How to Be a Nursing Instructor

How do you become a Masters-prepared nurse instructor? Well, we have an expert here, Mary King, who's been teaching for over 30 years.

Mary King: But there are many, many, many different ways that you could achieve the Masters degree in Nursing, which the NLN (the National League for Nursing) requires that you have. Now, sometimes small little schools will hire someone with a BSN [Bachelor of Science, Nursing] who agrees to work toward the degree, and NLN will, allow that. But all of our NLN, National League for Nursing, accredited schools require that your Nursing Instructors hold a Masters degree in the field. However, if you have a BSN, and are working toward it then they will allow you to teach, you see.

But many students go straight from BSN, straight to MSN [Masters of Science, Nursing], and "Now, I'm going to be a Nursing Professor!" It is my recommendation that any person who desires to be a nursing educator first know the field very, very well. Work in the field, from the ground up so that you know how to do everything. How can you delegate things, how can you teach someone to do something if you don't know how to do it yourself? And so, I just really believe a prerequisite, regardless of whether you go from one level of nursing to another, to another, to another, to another. Or whether you go straight from a generic program into a Masters program, and straight from there I do not recommend that you go straight into teaching. You must be able to do it before you can teach somebody else how to do it, and it really, really helps to have been in the field.

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