This article, titled “Transforming Curriculum for a Nursing Leadership Course: A Collaborative Approach”, written by Barbara B. Desimone describes a project that intended to enhance course participant’s competence perceptions and satisfaction using collaborative teaching strategies. The author formulates the meaning of transformational leadership, by stating that transformational leadership is a process of mutual motivation and morality increase by leaders as well as their followers. The duties of transformational leaders include teaching, commitment, inspiration, application of change, and representation of the group. In the eyes of his followers, such a leader must be the right and proper person for this function. The article notes six capabilities that should be possessed by transformation leaders: communication, association, sanction, delegation, initiation, and achievement of external legitimacy.
The author describes the purpose of the Nursing Leadership Course curriculum transformation. It is confined to strengthening transformational leadership abilities of the nursing students through including every course participant’s perceptions of this topic into the Nursing Leadership Course curriculum. To do this effectively, the students and faculty evaluated each other’s capabilities by filling out a Leadership Performance Competence Profile that was later used to direct the course activities and teaching strategies. The Profile demonstrated that the competence of sanction was believed to be a mutual weakness among all the students. After the course had ended, the Profiles were filled out once again, and the results revealed an increase of all six leadership capabilities.
The article indicates the purpose of the project, as intent to influence group competence perceptions of transformational leadership, after those perceptions have been included in the curriculum of the course. The project, however, was not designed to formulate one precise theory of leadership. After determination of each other’s strong and weak aspects, the requirements and objectives of the course were established. These objectives consisted of a change project, clinical activities, clinical practicum, and oral presentation. The results of the Profiles were used as guidelines for evaluation and integration of each objective, particularly the clinical activities and clinical practicum, as they were implemented into this course for the first time. Teaching strategies directed to strengthen such competencies, as a sanction, delegation, initiation, and external legitimacy achievement were developed and introduced.
The methodology called “interactive teaching”, which included the sequencing of classroom discussions, classroom questioning, and the lecture was being followed by the participating teachers. A change proposal project was designed, implemented, and evaluated by each student in order to evaluate the individual ability of transformational leadership. Every project included an overview of encountered difficulties and a plan of change process evolvement. It turned out, that choosing a change project that would correspond to the student’s clinical agency position was the most difficult task, as well as combating resistance from the side of nurse administrators. All course participants had acknowledged the fact that mentoring and team learning turned out to be priceless experiences valuable to any new graduate. Most of the students have noted that such aspects of the clinical practicum, as managing patient care and mentoring were invaluable to their experience in the field. Some participants have commented that they were feeling more like the “real nurses” than students during the management of large patient cohorts. They were able to get involved with such nursing roles, that they have only previously heard or read about. The students also reported that in the future they plan to put their nursing and mentoring roles from this course on their resumes.
References
Desimone, B. (1996). Transforming Curriculum for a Nursing Leadership Course: A Collaborative Approach. Journal of Professional Nursing, 12 111-18.