ranked novices who need quite a bit of your attention.  What's the difference between how you teach people effectively in the cognitive domain versus the  psychomotor domain versus affective domain? How do you foster critical thinking in a clinical setting?  And I could go on and on but we really we wanted to give people you know very practical, practical  information and you know as I said kind of create a community where we weren't putting ourselves up  on pedestals as experts, but we were there to all learn from one another. So then time rolled on and  the first grant came to a close. We were extremely successful and the Maryland Higher Education  Commission came back to us and said you know this model seems to really be working well for you,  Would you be interested in writing a continuation grant and taking it across the state? And we said  of course we are! So then that's exactly what we did again. We were still in a face-to-face delivery  for most. We had some online learning activities that the participants would do in between our  meeting times and we would meet about every two weeks and we also wanted to be mindful of the fact  that these were working professionals. They were doing this training on you know kind of their own  time around their regular work schedule so we had I believe at that time we had three face-to-face  meetings. And we essentially took our show on the road. So we had a location on the Eastern Shore  of Maryland, we had a location more centrally in Baltimore, and then we had another location out  in western Maryland. A couple of things just to add to that. So we began integrating simulations.  I know, Raquel, you would love that because part of what we wanted to do was give our participants an  opportunity to work through in real time some of the kinds of situations they might find  themselves in, have an opportunity to get some peer feedback, and have an opportunity to have a do-over,  you know to kind of reconsider maybe an approach. And so we did that kind of thing using  you know trained actors and then used different simulation facilities around the state. The other  thing just that I skipped over in the beginning, but I did want to just go back to is we really had  four main objectives and those objectives have continued over this 12, no more than that 14-year  period that we've been running this. The number one of course was to increase the number of  faculty who were available for open positions in the state ... by providing this training.  Number two was we wanted to increase the number of trained individuals from under represented  groups because we looked around and we said you know we have not made enough progress in terms of  diversity of our faculty workforce. Our students are getting more diverse but we are not and so  we want to be much more intentional about that. We were interested in prioritizing the training to  help us staff particular clinical areas where we were all struggling. Not surprisingly, it was OB,  peds, psych, mental health, those were, those were our top and then our you know other sort  of not so secret mission was to encourage folks who had completed our program to advance their  education either through advanced certifications or advanced degrees. Again, just trying to have a  better prepared, better educated faculty workforce. So yeah, and I was actually very curious earlier  when you said that you were very successful and you were actually offered by the higher  education commission to have a continuation grant. And after hearing you kind of like enumerate your  goals right or your like apparent and hidden intent. So I'm curious at this point, like 14  years fast forward. So I'm curious to see like are there, are you filling of faculty  positions in your area or in the state? Have you seen an increase in diversity of our  faculty population or the clinical educators and all that? So what's the current picture of,  I would say, all these goals and what you have achieved? Yeah, thank you. Great question. So we  to date have 650 graduates. 73% of them have taken some kind of teaching job, teaching assignment for ...  and this is part of what I'm most proud of, I mean, three quarters of them are helping fill the  positions and our graduates are working at every single nursing program in the state of Maryland.  So what started as you know a very local thing to meet our own needs has now really expanded the  you know the pool of available faculty to meet the needs across the state. 43% of our graduates  come from underrepresented groups and so that for us is defined as racial and ethnic minorities and  men and about a third of them come from those high need clinical specialties that I mentioned  before. So that's the picture to date and we keep on raising the bar for ourselves. Right, and  that sounds really wonderful and that is a challenge that Maryland. Not only Maryland  encounters, but I think of course all across the board. So I also heard you say, well, we've been  using simulation methodologies to educate the educators and yeah of course we love that right  and I, we love everything simulation right so any anything that has something to do with simulations  because we know it's a very powerful learning methodology. So if our educators experience it  firsthand so hopefully they can get buy into using that as well in their teaching. So other than  simulations, what current delivery modalities have you been using to kind of like impart what are  future educators or even current educators need as far as competencies are concerned? So I heard  simulations, so I heard face to face, but currently how are you programming your instructional  design is pretty much what I'm curious about. Yeah, so you know this is one of those things  that actually the pandemic helped us with a lot. We needed of course to pivot to distance delivery  of the FAMI program during the pandemic and that actually created a wonderful opportunity for us  that instead of, as I said, taking our show on the road we transitioned everything to  hybrid learning. so we had some online modules, which were, I wouldn't call them self-study. They  were people go through this program as a cohort. So we take between 10 and 15 people at a time.  They have ... they're committing to a six-week period and during that six week period there are online  modules and a variety of things that you know you might expect. So you know, case studies and  discussion boards and you know various kinds of assignments. And then we come together about every  two weeks for Zoom meetings and those sessions are I guess fairly intense. We do ask people for  about a four hour time block and that's our time to build community. That's the way in which you know  we're delivering our simulations. We, of course, were you know, immersed during the pandemic in terms of,  well, how can we make clinical type experiences happen when you know we weren't often able to  even be in clinical agencies? And so you know, all the kinds of things that we did you  know during the pandemic got introduced into our curriculum as other kinds of learning strategies.  So those you know have remained and that model of six weeks time. It's 40 contact hours,  you know about two weeks to do the online and engage with your colleagues come together have  our sessions, which are you know again focused conversations around topics simulations and  then ending up with what we call our sort of mentoring night, which setting the stage for like  what's next. So our participants, because we have continued to be grant funded, we are able to pay  them an honorarium for their time. It's $1,000 and you know on the one hand that sounds like a lot. On  the other hand, we're asking a lot from them. And so you know they're free to use that to support child  care or you know work a little less during this intense course and then they also receive 40 CEs  through the Maryland Nurses Association. So that ... Yeah. Oh. So sorry for talking. I was like,  "Wow that's a unique feature of the FAMI." Because anywhere else you go where you would need faculty  development there is a cost associated with it and yours is the reverse. They receive stipend or  or allowance or I don't know how you call it for participating in the academy activities, right? So  my question then is given that these nurses are busy individuals and that the  course is really intense from what I hear you say, an intense period of time with all of these  activities, how do you enhance engagement and participation? So I'm curious like do they have,  do they have dropout rates or how's your retention rate and and all that? Yeah and  so after all of these things, what's going on? Yeah so that's a really good question.  I don't have a hard and fast retention rate to report, but I would say that I believe our  completion rate is extremely high and part of that is that there is an application process. We  are in the fortunate position that we have more applicants than we are able to take. We have again  very intentionally limited the size of each of the academies. We run 10 or 11 of them a year because we  want there to be a close connection. We don't want this to be a MOOC you know. We really want this  to, for people to feel bonded with the others that they're in this program with and so in our  application process and then also in our kind of initial I call it the course launch  we go through, I mean everybody gets the schedule actually that's posted online with kind of this  is what you can expect. You'll have to spend every week so that people have an idea.   I will say that life has happened along the way to folks and you know, we've maybe had to have some  flexibility with deadlines. So much is around peer peer-to-peer learning thoug,h is if you get too far  out of step, you know, with what the rest of your colleagues are working on, you know, it could  be a better choice to say, you know, why don't you step away right now and come back. We're going to  be offering another one in a few more weeks and you know, come back when life has settled a little  bit because I think the main thing we want is we want people to love teaching. We want them to  bring, you know, not just their expertise but their excitement about preparing our next generation of  nurses. And so we don't, you know, we just want to really have a supportive community for our new  folks. So Lisa this is such a wonderful program and is much needed. Raquel and I were just having this  conversation the other day that a lot of us get into teaching coming from clinical practice and  then getting our first job in academia and as we know whether we're nurse practitioner or  we're coming from the clinical setting, it doesn't prepare us to be an educator. And NP school doesn't  teach us how to create syllabus, how to create test questions, how to put a curriculum together.  So that's why I think it's so important that we have more of these type of faculty mentorship  programs, particularly for people who do not have a background a nursing education. So my question  is, you have great outcomes. This has been a very successful program. Have you have had any thoughts  about ways that we can scale this program so it can be duplicated in other cities or states or  has it been already done in other states? Yeah, so great question because every time of course you  write a grant they want to know sustainability and scalability. Exactly. Yeah, no, it's a terrific  question. So kind of, interestingly enough, when we very first started of course you know we scoured  the internet because we thought certainly there must be something out there already that we can  build upon and we actually did find a wonderful curriculum that was put together  in, as it's (MidHealth Alliance of Kansas City) and it was a collaboration between  a couple schools of nursing and a large medical center there. Their curriculum was available for  purchase and was very reasonable and so we purchased that, but we also realized that  there were some things that we would like to add to their curriculum. So had conversations  with them about making adaptations and they were very willing to you know to allow that to happen. and that's how we integrated the simulations. We expanded some of the sections over the years. Our  participants had told us, well this you know, this 40 contact hour thing is great but we want more.  And so we actually wrote another grant to MHEC to develop an advanced curriculum because there  wasn't anything or we didn't see anything quite like that. So we developed that ourselves, which is  another 40 contact hour workshop, same arrangement, thousand honorarium in exchange for those, which I  don't think I said and I do need to say this is our participants do need to agree to have their  contact information be in our database that is then shared with the deans and directors  or hiring managers for the schools. So that if they get a phone call out of the blue they kind of  come to expect that. So in terms of scalability, I think the main thing is how to get the word  out about not just this program but and I know that there's a conversation going on in the NLN  community. Gosh I've forgotten what the name of that, is about somebody is working on I think it's  a capstone project and they're trying to build a curriculum like this for clinical faculty.  We don't all have to reinvent the wheel and I mean frankly one of the things I think could be  terrific is if the grant funding came to an end and if the grantors were okay with you know  we'd have to think about intellectual property and all those kinds of things, you know is creating something that could be available kind of on a national level, back to Raquel's point. I  don't know that we, I mean I think it would have to be you know a fee for service kind of that we  probably wouldn't be in a position to compensate people for taking this, but rather you know making  it available. But you know, even just recently here at NERC just several days ago there are  lots of presentations around what we need and so anyway, we've tried to put the word out but  we appreciate the opportunity to share through this podcast and love to talk with folks about  how to collaborate and how to do this you know in a bigger, in a bigger way for all of us.  So yeah definitely very interesting conversation we're having right now. And I know  20 minute discussion was too quick, never enough, but we would definitely share the word out there  through this podcast all the information about FAMI and your other projects. That would be  absolutely wonderful. We need to just continue to share really good ideas and again I'm so grateful  for the opportunity to be with you today. Yes, thank you also for taking this time to have this  very important conversation. So before we close, and so if you could just identify at least like  one nugget of information that you would like to share with the nursing education community about  faculty mentoring. Oh just one! Just one! You know, I think it is about the power of collaboration. And  part of why this program I believe is successful is that we have facilitators representing a lot of  schools across Maryland and that same model could be replicated. We don't often think about putting  together teaching teams across institutions and that's a really interesting way  particularly around preparing clinical faculty, many of whom do teach for different schools. So  this whole idea of you know let's share what we know, share you know kind of what  we've learned. Maybe, Kellie you said before, kind of through trial and error, is that people who  come behind us don't have to you know go through those same, those same challenging times. Yeah. Yes.  Definitely collaboration is the key in many, many things. So thank you for joining us for this  episode of Nursing Edge Unscripted. Thank you, Dr. Lisa Seldomridge, and well thank you for sharing  your insights and expertise with us today. So we appreciate your support and we look forward to  continuing the conversation in our next episode. So thank you very much. Bye bye. You're very welcome. Bye bye.