Enhancing Innovative Pedagogical Change Through Improvement Science

This Faculty Learning Toolkit was developed to provide practical, evidence-informed guidance that helps faculty reflect on their teaching practices and identify manageable ways to improve student learning and academic performance. Creating meaningful learning experiences requires more than simply delivering content; it requires intentional instructional strategies that actively engage students in their own learning.

I chose to create this toolkit because active engagement through game-based review (GBR) has been widely studied to determine its impact on knowledge retention, critical thinking, classroom participation, and overall student success. As a nurse educator, I have observed that even small, intentional changes in instructional design can significantly increase student engagement and promote deeper learning. These observations, combined with the growing body of evidence supporting active learning, inspired the development of this resource.

Designed as a self-paced learning experience, this toolkit guides you through a series of brief self-assessments, interactive activities, and reflective exercises to evaluate your current teaching practices, identify opportunities for growth, and explore evidence-based strategies that promote active learning.

Rather than prescribing a single “best” way to teach, this toolkit provides a structured framework to support reflection, experimentation, and continuous instructional improvement. With the completion of the learning pathways, you will have identified practical strategies and developed an action plan to create more engaging and effective learning experiences for your students by incorporating GBR into your classroom design.

Learning Pathways:

Pathway 1: Reflection

Pathway 2: Engagement

Pathway 3: Application

Pathway 4: Design

Pathway 5: Evaluation

Chris Katzberger, MSN-Ed., RN

ckatzberger@crimson.ua.edu

Doctoral Student, University of Alabama

I hope you find this toolkit to be a valuable resource that enhances your teaching knowledge and supports your ongoing professional growth.

My experiences across multiple educational settings—from elementary to higher education—have shaped my understanding of the powerful influence instructional practices have on student learning. Before becoming a nurse educator, I spent 13 years as a bedside nurse, where I developed the clinical expertise that became the foundation for teaching pre-licensure nursing students. For the past five years, I have taught in an associate degree nursing program while also serving as an adjunct faculty member in an online Bachelor of Science in Nursing program.

Throughout my teaching career, I have continually sought innovative instructional strategies that foster active learning, critical thinking, and long-term knowledge retention. Through my doctoral improvement science project, I used a continuous improvement approach to develop, test, and refine game-based review strategies that enhanced student engagement and academic performance. The findings from those iterative improvement cycles, together with current educational research and learning theory, served as the foundation for this Faculty Learning Toolkit.

Although this toolkit was developed to support nursing education, the use of GBR as an innovative pedagogical strategy extends beyond nursing and can be applied across a wide range of educational disciplines as well as a variety of educational levels.

Student Responses to GBR

★★★★★

GBR activities allowed me to apply information I learned in a fun way that facilitated community among the class.

★★★★★

Takes a different approach in an entertaining way to actively recall previously taught information.

★★★★★

It helped me rationalize the information into applicable knowledge instead of pure memorization of a fact.