A nursing school faculty member talks about a graduate seminar

One experience that stands out is when I co-taught a graduate psych seminar with a psychologist. We started teaching this small group in 1996, neither one of us really knew each other, so we had to have a lot of trust in order to figure out how to co-teach as well as how to work well together for the students. It just became a real positive time in my week, and I think she has said the same thing, that we both really looked forward to Thursdays because it was a day when we were not only teaching the students but we were also trying to model to the students what it was like to be in a collaborative relationship.

We would start each class with a co-round. It was a 3-hour class with about six or seven students, and we would spend the first hour going around the room and doing a check-in period. She and I both participated, but we were able to model how much to disclose, boundary issues, a relevant thing to bring to the group in terms of peer supervision.

I come at this from a nursing perspective with a psych/mental health specialty. What was also neat about the experience is that although we came from different disciplines, we really showed a lot of respect for each other’s discipline so that when a student would bring up something that had more to do with nursing care, she would answer. But then she would say, “Well, Sarah has an idea about that.” And if it had something to do with brain anatomy or physiology, I would say what I thought, and then I would say, “But I know that she has a different take on that, and she might be able to talk a little more about the limbic system and how it affects behavior.”

We didn’t think about this, it just naturally occurred that we were modeling collaborative teamwork in this group. And we got to know the students really well because of the processes that we used, and we also got to know each other really well.

The other part about this that was special was the environment. Because I had just been selected to live in one of the Pavilions up on the lawn, and we said, “Hey, we have enough chairs, we have sofas…” So we met there, and we’d have my golden retriever on the floor wagging his tail, wanting to be loved. And we had really ratty old sofas – they were like something you would find at the Salvation Army – and people would come in and you had to be comfortable because there were these thick sofas with pillows and blankets.

It was in a beautiful setting, and people looked forward to coming just because they got to walk through the garden to get to class. Sometimes at the health system I’m a little isolated from the academical village and once a week, it brought me to thinking, “This is really the ideal, to be teaching a seminar in a room that’s like a coffee shop.” And I think that changed the whole dynamic because we could have had the same people sitting in this sterile, bright room, and I don’t think we would have gotten the same outcome. People felt comfortable talking about difficult psychiatric cases. We needed a private environment; we didn’t necessarily need all this academic stuff. We needed more something that would simulate a psychotherapist’s office.

When I had to start teaching this seminar by myself, I grieved for that a little bit, and I thought, “Oh, I’m missing something.” And I also wasn’t teaching in the Pavilion anymore. Well, what I did was, the next semester I had seven students, and I taught it in a small room, and I brought in lighting that was low lighting; we were able to turn off the fluorescent lights and have low lighting.

I did some other creative things, like we’d start out each session with either a guided imagery, or some kind of relaxation or deep breathing for the entire class. It sounds a little touchy-feely, I know. But at the same time, when we looked at the Standards of Care for the psych mental practice, relaxation was in there 27 times in a 14-page document. And so I thought, “What better way to teach that than to say,