Frederic Bachman Lieber memorial award, Sharon L. Sims

"Dr. Sims is the faculty member about whom I have received more unsolicited testimony regarding her teaching excellence than any other person in my two-decades-plus time at Indiana University. Students regularly stop me in the corridors to comment on her abilities."

—Angela Barron McBride, university dean of the IU School of Nursing

“I can say that she is one of the best teachers I have ever seen,“ wrote Melinda Swenson of Sharon Sims, her teaching partner for the past nine years. "Her teaching is characterized by openness to all possibilities—new learning, new ideas, new voices, new approaches."

Her students clearly appreciate her talents—in the past two years, her courses have been rated between 4.61 and 5 on a 5-point scale. They praise her ability to stimulate critical thinking, to interact effectively with students and to guide them through difficult material.

"Nursing is an applied science and art, and it isn’t enough to learn and recall facts, especially when the world is changing so rapidly," wrote Sims."I began to develop and try teaching methods that enabled students to be responsible for their own learning, to experience more directly what they know and don’t know. My goal is for students to experience a kind of thinking in the classroom that mirrors the thinking they must do in clinical situations.”

Sims has taught courses in pediatric health care, research methods and nursing theory. She also has served since 1996 as the chair of the school’s Department of Family Health and co-founded the Family Nurse Practitioner Master’s Program. Sims received a Teaching Excellence Recognition Award in 1999 and was selected to the Faculty Colloquium for Excellence in Teaching (FACET) in 2000.