Nurses 'Fit for Purpose': Using a task-centred group to help students learn from experience

In a time of high demand for qualified nurses, mass education has become the norm. This is a necessary constraint within which we have to learn to function. However, the need to educate large numbers of nurses, may lead to a one-sided unimaginative reliance on the traditional lecture method, creating a learning environment that inadvertently limits and undermines one of the central goals of nurse education. Opportunities for positive professional acculturation, in which the student is challenged to think more deeply about their experience of their role, are lost. The consequence is that students and teachers become estranged. In this paper, I describe an approach that I have used to try to bring students and teacher back together, to provide a space where thoughts about the potential meanings of clinical practice can begin to take shape.