Dr. Benner, RN, PhD, FAAN, FRCN is serving as Chief Faculty Development Officer. Dr. Benner works with educators to integrate the NovEx online patient simulations and content. Faculty Development efforts focus on preparing faculty to integrate classroom and clinical teaching and learning while integrating the three Carnegie high-end clinical teaching and learning professional domains: 1) cognitive, science, theory and knowledge; 2) practice know-how and clinical reasoning; and 3) ethical comportment and formation.
Dr. Benner directed the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching National Nursing Education Study and published this landmark work in Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation. This book won the AJN Book of the Year Award and the Prose Award for Scholarly Writing for Publishers. Further, she collaborated with the Carnegie Preparation for the Professions studies of clergy, engineering, law, and medicine. She brings the curricular and pedagogical implications of these studies to NovEx Situated Learning faculty development workshops and learning materials. Her goal is to help faculty and educators across disciplines develop profession-specific pedagogical and curricular strategies for today’s students and staff.
Dr. Benner is a Professor Emerita in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. She brings 35 years of experience in nursing education with a research focus on clinical reasoning and judgment, the development of expertise from the novice student to the expert practicing clinician, and nursing errors. Her research contributions are published in From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Nursing Practice, which has been translated into ten languages, Expertise in Nursing Practice: Caring, Ethics and Clinical Judgment, Clinical Wisdom and Interventions in Acute and Critical Care, and Nursing Pathways to Patient Safety. Her research also focuses on articulating “on the ground” knowledge and clinical wisdom of the practicing nurse and nurse educators that may not yet be described or articulated in formal theories, science and technology. Dr. Benner’s current research, in collaboration with Military Tri-Service Nurse Researchers, is articulating the new experiential knowledge gained in caring for wounded warriors from Iraq and Afghanistan and through rehabilitation.
Dr. Benner believes in the potential of NovEx to diminish the Practice-Education gap that currently exists in professions. The NovEx programs provide the learning aids that faculty can use to fill out gaps in their areas of clinical expertise in any semester or quarter long course. In today’s highly specialized world, no one faculty member can cover all areas of any one course at an expert practice and science level. NovEx programs provide the essential state of the art learning resources that help faculty meet the challenges of today’s specialized professionals. Dr. Benner and her colleagues have designed faculty development workshops and learning materials so that faculty can extend and integrate the online learning in the classroom and clinical arenas.
Dr. Benner is a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. She was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Nursing. Her work has influence beyond nursing in the areas of clinical practice, education, clinical ethics and qualitative research methods. She is the recipient of the 2010 President’s Award for Creativity and Innovation in Nursing Education, National League for Nursing.