Traditional teaching in the United States - as in other developed,
             industrialized nations - has been based on a hierarchical model in which
             a teacher has all of the authority in the classroom and in which students
             learn through rote drills and memorization of the facts that the teacher
             presents to them. However, while some types of knowledge are best
             conveyed in this traditional fashion (such as irregular verb formations
             and mathematical formulae), for most other types of knowledge an non-
             traditional form of learning is both more enjoyable and more productive.
             This is certainly true of the ways in which nurses should be educated:
             Some facts must simply be memorized but most of nursing education must be
             conducted through a more active, engaged approach to learning
             There are many different forms of non-traditional - i.e. non-
             hierarchical - teaching and learning. Perhaps the most important (and one
             that has certainly won wide-spread acceptance in many universities today)
             is Constructivist teaching. Constructivism is based on the idea that
             learning is as natural to humans as breathing air. We can't help doing
             it, especially when we are children. Our desire to find out how the world
             works is deeply programmed into our brains, encouraged over the
             generations by evolutionary selection. But while learning is natural,
             Eble (1993) reminds us that teaching is not and much of the goal of
             constructivism is an attempt to create the best possible match between
             the natural desire for children to learn (and their inherent skill at
             doing so) and the artificiality of the classroom environment.
             Brookfield and Preskill (1999) argue that the standard way in which
             nursing education has been performed - the lecture - is one of the least
             useful methods of conveying the needed knowledge and especially the
             needed s...