Teaching to the three apprenticeships: designing learning activities for professional practice in an undergraduate curriculum.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently completed a series of comparative studies that examined components and best practices in professional education and practice across five professions (clergy, law, medicine, nursing, and engineering). Across these disciplines, three apprenticeships were identified as necessary components of education for professional practice: an intellectual or cognitive apprenticeship, a skill-based apprenticeship related to clinical judgment and practice, and an apprenticeship to the ethical comportment or behavior of the profession. Although nursing education has a strong theory and clinical practice base historically, the comparative study of nursing education by the Carnegie Foundation found limited integration of the apprenticeships. Using an exemplar, this article discusses intentional design of learning objectives and activities to integrate learning across the three apprenticeships with an emphasis on key elements for professional practice in nursing.