Summary of Teaching Plan
Duration: 30 Minutes
Epidemiological Rationale for Topic
In most countries, common cold has caused children to skip school and adults to miss work. The United States reports approximately 1 billion cases of common cold each year with a child getting 6-10 colds and adults 2-3 annually “Common Colds: Protect Yourself and Others,” 2015). During winter and spring, high cases of colds are reported during the year. Common symptoms of colds include running nose, sore throats, and headaches, watery eyes, sneezing and coughing. A nurse should be able to tell from the ineffective airway clearance related to inflammatory process in respiratory tract that one has a cold. Alternatively, they could find ineffective breathing pattern related to community-acquired common colds. Today, many viruses have been found to cause colds with rhinoviruses being the most repetitive. The community does not know about this kind of viruses and how colds acquired from viruses can be transmitted through simple things such as handshakes and door touches. As such, educating the community about common cold would help to reduce the number of cases that the U.S. faced and experience and this would translate to a healthier nation.
Further, the society does not know the treatment and prevention methods that they can use to avoid the virus from spreading. Hence, educating them on such methods assists in promoting health through equipping individuals with knowledge. Through this lesson, the target audience learnt that they could protect themselves and others through washing their hands with soap frequently, staying away from infected people, avoid using unwashed hands to touch the eye. Additionally, America’s vision is to have health people as presented in the HP2020 objectives regarding respiratory. In this objective, the focus is to “Promote respiratory health through better prevention, detection, treatment, and education efforts.” Therefore, teaching children and care providers on the ways of preventing the spread of common cold would reduce the number of children and days the fall sick. This lesson would help in implementing the HP2020 objectives on respiratory, which is education on health problems.
Evaluation of teaching experience
Throughout the teaching, the audience was so attentive and seemed to be interested to learn more about the topic. The staff kept asking question relating to the prevention of common cold. Being part of the session made me enjoy my health profession. Children were very eager to learn how to wash their hands with soap and water during an exercise in the lesson. The children found this activity to be enjoyable hence ensuring learning took place. This form of teaching employed was the social cognitive theory where children learn through practice. In this theory, the teacher “describes the roles of reinforcement and observational learning in explaining health behavior change” (Edelman, 2014 p. 248). The staff and parent paid attention and sang the ‘happy b-day’ song to the children as they washed their hands. This made the children to wash their hands without the urgency to stop achieving one goal of the lesson, which was to teach the learners on how to prevent common colds. Consequently, the children enjoyed the lesson and the understood the message been passed across in the lesson. It would be correct to suggest that the objective was achieve and the experience was overall good.
Despite the positive experience and goals being achieved, there were several challenges encountered in the teaching. It was very difficult to control the session with children being in the room. On several occasion it felt as though parents and staff were distracted and absent minded and they could not comprehend because of the children activities. The staffs had to once in while walk out of the session and this disrupted the session. During interactive sessions, the audience did not respond quickly to the questions asked and this delayed the session, which had to be extended by an extra 10 minutes to cover the objectives.
Community response to teaching
After educating the community, the childcare Centre expressed that they noted a difference in the cases they handled of common cold. Children were not missing to attend lessons at the Centre because of colds. The management noted this improvement and they expressed that the education was important. Additionally, the children learnt the importance of washing their hands after the visit the washroom and before they ate anything. Before the teaching session, the child Centre did not provide children with soap they could use to wash their hands. Hence, they only used waster but this changed after the education and the childcare Centre began providing hand wash and detergent used to clean hands and floors properly.
The staffs have adopted hygiene ensuring that the environment was clean to avoid the transmission of colds through handshakes and doorknobs. They learnt the importance of using sanitizers to clean the floors instead of using bleaches. Moreover, they changed their methods and focused more on disinfections. Additionally, the Centre came up with a rule that each child was to come to school with a handkerchief even if they did not have a running nose. The rule shows that the community got the message and understood the various ways colds can be transmitted. Each child having a handkerchief helps to avoid transmission of colds through sneezes and coughs if the children use them to cover their mouths.
Areas of strengths and areas of improvement
The teaching experience was good and I am confident that the audience understood all that was taught. I was able to deliver the health message appropriately with the materials that I had. The audience including children was interactive making the session to be lively. In addition, the childcare providers and the Centre were very cooperative and they were very eager to learn about the topic on common cold. The strengths of the teaching experience include proper communication, interactive audience, adequate materials, proper preparation, and content presentation. Even so, certain areas that need improvement in my next presentation on the same topic are to have two or three different sessions. Having a session that included children in it affected the delivery of the message and communication process. Parents and staff kept worrying about the children considering that most of them were aged between two and two and a half years. Since learning is a continuous process, I recommend that staff of the child care Centre to continue educating the children on issues concerning common cold. It is also important to acknowledge the efforts undertaken by the management to ensure that they implement whatever was taught in session.
References
“Common Colds: Protect Yourself and Others.” (2015). CDC. Retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/
Edelman, C., & Mandle, C. (2014). Health Promotion throughout the Life Span. Missouri: Elsivier Publishers.
