A Strategy to Try: Meaningful Introductions

Discussion board post for NURS624 Teaching in Health Disciplines, posted on May 4 2023. Post is in response to prompt: To be true to invitational theory, the instructor needs to find ways to welcome learners to the course as a great host would welcome guests to a dinner party. Introductions are important if you adopt the invitational theory viewpoint... This will create fodder for discussion, help each person to feel like an individual, and promote connections among learners in the group.

Invitational theory is based on concepts of respect, trust, and optimism, and it is intentionally implemented by the teacher to foster an effective, positive learning environment. I believe in the value of familiarity and connectedness in the classroom. In my experience as a clinical teacher and faculty advisor for nursing students, learners benefit the most from their experience when they feel that their teacher is approachable and learners are comfortable to express themselves.

While invitational theory can seem obvious in some circumstances, such as welcoming a cohort of students into a clinical lab that they will be returning to weekly for the semester, I was surprised of its efficacy in a non-traditional context.

This past semester, I was a Faculty Advisor for a group of 12 consolidating nursing students, meaning I was overseeing their preceptorship and ensuring their hours were being tracked and evaluations completed. While I was not directly teaching them, in our first meeting together, I welcomed them to the semester the same way I would welcome my lab students: applying invitational theory by having them introduce each other, offering words of encouragement and optimism for their semester ahead, exploring their fears and anticipations, and establishing a plan that we could all benefit from for the semester.

We maintained respect, trust, and optimism throughout our time together. In instances where incorrect information was communicated to students, I took responsibility with the faculty and sought to correct it, ensuring trust and respect were maintained between teacher and learner. I encouraged students throughout, sending them congratulatory emails as they made it past each month.

At the end of our three months together, though never meeting in-person (touchpoints were over the phone, with frequent email/Blackboard interactions), these students expressed gratitude for the connectedness they felt to our group over the semester, they were comfortable voicing concerns knowing that solutions were the focus rather than blame, and many sought me as a reference because we remained so connected that I could genuinely speak to their clinical performance despite being at a distance. I ended our relation with a goodbye email, warmly thanking them for our time together and wishing them well in their careers ahead.

While I did not know the term for "invitational theory" at the time, I had been practicing it as a self-identified expectation of myself as a teacher, perhaps based on my previous experiences as a student in which the classes I felt most supported in were those with teachers that were welcoming hosts.