by Sarah Mummert
When you have a wide variety of topics and want every student to engage with all the material, what do you do? In Cedarville University’s School of Nursing, one program has gone to speed dating.
Based on the awkwardly termed get-to-know-you game, nursing professors Nate Kincaid and Nancy Stell put together this activity with a fun educational twist — instead of students getting to know each other, they engage with the academic topics in the Care of Children course.
The speed-dating learning model, which was featured for the first time last fall, will return to the Cedarville classroom on April 10. To prepare for the event, students formed groups based on topic, including pediatric substance abuse, child abuse, childhood obesity, and bullying. Each student researched a subtopic, wrote a scholarly paper and then presented their findings to the class during the activity.
For the activity, the students will be divided into teams with one person from each topic group to facilitate learning. As they make it to each station set up in different rooms, the student on the team who researched that station’s topic will present information and lead an activity. For example, for the station on pediatric substance abuse, the activity will allow students to inspect the contents of a backpack to assess for potential warning signs.
Students will have 12 minutes in each room, making it through more learning experiences than they would have been able to if they had only researched their own topic.
“In this course, our focus is on developing our students’ skills in caring for infants, children and adolescents, which involves caring for vulnerable populations,” Stell said. “These are important topics, and this activity is a way our students really get to engage with all the material.”
Located in southwest Ohio, Cedarville University is a Baptist university with undergraduate programs in arts, sciences, and professional programs, and graduate programs. With an enrollment of 5,456 students in 175 areas of study, Cedarville is one of the largest private universities in Ohio and is recognized nationally for its authentic Christian community, rigorous academic programs, including its Bachelor of Arts in Nursing (B.S.N.), and high graduation and retention rates. For more information about the University, visit cedarville.edu.