Building Trust, Accountability and Critical Thinking in Nursing Education
The Framework
Our framework integrates Just Culture principles, the Trust Equation, and META-3 self-regulation assessment to respond to student incidents with both compassion and accountability.
This creates an environment where students can honestly report errors, develop critical thinking skills, and become self-regulated professionals.
We believe in supporting student learning and growth through restorative practices. We recognize that errors are opportunities for learning and that most mistakes happen in the context of system factors. We are committed to building psychological safety by reducing faculty self-orientation—ensuring our responses prioritize patient safety through student development.
Just Culture
A fair, evidence-based approach to responding to student errors and behaviors.
Developed by David Marx, Just Culture provides a decision-making algorithm that distinguishes between human error (unintentional mistakes), at-risk behavior (conscious shortcuts), and reckless behavior (intentional harm). Instead of defaulting to blame or punishment, we use this framework to respond consistently and fairly—ensuring that students receive coaching when they need support, education when they take shortcuts, and consequences only when they consciously disregard safety after being taught.
Trust Equation
Building psychological safety through authentic, student-centered relationships.
Created by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford, the Trust Equation reveals a critical insight: trust erodes when self-orientation is high. In nursing education, this means faculty must examine their own motivations before responding to student struggles. Are we protecting our program's reputation, or genuinely focused on student development and patient safety? By reducing self-orientation, we create an environment where students can be honest about their mistakes, ask for help without fear, and develop into the reflective professionals healthcare needs.
META-3
Developing self-regulated professionals through structured metacognition.
META-3 teaches students to become reflective practitioners through three progressive levels of metacognition: self-awareness (noticing what's happening inside me), self-regulation (adjusting and improving my approach), and self-evaluation (honestly assessing how I'm doing). Rather than simply telling students to "be accountable," we teach them HOW through structured reflection. The goal is students who can honestly assess themselves, manage their own learning and behavior, and hold themselves accountable—not because they're being watched, but because they're professionally engaged.
How It Works Together
Just Culture provides the fair system for responding to student behaviors. The Trust Equation creates the psychological safety that allows students to be honest about their struggles. META-3 develops the reflective capacity students need to become self-regulated professionals.
Together, these three frameworks transform nursing education from a fear-based compliance culture to one of growth, learning, and genuine professional development. Faculty gain clarity and consistency in their responses. Students feel safe enough to take risks and be vulnerable. And most importantly, we prepare nurses who can think critically, reflect honestly, and hold themselves accountable throughout their careers.
About Melinda Murray
I'll be honest with you: I didn't set out to create a framework for nursing education. Like most nursing educators, I just wanted my students to learn, grow, and become the kind of nurses I'd want taking care of my own family. But when I transitioned from hospital leadership to full-time faculty, I started seeing patterns I couldn't unsee.
A Different Perspective
As Director of Nursing Professional Development, over 1,000 nursing students from various programs rotated through our facility every semester. I'd see the incident reports—students making mistakes, programs responding, everyone doing their best. The schools handled things quickly, and I understood they were navigating difficult situations by following policy.
But now that I'm on the other side as faculty, I see what that pressure feels like from the inside. Faculty meetings filled with discussions about various student concerns. Colleagues genuinely frustrated with students who seem to "lack accountability" and are "entitled." Everyone trying hard to do right by students, but the sheer volume of concerns signaling something systemic isn't working.
The Moment Everything Shifted
In one faculty meeting something clicked. I thought about my director role—when I put an employee on a PIP, it meant we'd exhausted coaching. HR was involved. We were headed toward severance. It was a last resort, not a teaching tool.
But in nursing education, PIPs were not punitive, the intent was to support them and given them an opportunity to improve. But students viewed them as punitive, no matter how much we insisted the PIPs were "to help."
That's when I said it: "We cannot control how students perceive us, but we can control how they experience us."
That statement changed how I thought about this work. Before we labeled students as lacking accountability, we needed to ask: Are we giving them clear, consistent expectations? Are we responding fairly? Are we creating a learning environment or a compliance environment? The problem wasn't just about students, some of it was about systems.
Remembering Just Culture
In that moment, I remembered how we used Just Culture in the hospital to analyze behaviors and determine if issues were really individual failures or symptoms of larger system problems. What if that same framework could work in academia? What if we could distinguish between a student who made an honest mistake, a student who took a shortcut, and a student who was genuinely reckless—and respond to each appropriately?
Why I Was Thinking About Just Culture
My path to nursing education wasn't direct. I spent over twenty years in clinical practice—starting as a critical care nurse, then an educator in acute care to being the Director of Nursing Education before becoming an Assistant Professor.
Throughout those roles, I'd seen Just Culture work in acute care settings. In many cases it helped us move from blame to learning, from punishment to system improvement. I knew the framework. I trusted it. And sitting in that faculty meeting, surrounded by frustrated educators, I wondered: could this work in nursing academia?
Three Frameworks Become One
Around the same time, my best friend Dr. Kelli Seaton mentioned the Trust Equation and META-3 in conversation. I looked them both up, and something started connecting in my mind. Just Culture could give us the fair system for responding to student behaviors. The Trust Equation could help us examine our own self-orientation—were we really focused on student development, or were we protecting our program's reputation? And META-3 could teach students how to develop the reflective capacity they'd need as professionals.
I used AI to help me explore whether these three frameworks could work together in nursing education. And that's how The Professional Culture Framework was born—not in a research lab, but in response to a real problem we were all wrestling with.
The Professional Culture Framework integrates:
Just Culture (the fair system), Trust Equation (the psychological safety), and META-3 (the reflective capacity)—working together to transform how we respond to student learning, mistakes, and professional development.
What I Believe
I believe that most students who struggle genuinely want to do better—they just need clearer expectations and consistent responses. I believe that most faculty deeply care about their students but are working with limited frameworks for responding consistently. And I believe that patient safety and student development aren't opposing goals—when we create psychologically safe learning environments, students become more honest, more reflective, and ultimately safer practitioners.
They're system problems that many nursing programs are facing. And Just Culture taught me that when you see patterns of behavior, you need to look at the system first.
Having seen nursing education from both sides—as a hospital director receiving students, and now as faculty teaching them—I understand the complexity. Programs are under immense pressure: accreditation standards, NCLEX pass rates, clinical site relationships, faculty workload. It's not that we don't care or don't know what we're doing. It's that we need a clear, consistent framework for one of our most challenging responsibilities: responding to student errors and professional development concerns.
Where I Am Now
I want to be completely transparent: The Professional Culture Framework is a theory. It's grounded in evidence-based frameworks (Just Culture, Trust Equation, and META-3), and it addresses real problems I see across nursing education. But I haven't implemented it in a formal study yet, so I don't have data to share. What I have is a well-developed framework, a decision-making algorithm, faculty resources, and a strong conviction that this approach could help programs navigate these challenges more effectively.
I continue teaching as a nursing faculty member while refining the framework and sharing it with others in nursing education. I am open to conversations about how we can support both students and faculty better. My unique perspective—having managed student rotations from the hospital side and now experiencing the faculty side—gives me empathy for the complexity everyone is navigating.
An Invitation
If you're a nursing educator who's ever felt the tension between "holding students accountable" and "creating psychological safety," or if you're drowning in student safety concerns and wondering if there's a better way—I'd love to connect.
I'm actively looking for nursing programs interested in piloting The Professional Culture Framework. If you're willing to be an early adopter, to try something new and provide feedback for ongoing refinement, I'd be honored to work with you. Whether you're considering implementation, looking for a speaker, or just want to talk about creating better learning cultures in nursing education, reach out.
This work is hard, and we can't do it alone. But together, we can build something better.
Let’s Connect
'm always interested in connecting with nurse educators, program leaders, and advocates for just culture in healthcare education.
For Nursing Programs
Interested in implementing The Professional Culture Framework™?
I work with nursing programs to:
Provide faculty development workshops
Offer framework implementation
Support policy alignment with just culture principles
Early adopters are welcome—I'm seeking programs to pilot this framework and provide feedback for ongoing refinement.
For Educators
Connect with me on LinkedIn where I regularly publish articles about creating just culture in nursing education.