Kent Blad

Nursing

I find the students love to be challenged. Too often we think that we have to hold their hand for them to have a good experience, but they love to be challenged and to have somebody expect a lot out of them. As faculty, we also need to have high expectations of ourselves. We need to be strong spiritually, but we must also be experts in our fields. We need to have credibility in what we’re teaching, and then bring the spiritual piece together with it. That’s what creates excellence in the classroom. It would be pretty tough for me to be a very poor clinician but expect high things out of the students. It doesn’t matter how much spirituality I have if I don’t know what I’m talking about—I’m not going to hold any weight. We have to have a high standards for ourselves and then high standards for our students, and it’ll come together.