Allocate at least 3 hours in the field to support this field experience.

Part 1: Observation

Observing a classroom environment can provide much needed detail and understanding of students’ learning needs and continued progress.

Observe a K-8 classroom during a science lesson. If possible, observe a lesson that integrates health, PE, or nutrition. During your observation of the lesson, complete the “Clinical Field Experience A: Science Observation” form.

With the help of your mentor teacher, identify 3-5 students above, at, or below standard achievement in the classroom environment that would benefit from additional learning support. Ask your mentor teacher for the unit and standards the class is currently learning, in order to develop the pre-assessment for Clinical Field Experience B and inquire about implementing a science pre-assessment during Clinical Field Experience B.

Speak with your mentor teacher and, provided permission, use any remaining time to seek out opportunities to observe and/or assist your mentor teacher or another teacher and work with a small group of students on instruction in the classroom. Your mentor teacher must approve any hours spent observing another classroom environment.

Part 2: Reflection

Maintain your documentation to develop an instructional approach with students. As a follow up to your observation, reflect on your observation experience.

Following your observation, discuss the science lesson with your mentor teacher. In 250-500 words, summarize your observation and discussion with your mentor teacher, and describe how you will apply what you have learned to your future professional practice.

Your discussion should answer the following questions:

• How do you engage students in learning opportunities specific to science?
• How do the science lessons promote critical thinking and problem solving skills?
• How did the students respond and engage during instruction and independent work?
• How do you modify or adjust instruction based on response from students?
• How do you prepare to teach instruction in the content area (vocabulary, knowledge of material, content standards, resources)?

Submit the “Clinical Field Experience A: Science Observation” form and reflection as one deliverable.

APA format is not required, but solid academic writing is expected.

For this benchmark, you will complete and revise the “Science Unit Plan” template, integrated with health and activity, (fitness, body, physical, emotional, motor skills) and aligned to state content standards, based on feedback from your instructor. The “Science Unit Plan” template includes developed lesson titles, summary and rationale, learning objectives, standards, instructional strategies, differentiation, materials, resources, and technology for five lessons that includes a minimum of two of the following content disciplines:

• Scientific Method
• Health (Human Movement, Activity, Fitness, Emotional Health, Motor Skills)
• Physical Science
• Life Science
• Earth Science
• Space Science
• Engineering, Technology, and Applications of Science

Part 1: Assessments

The final part of the “Science Unit Plan” is to include formative evidence-based assessment strategies to gauge student learning for each individual lesson.

Using the “Class Profile,” develop an end-of-unit summative assessment and

• List how you will formatively assess the learning for each lesson.
• Description of the summative assessment for the entire unit.

The completion of your “Science Unit Plan” should fulfill all requirements of the unit plan and considerations for the successful instruction of each lesson.

Ensure that your unit plan includes:

• Age-appropriate lessons that incorporate the fundamental concepts of multiple areas of science, based on your state standards, integrated to build student understanding for personal and social application in science.
• Integrate major concepts in health education by creating opportunities for development and practice of skills that contribute to positive understanding of physical activity and health education.
• Instructional strategies that promote understanding and skills of physical activity that foster active, healthy lifestyles and enhanced quality of life for students.

 Part 2: Reflection

In 250-500 words, summarize and reflect on the process of creating a cohesive, weeklong unit plan that successfully incorporates multiple areas of science integrated with health. What strategies can you use to create opportunities to promote health education that positively contributes to a good quality of life for students? Why is this important? How can this be incorporated into your future classroom?

Support your findings with a minimum of three scholarly resources.

Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide,  An abstract is not required.

This assignment uses a rubric. Review the rubric prior to beginning the assignment to become familiar with the expectations for successful completion.

Program competencies and national standards assessed in the benchmark assignment:

2.2: Use fundamental concepts of physical, life, and earth/space sciences to design and implement age-appropriate lessons, centered on the principles of scientific inquiry, to build student understanding for personal and social applications, and to convey the nature of science. [ACEI 2.2; InTASC 4(a), 4(f), 4(g), 5(c), 5(h); MC2]

2.6: Use the major concepts in the subject matter of health education to create opportunities for student development and practice of skills that contribute to good health. [ACEI 2.6; InTASC 5(j); MC2]

2.7: Use instructional strategies that promote, as appropriate to their own understanding and skills, human movement and physical activity as central elements to foster active, healthy life styles, and enhanced quality of life for elementary students. [ACEI 2.7; InTASC 5(j); ISTE-T 2a]

For this assessment you will create an 8-12 slide PowerPoint presentation for one or more stakeholder or leadership groups to generate interest and buy-in for the plan proposal you developed for the third assessment.

As a current or future nurse leader, you may be called upon to present to stakeholders and leadership about projects that you have been involved in or wish to implement. The ability to communicate a plan—and potential implications of not pursuing such a plan—to stakeholders effectively can be critically important in creating awareness and buy-in, as well as building your personal and professional brand in your organization. It is equally important that you know how to create compelling presentations for others’ delivery and ensure that they convey the same content you would deliver if you were the presenter.

Demonstration of Proficiency

• Competency 1: Explain strategies for managing human and financial resources to promote organizational health.
  • Explain how the interdisciplinary plan could be implemented and how the human and financial resources would be managed.
• Competency 2: Explain how interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to achieve desired patient and systems outcomes.
  • Explain an organizational or patient issue for which a collaborative interdisciplinary team approach would help achieve a specific improvement goal.
• Competency 3: Describe ways to incorporate evidence-based practice within an interdisciplinary team.
  • Summarize an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to address an organizational or patient issue.
• Propose evidence-based criteria that could be used to evaluate the degree to which the project was successful in achieving the improvement goal.
  • Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly, evidence-based communication strategies to impact patient, interdisciplinary team, and systems outcomes.
• Communicate the PowerPoint presentation of the interdisciplinary improvement plan to stakeholders in a professional, respectful manner, with writing that is clear, logically organized, with correct grammar and spelling, using current APA style.

Professional Context

This assessment will provide you with an opportunity to sharpen your ability to create a professional presentation to stakeholders. In this presentation, you will explain the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle and how it can be used to introduce the plan (P), implement the plan (D), study the effectiveness of the plan (S), and act on what is learned (A) to drive continuous improvement. By using this cycle, the stakeholders will have a tool and a proposal to expand on these ideas to drive workplace change and create improved processes to solve an interprofessional collaboration problem.

Scenario

In addition to summarizing the key points of Assessments 2 and 3, you will provide stakeholders and/or leadership with an overview of project specifics as well as how success would be evaluated—you will essentially be presenting a discussion of the Plan, Do, and Study parts of the PDSA cycle. Again, you will not be expected to execute the project, so you will not have any results to study. However, by carefully examining the ways in which your plan could be carried out and evaluated, you will get some of the experience of the thinking required for PDSA.

When creating your PowerPoint for this assessment, it is important to keep in mind the target audience: your interviewee’s organizational leadership. The overall goal of this assessment is to create a presentation that your interviewee could potentially give in his or her organization.

Instructions

Please follow the Capella Guidelines for Effective PowerPoint Presentations [PPTX]. If you need technical information on using PowerPoint, refer to Capella University Library: PowerPoint Presentations.

Be sure that your plan addresses the following, which corresponds to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Please study the scoring guide carefully so you understand what is needed for a distinguished score.

• Explain an organizational or patient issue for which a collaborative interdisciplinary team approach would help achieve a specific improvement goal.
• Summarize an evidence-based interdisciplinary plan to address an organizational or patient issue.
• Explain how the interdisciplinary plan could be implemented and how the human and financial resources would be managed.
• Propose evidence-based criteria that could be used to evaluate the degree to which the project was successful in achieving the improvement goal.
• Communicate the PowerPoint presentation of the interdisciplinary improvement plan to stakeholders in a professional manner, with writing that is clear, logically organized, and respectful with correct grammar and spelling using current APA style.

There are various ways to structure your presentation; following is one example:

• Part 1: Organizational or Patient Issue.
  • What is the issue that you are trying to solve or improve?
  • Why should the audience care about solving it?
• Part 2: Relevance of an Interdisciplinary Team Approach.
  • Why is using an interdisciplinary team relevant, or the best approach, to addressing the issue?
  • How will it help to achieve improved outcomes or reach a goal?
• Part 3: Interdisciplinary Plan Summary.
  • What is the objective?
  • How likely is it to work?
  • What will the interdisciplinary team do?
• Part 4: Implementation and Resource Management.
  • How could the plan be implemented to ensure effective use of resources?
  • How could the plan be managed to ensure that resources were not wasted?
  • How does the plan justify the resource expenditure?
• Part 5: Evaluation.
  • What would a successful outcome of the project look like?
  • What are the criteria that could be used to measure that success?
    • How could this be used to show the degree of success?

Again, keep in mind that your audience for this presentation is a specific group (or groups) at your interviewee’s organization and tailor your language and messaging accordingly. Remember, also, that another person will ultimately be giving the presentation. Include thorough speaker’s notes that flesh out the bullet points on each slide.

Additional Requirements

• Number of slides: Plan on using one or two slides for each part of your presentation as needed, so the content of your presentation will be 8–12 slides in length. Remember that slides should contain concise talking points, and you will use presenter’s notes to go into detail. Be sure to include a reference slide as the last slide of your presentation.
• Number of references: Cite a minimum of 3 sources of scholarly or professional evidence that support your central ideas. Resources should be no more than five years old.
• APA formatting: Make sure that in-text citations on your slides and in your notes pages and reference slide reflect current APA Style and Format.

For this assessment, you will create a 2-4 page report on an interview you have conducted with a health care professional. You will identify an issue from the interview that could be improved with an interdisciplinary approach, and review best practices and evidence to address the issue.

As a baccalaureate-prepared nurse, your participation and leadership in interdisciplinary teams will be vital to the health outcomes for your patients and organization. One way to approach designing an improvement project is to use the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement describes it thus:

The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is shorthand for testing a change in the real work setting—by planning it, trying it, observing the results, and acting on what is learned. This is the scientific method adapted for action-oriented learning…Essentially, the PDSA cycle helps you test out change ideas on a smaller scale before evaluating the results and making adjustments before potentially launching into a somewhat larger scale project (n.d.).

You might also recognize that the PDSA cycle resembles the nursing process. The benefit of gaining experience with this model of project design is that it provides nurses with an opportunity to ideate and lead improvements. For this assessment, you will not be implementing all of the PDSA cycle. Instead, you are being asked to interview a health care professional of your choice to determine what kind of interdisciplinary problem he or she is experiencing or has experienced in the workplace. This interview, in Assessment 2, will inform the research that you will conduct to propose a plan for interdisciplinary collaboration in Assessment 3.

Reference

Institute for Healthcare Improvement. (n.d.). How to improve. Retrieved from http://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/HowtoImprove/default.aspx

Demonstration of Proficiency

• Competency 2: Explain how interdisciplinary collaboration can be used to achieve desired patient and systems outcomes.
  • Summarize an interview focused on past or current issues at a health care organization.
  • Describe collaboration approaches from the literature that could be relevant in establishing or improving an interdisciplinary team to address an organizational issue.
• Competency 3: Describe ways to incorporate evidence-based practice within an interdisciplinary team.
  • Identify an issue from an interview for which an evidence-based interdisciplinary approach would be appropriate.
• Competency 4: Explain how change management theories and leadership strategies can enable interdisciplinary teams to achieve specific organizational goals.
  • Describe change theories and a leadership strategy that could help develop an interdisciplinary solution to an organizational issue.
• Competency 5: Apply professional, scholarly, evidence-based communication strategies to impact patient, interdisciplinary team, and systems outcomes.
  • Communicate with writing that is clear, logically organized, and professional, with correct grammar and spelling, using current APA style.

Professional Context

This assessment will introduce the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Model to create change in an organization. By interviewing a colleague of your choice, you will begin gathering information about an interprofessional collaboration problem that your colleague is experiencing or has experienced. You will identify a change theory and leadership strategies to help solve this problem.

Scenario

This assessment is the first of three related assessments in which you will gather interview information (Assessment 2); design a proposal for interdisciplinary problem-solving, (Assessment 3); and report on how an interdisciplinary improvement plan could be implemented in a place of practice (Assessment 4). At the end of the course, your interviewee will have a proposal plan based on the PDSA cycle that he or she could present to stakeholders to address an interdisciplinary problem in the workplace.

For this assessment, you will need to interview a health care professional such as a fellow learner, nursing colleague, administrator, business partner, or another appropriate person who could provide you with sufficient information regarding an organizational problem that he or she is experiencing or has experienced, or an area where they are seeking improvements. Consult the Interview Guide [DOCX] for an outline of how to prepare and the types of information you will need to complete this project successfully.

Remember: this is just the first in a series of three assessments.

Instructions

For this assessment, you will report on the information that you collected in your interview, analyzing the interview data and identifying a past or current issue that would benefit from an interdisciplinary approach. This could be an issue that has not been addressed by an interdisciplinary approach or one that could benefit from improvements related to the interdisciplinary approach currently being used. Additionally, you will start laying the foundation for your Interdisciplinary Plan Proposal (Assessment 3) by researching potential change theories, leadership strategies, and collaboration approaches that could be relevant to issue you have identified.

When submitting your plan, use the  Interview and Issue Identification Template [DOCX], which will help you to stay organized and concise. As you complete the template, make sure you use APA format for in-text citations for the evidence and best practices that are informing your plan, as well as for the reference list at the end.

Additionally, be sure to address the following, which corresponds to the grading criteria in the scoring guide. Please study the scoring guide carefully so you understand what is needed for a distinguished score.

• Summarize an interview focused on past or current issues at a health care organization.
• Identify an issue from an interview for which an evidence-based interdisciplinary approach would be appropriate.
• Describe potential change theories and a leadership strategies that could inform an interdisciplinary solution to an organizational issue.
• Describe collaboration approaches from the literature that could facilitate establishing or improving an interdisciplinary team to address an organizational issue.
• Communicate with writing that is clear, logically organized, and professional, with correct grammar and spelling, and using current APA style.

Additional Requirements

• Length of submission: Use the provided template. Most submissions will be 2 to 4 pages in length. Be sure to include a reference page at the end of the plan.
• Number of references: Cite a minimum of 3 sources of scholarly or professional evidence that support your central ideas. Resources should be no more than 5 years old.
• APA formatting: Make sure that in-text citations and reference list follow current APA style.