Discussion: Growth and development during your practicum experience
Discussion: Growth and development during your practicum experience
Discussion: Growth and development during your practicum experience
Critical reflection of your growth and development during your practicum experience in a clinical setting has the benefit of helping you to identify opportunities for improvement in your clinical skills, while also recognizing your strengths and successes.
Use this Journal to reflect on your clinical strengths and opportunities for improvement, the progress you made, and what insights you will carry forward into your next practicum.
To Prepare
Refer to the “Population-Focused Nurse Practitioner Competencies” found in the Week 1 Learning Resources, and consider the quality measures or indicators advanced nursing practice nurses must possess in your specialty of interest.
Refer to your Clinical Skills Self-Assessment Form you submitted in Week 1, and consider your strengths and opportunities for improvement.
Refer to your Patient Log in Meditrek, and consider the patient activities you have experienced in your practicum experience and reflect on your observations and experiences.
Journal Entry (450–500 words)
Learning From Experiences
Revisit the goals and objectives from your Practicum Experience Plan. Explain the degree to which you achieved each during the practicum experience.
Reflect on the three (3) most challenging patients you encountered during the practicum experience. What was most challenging about each?
What did you learn from this experience?
What resources were available?
What evidence-based practice did you use for the patients?
What would you do differently?
How are you managing patient flow and volume?
How can you apply your growing skillset to be a social change agent within your community?
Communicating and Feedback
Reflect on how you might improve your skills and knowledge, and communicate those efforts to your Preceptor.
Answer the questions: How am I doing? What is missing?
Reflect on the formal and informal feedback you received from your Preceptor
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.