NURS 6910 Week 1 planning manual

1. Capture the live Week 1

Open the registered classroom and create one row for every visible activity. Record its exact name and type, complete action verbs and questions, rubric or scoring criteria, points and course weight, due date and time zone, required and permitted resources, length and format, discussion reply rules, dependencies, attempt limits, submission location, and instructor announcements. Save the rubric version beside the working file.

2. State the Week's reasoning question

For Introduction to Palliative Care: Principles of Hospice and Palliative Care, the durable class question is: What does the prompt ask the student to understand, apply, compare, create, or evaluate? Translate the live activity into one sentence that names the decision or explanation, the required evidence, the audience, and the expected output. If that sentence cannot be written, return to the prompt instead of guessing from a prior Week or third-party example.

3. Build the work in proof order

Define the required concept precisely, apply it to the stated context, make the reasoning visible, and close with the implication the current rubric requests.

Make a rubric-to-evidence matrix before prose: one row per criterion, the evidence or reasoning needed, where it will appear, what the student must personally do, and the test that will prove completion. Draft the highest-risk row first, not necessarily the introduction. Protect time for replies, calculations, format conversion, approvals, and the final upload.

4. Use evidence deliberately

Use the assigned readings first when required, then add current authoritative or peer-reviewed support matched to the claim.

For every source, write a one-line use note before drafting. Distinguish direct evidence from interpretation and local observation. Quote sparingly, paraphrase from understanding, and cite the claim actually supported. If the activity requires current evidence, confirm publication dates and whether an older foundational source is still appropriate.

5. Complete discussions and collaborative work

When the live Week contains a discussion, schedule the initial post by its own deadline and each reply by the response window. A useful reply does more than agree: compare evidence, apply the peer's idea to a different context, identify a boundary, or ask a focused question supported by the course material. The student writes and posts every contribution; a tutor may critique clarity and reasoning before submission.

6. Protect identity, practice, and research boundaries

Do not share protected health information, employer secrets, client identities, private peer content, assessment security material, or unauthorized research data. Clinical encounters, field hours, simulations, observations, interviews, group participation, proctored work, residencies, approvals, attestations, and original data collection must be completed and recorded by the student under the applicable Walden process.

7. Run the Week 1 quality gate

Check task completion, reasoning, evidence fit, examples, organization, citations, file rules, and the student's own explanation of the result.

Then perform a literal instruction audit: every prompt part answered, rubric row visible, calculation reproducible, citation matched, heading and format correct, accessibility checked, file opened successfully, and confidential material removed. Compare against the current rubric, not a saved rubric from another section or term.

8. Submit and close the loop

The student performs the final upload or entry, opens the submitted artifact, confirms the timestamp and file, and saves the receipt. When feedback arrives, record each criterion result, instructor comment, correction, and lesson for Week 2. Contact the instructor or official support channel promptly for a missing, late, or technically failed submission.

9. Defend the learning before moving on

Before closing Week 1, the student should explain the live task, central claim or decision, strongest evidence, method or calculation, important limitation, and next action aloud without reading the submitted artifact. For a discussion, explain what the peer exchanges changed. For clinical, field, research, group, or proctored work, identify which parts the student personally performed and how they were verified. Any point that cannot be explained becomes the first short practice item for the next study session. This oral defense tests understanding more honestly than another formatting pass and turns the finished Week into preparation for Week 2.

Working the vocabulary before working the prompt

Introduction to Palliative Care opens on a vocabulary that feels familiar and is not. Palliative care and hospice care, disease-directed treatment and comfort-directed treatment, symptom burden and quality of life, advance care planning and the advance directive document, surrogate and next of kin, grief and bereavement: each pair gets used loosely at work and precisely in a graduate course. In Week 1, build a one-page term sheet from the assigned readings only. For each term, write the reading's definition, the boundary that separates it from its neighboring term, and one sentence naming what changes if the two are swapped. Do not import a definition from an employer policy, a public information page, or a colleague's shorthand. When the first graded activity arrives, that sheet is what keeps a sentence from drifting, and a response that uses the course's own definitions reads as prepared before the argument even begins.

Reading the rubric row by row on the first graded activity

Open the rubric for the first visible activity and read it as a set of separate questions rather than a paragraph of expectations. For each row, write down three things: the verb it uses, the object that verb acts on, and the weight it carries. A row that says analyze is not satisfied by description; a row that says apply to a named context is not satisfied by a definition. Then locate the heaviest row and ask what a reader would have to see on the page to credit it fully. That row gets drafted first and revised last. Your classroom rubric decides what actually counts here, so copy the live version into your working file and date it, because a rubric from another section or another term can differ in rows, wording, and weight.

What counts as a scholarly source in hospice and palliative work

Start with the assigned readings, because where the activity requires them nothing substitutes. Beyond that, the defensible categories in this subject are peer-reviewed studies and systematic reviews in the hospice, palliative, and supportive care literature, consensus guidelines and position statements issued by recognized professional bodies, and government or public-health data sources where the claim concerns access, utilization, or population trends. Trade magazines, program marketing pages, question-and-answer sites, and undated clinical summaries are not scholarly support, even when the underlying statement is reasonable. Build the ledger now with one row per source: what it is, when it was published, what population or setting it covers, the single finding you can actually use, and the exact sentence in your draft it will support. A source with no assigned sentence does not belong in the reference list.

Three Week 1 mistakes that cost points later

The first is treating the syllabus as the rubric. The syllabus describes the course; the rubric grades the artifact. Fix it by opening both inside the classroom and saving the rubric separately for every graded item you can see.

The second is defining palliative care from the workplace instead of the readings. Local eligibility language, referral habits, and program names vary, and a graduate response built on them can contradict the course text. Fix it by paraphrasing the assigned definition first, then noting any local variation as an observation and labeling it as one.

The third is filing the reading list without use notes. A stack of unread articles becomes drafting-day panic. Fix it by writing one line per reading the day you open it: the claim it can support and the claim it cannot. Ten minutes now removes an hour later.

Setting the ledgers that Weeks 2 through 11 will use

Week 1 is the cheapest week to build infrastructure, because nothing is due against it yet. Create four files and keep them for the whole quarter: the control packet, holding modality, calendar, time zone, and dependency lanes; the rubric folder, holding a dated copy of every rubric you have seen; the source ledger described above; and the feedback ledger, which is empty today and becomes the most valuable of the four. Name them consistently so a search finds them in seconds. Then set one recurring block in your own calendar for classroom capture, placed early enough that an announcement posted mid-week still reaches your plan. Students who feel steady in Week 7 are almost always the ones who did this in Week 1.

Source boundary

Walden's current catalog verifies this Course-Based class context, and the quarter calendar supports positional Weeks. The public catalog does not identify the student's Week 1 activities. The registered syllabus, classroom, rubric, announcements, instructor directions, and official policies remain controlling.

Week 1 questions