Essay on Community Teaching Review

Summary of Teaching Plan

The teaching plan included how the activities would run throughout the schedule. The time estimated for the teaching sessions was 50-60 minutes which was to include the delivery, feedback, question and answer sessions. According to the teaching plan, the meeting was to take place at the community centre focusing on the youths in the community as the main audience. The teaching plan focus was to educate the youth on how to prevent depression and suicide. The topic was chosen after several reports on attempted suicide from the emergency department of the hospital. The nursing diagnosis states that young people fall into depression which leads to suicide attempts. The underlying issues that lead to such cases are the inadequate skills among young people in coping with depression.

The goal of community education is to have a reduced number of attempted suicides and the number of people suffering from depression. The goal is to be achieved by teaching the youth various coping skills, how to identify symptoms of depression, how to help someone suffering from depression and how to respond to suicidal ideations. The process of learning is interactive and therefore building rapport with the audience plays a significant role. The creativity in the sessions was to allow an environment that is conducive for the educator and the audience to build trust between themselves. The creative session also involved the use of sticky notes where one would write their concern questions and pin them on the sideboard and the educator would, later on, tackle the question. The learning theory utilized by the educator was the social development theory. The focus of the social development theory was to build on the experiences that the audience had handled before concerning the study topic.

Epidemiological Rationale for Topic

The rationale behind the study is that there is an increasing number of young people dying due to depression and suicide. According to research suicide attempts among the youth began to be reported in 2008 where there was 5.7% of suicide attempts annually. The suicide trend showed an increase among young females by 8.4% in the year 2009-2015. Among the affected population, females between the age of 10-14 years were the most affected having an annual increase in suicide attempts by 18.8% after 2009 (Weinberger et al., 2018). Research has also revealed that there is a high suicide rate among youths aged between 10-24 years and it is also the second leading cause of death. Among the communicable diseases in the world, Depression among the youths has a record of 27% among the total diseases.

Evaluation of Teaching Experience

The teaching experience was a platform that helped to develop some skills. I learnt that the time might be scheduled but at times it may not go according to plan and therefore I should be ready to work with whatever outcomes that emerge. I also learnt that utilizing every minute of the second is necessary such that all of the scheduled topics or segments are covered and therefore, the session does not prolong. In doing so, I as an educator would have to be thoroughly prepared to handle any form of questions that arise. I realized that in part of rapport building with the audience, they tend to question the educator’s competency through asking challenging questions to gauge the educator’s response. Therefore, as part of the community teaching process, the educator needs to do extensive research and have probable responses to key areas of the study topic.

I learnt that having identified my target group, I could have used this knowledge to prepare more creative sessions that would enable the interactive process to be more engaging. However, the use of sticky notes during the interactive sessions was a positive move. It helped most of the audience who were not confident to speak in front of a group to be able to give their feedback and also ask questions. I realized that getting the audience to stay and fill in evaluation questionnaires is not an easy task since they are all in a rush to leave the meeting after it ends.

The skills that I used in teaching this community group were the general skills that includes, listening skills; when the audiences give back responses, as the educator I had to be keen to pick out the key areas that needed to be addressed and also pick out what they as the individual are raising as a concern for themselves, Observation skills; employed in monitoring the audience as they engage in the different exercises, how they respond and their behavioral reactions to key areas of the study topic, paraphrasing; used to emphasize the response from the audience to give it more meaning, repetition; I used this skill to put emphasis on critical areas of the study such that the audience could grasp what is said, affirmations; I affirmed responses from the audience that were in line with the study to give them more confidence to continue engaging and attention to details; I generally observed the mood of the audience, how specific individuals interacted, the level of engagement, the appearances of different individuals, that enables to identify if there is need for concern and action to be taken if a possible patient can be identified.

Community Response To Teaching

The audience in attendance was a response from the general community call. The attendance was a sign of agreement from the community that action needs to be taken to address the depression and suicide rates within the locality. The members who attended the meeting were volunteers aged between thirteen and twenty- eight-year-olds. The different age groups showed their knowledge on the subject and experiences from different perspectives. It was also recognizable that almost every person who attended the meeting had a story to tell of their experience with depression and suicide.

The evaluation feedback showed that the audience appreciated the time given to them to learn about depression and suicide. Some of them expressed that they had been in situations that they did not know how to handle and therefore, they thanked the entire team for availing themselves and equipping them with skills necessary to handle a case of depression and suicide. The general response from the audience was positive that the study topic was necessary and that they learned from the educative process.

The interactive sessions revealed that the topic was a subject that the audience was willing to discuss and learn more about. There were a lot of questions asked and experiences shared during the educative process. I felt that there need be a follow-up session to have further discussions on the topic based on the number of arising questions during the feedback session. The time allocated did not allow for all of the questions asked to be answered in detail. The other arising matter was that most of the depressive cases were linked to the high school age group as a result of school bullying and not being able to fit in. Therefore, there is also a need to address the underlying cause of depression to reduce the reported numbers and also eliminate suicide attempts.

Areas of Strengths and Areas of Improvement

The first area of strength in the community educative plan was that the plan identified a topic that was relevant to the community. It is a strength because it addresses the issues that the community is dealing with and one to which they can relate and give responses. The topic helps the community to learn how to handle a suicide case and how to report such an emergency. The plan teaches the community to know how to identify an individual dealing with depression and how to help them. It also helps the community know how to prevent the rise of depression and suicide.

The second strength of the educative plan is the ability to specify the target audience and engage their thoughts and assumptions in a discussion. The research done before the community education revealed that the majority of suicide attempts and depressive cases were the young people between the age of ten and twenty-four years. Therefore, I would say that it was a success that these age groups were represented in the community education and that their views on the subject came out and the specific experiences they had been part of were part of the interactive process.

Lastly, the use of an interactive approach of the study was a strength and the major success of the educative meeting. The ability to interact gave the audience a chance to express themselves and feel that their opinions mattered and that their voice was listened to. The interactive process also allowed a chance for some of the audience that carried past burdens to be able to freely share, open up and recount the experiences. The approach gave light to new areas that the youth in the community were dealing with that need to be handled and discussed in a future forum.

The first area of improvement would be the lack of dividing the audience according to age group. It came out later on during the study that all of the audience had some knowledge of depression and suicide, however, they differed in some aspects of the experiences they had. Therefore, to be able to handle the most sensitive areas of individual responses, future forums would be keen to have audience groupings according to age differences. The divisions would also allow the different age settings to be more open about their struggles and how to cope with them.

The second area of improvement is the need to involve more energy building exercises in between the discussions. The exercises are important such that there is a break of monotony and tension built from the sharing of experiences. The exercises are crucial to the educative session as it helps to re-energize the audience, lift their mood and set a transition from one discussion to another. It also gives the educator time to take in the responses that are given during the sessions and prepare correct responses.

Reference

Weinberger, A. H., Gbedemah, M., Martinez, A. M., Nash, D., Galea, S., & Goodwin, R. D. (2018). Trends in depression prevalence in the USA from 2005 to 2015: widening disparities in vulnerable groups. Psychological medicine, 48(8), 1308-1315.