Caring & Creativity

by Melissa L. Weber

When Instructor of Clinical Practice Christa Newtz, MS, RN, saw The Ohio State University Provost Bruce McPherson on the Zoom faculty meeting, she expected a big announcement about progress on the building. Instead, he congratulated her as the winner of the 2020 Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Lecturer.

The award was a complete surprise. “I’m so grateful. I get to do what I love every day,” she said. Newtz confesses to a “nervous excitement” every day when she comes to campus.

“OSU has been part of my heart since I was a kid,” said Newtz. She was born in Columbus at what was then University Hospitals while her parents were students. She grew up in northeast Ohio and then followed in her parents’ footsteps by attending Ohio State. She now has three degrees from the university: a bachelor’s degree in nursing, a master’s in psychiatric mental health nursing, and a master’s in community public health nursing.

Newtz believes the most important part of teaching is developing positive relationships with the students. “If you want to engage students in learning, you have to engage them as people first,” she said. “They have to know that you care about them.”

“Fortunately, we already had built relationships when we moved online,” she said of the challenges of teaching this spring. “I tried to keep the class as much the same as I could.” Instead of live in the classroom, she taught live using technology, with Zoom. She maintained regular class times and her standard office hours with an open Zoom room that students could visit if they had questions.

“The students just went with it,” she said. “A few couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi, so we recorded everything. My comfort is in the classroom, but it went well on Zoom. Students were happy to be together, to interact and talk. The class was Therapeutic Communications and students really appreciated being able to talk about how much our world changed! Students who attended the virtual office hours usually just wanted to talk about and process what was happening around them,” she said.

Newtz, who helped found a wellness program called “Banding Together for Wellness,” likes to remind her students to make self-care a priority. “I think bringing humor to the situation helps,” Newtz added. “I kept thinking, ‘How can we still have fun?’” She decided to share some of her own family’s creative activities during quarantine with her classes, including dance videos and art projects. Students said these moments were some of their favorites of the semester.