Junior Faculty Spotlight: Mary Lauren Pfieffer and Natasha McClure
Each month, the CFT Newsletter highlights the work of our Junior Faculty Teaching Fellows. This month, Mary Lauren Pfieffer, Nursing, and Natasha McClure, nursing, talk about their teaching philosophy and interests.
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Mary Lauren PfiefferI currently teach in the Family Nurse Practitioner program at Vanderbilt School of Nursing. Ultimately, I am preparing graduate nursing students to be primary care providers that provide care across the lifespan. Our program is in a hybrid format. Our students learn in an online and clinical setting three weeks out of the month and one week out of the month they come to campus for face-to-face education. Through this rigorous three-semester program, there is an immense amount of information that has to get relayed to the student. This makes our weeklong face-to-face block critical to the students’ overall learning experience. Meeting the needs of various student learners in a hybrid format is challenging at times but ever so rewarding as you see the students apply knowledge from the classroom in small group case sessions and in clinical performance.
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My philosophy of teaching is grounded on preparing students to care for patients as advanced practice nurses. They need to critically appraise the current evidence on comprehensively caring for patients with multiple medical conditions across the lifespan. I strive to engage the students in all learning experiences either online or face-to-face to the best of my ability. I assess the learning styles of my students and try to incorporate many teaching modalities within the classroom to meet the various needs of the students—case discussion in small groups, simulation experiences in the lab incorporated in lecture, lecturing needed content and content expert panels when appropriate.
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My teaching also extends outside of the classroom. I am available in my clinical practice where we can jointly see patients and also I go to see them in their clinical sites to assess their growing skills and knowledge. I try to provide mentorship as needed to help my students be successful. I also encourage students in their lifelong learning. New evidence is emerging daily and it is important as providers to be up to date on evidence. I try to model this in my engagement with students and show them my resources for how to continue their education post graduation. My mentorship extends after graduation, as I still am connected with my faculty mentors.
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Natasha McClureI co-coordinate community health nursing at VUSN, a three semester course designed to prepare graduate nurses to care for patients with complex chronic disease in their future practice. I developed and maintain an academic clinical partnership with the pediatric pulmonary outpatient clinic which provides a real-world clinical learning environment for nursing students, who deliver care to patients to improve medication adherence, reduce emergency department visits, and decrease hospitalizations due to asthma.
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Students learn core skills through this clinical experience that are critical for graduate nurses practicing in the primary care setting and patients receive extra clinical care at no additional cost.
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I am interested in improving clinical performance evaluation methods for community health nursing and evaluating competency in core chronic disease management skills. My scholarly work focuses on the impact of home visits on healthcare utilization, as well as the impact of school based asthma interventions on children’s ability to self-monitor and report asthma symptoms.
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