An undergraduate leadership course should foster clinical judgment and communication while embracing diversity, equity, and inclusivity in nursing practice. Promoting student engagement through experimental and competency-based learning is also key. Students in an undergraduate leadership course were assigned completed a Hot Topic/Hot Take assignment to incorporate concepts found in the AACN Essentials and prepare them for leadership positions in nursing. Learn more about this creative strategy in this podcast with Dr. Nancy Jo Thompson and Dr. Rumay Alexander. Be sure to read their Teaching Tip.

Test-taking is a prominent cause of anxiety for nursing students. Test anxiety may interfere with academic performance, program completion, and successful transition to practice. Dr. Cristen Walker shares the results of her study that examined differences between test anxiety in nursing and nonnursing students. She discusses implications of the findings and supportive strategies nurse educators can use to help students.

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Many nursing students experience high levels of stress throughout their nursing program. When stress occurs, the student is prompted to seek a balance using available coping mechanisms. Dr. Rebecca Liljestrand describes a 10-week resiliency program with weekly 50- to 75-minute sessions. Each session has the same format: students share a response to a homework assignment and how they used a strength during the past week; participate in a guided mindfulness practice; engage in a resilience presentation; write a response to related research with prompts such as “what I am good at” and “a time when I was resilient;” and share their writings in small breakout groups. The session closes with the three As: an affirmation,  appreciation, or appraisal.

Their article provides more detail on the resiliency program and its outcomes.

Incivility between and among nursing faculty is a national and global phenomenon. In this podcast, Dr. Cynthia Clark, the leading expert on civility, presents characteristics of faculty who demonstrate incivility and describes how to use cognitive rehearsal and other strategies to manage these behaviors when encountered in the academic setting.

Learn more about cognitive rehearsal and how to use it in Dr. Clark's article.

Nurse educators encourage students to bring knowledge forward and apply it to new situations continuously. However, nursing students are rarely asked to apply their liberal arts knowledge to patient care. In this podcast and teaching tip, Dr. Melissa Klamm presents a teaching approach that used a faculty-assigned reading of Plato's Allegory of the Cave along with faculty-developed parallels between the allegory and health promotion and patient education to review before class.

Innovative approaches are needed to deepen students’ understanding of nursing’s history. Drs. Coleen Toronto and Maureen Hillier explain how they use the Hello History AI app for nursing students to experience life-like conversations with Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton. 

You can learn more about this creative teaching strategy in their article.

Dr. Rachel Cox Simms explains how she uses ChatGPT to generate NCLEX style questions for students to review during virtual office hours. With ChatGPT she is able to customize the questions to meet individual students' needs for review. She also discusses considerations for faculty when using ChatGPT-generated questions.

Read more about this in Dr. Simm's Teaching tip.

Active learning strategies for responding to bias often involve students role-playing potentially triggering scenes. A virtual escape room was developed to encourage the same level of active learning, while removing students from the need to playact distressing explicit and implicit bias. The escape room includes several virtual environments depicting different varieties of bias and prompting student responses. In this podcast and article, Juliann Stanis discusses the virtual escape room and why she developed it.

The increasing trend of human and natural disasters in the world has given rise to the importance of disaster preparedness in nursing education. Dr. Jessica Gregg describes an innovative strategy she developed in which students create their own disaster simulations. Students were assigned to the roles of patient, narrator, or triaging nurse who was faced with limited resources and supplies. Learn more in this podcast and teaching tip.

Dr. Beth Tremblay and Dr. Janice Hawkins describe their approach to integrating climate and health topics in prelicensure education with their “energy efficiency treasure hunt” and Climate for Health Ambassador Training. In this podcast, they share specific topics, tools, and teaching strategies you can use to thread climate education throughout nursing education curricula.

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