Without a strong leadership skill set, nurses may struggle to navigate the role transition from student to professional nurse in today's health care environment. To initiate a strong foundation for safe and effective nursing practice, it is important to address leadership content and skill development with all entry-level nursing students. Employers of new graduates expect them to be equipped with leadership skills that will enhance bedside practice and improve the care delivered to patients.1,2 Some educators recommend restructuring how leadership is addressed in prelicensure curricula and advocate for threading leadership concepts across the curriculum rather than embedding this content in one course. Additionally, they suggest using engaging strategies to prepare students for embracing the charge nurse roles and responsibilities.3 Traditional strategies for teaching leadership concepts in the classroom include faculty presentations, guest lectures from nurse leaders, or passive reading assignments. The purpose of this article is to explore the use of leadership fables to enrich the learning experience of nursing students.

Leadership Fables

A fable, also called a parable, is a short tale illustrating a moral or ethical lesson. Children often read fables to facilitate moral development, personal judgment, and decision-making skills. Leadership fables offer situations that require leadership skills and actively involve students in the learning process. Fables provide a brief, meaningful leadership story and culminate with lessons learned and takeaways for future reference. These lessons highlight how leadership affects personal changes and changes in others while offering the unique opportunity to evaluate critical situations from the lens of the observer. The lessons learned can be applied to general situations in nursing leadership courses. Examples of leadership fable topics include effective meeting structuring, effective team functioning, adapting to change, teamwork and collaboration, and strategic planning for innovation.4-13 The Supplemental Digital Content, Table, http://links.lww.com/NE/A680, provides an overview of selected leadership fables and key concepts addressed within each lesson.

In Who Moved My Cheese?9 coping and effective adaption skills within the aging process are highlighted. Nurses have used these lessons to appreciate how the aging patient may struggle with coping and engage the nurse in positive effective adaption opportunities.14 The fables Ubuntu!7 and How Stella Saved the Farm8 emphasize the power of teamwork and collaboration, important skills needed to ensure safe patient outcomes.15 These examples illustrate that leadership fables can offer significant value in the classroom setting to allow the student to review a challenging leadership situation and stimulate self-reflection on their own leadership development skills.

Reflective Learning

Leadership lessons contained in fables can be conveyed through reflective learning, during which students are asked to analyze situations from the fable while engaging in the issue. This can be incorporated into learning activities with leadership fables by using structured, focused questions that guide readings, assignments, or class discussions.

Reflection is a thoughtful analysis of experiences and the relationship to their meaning.16 Reflective learning leads to increased moral attentiveness and improved cognitive processing and promotes a deeper understanding of our actions while connecting learning to sociocultural dynamics.17,18 By engaging students in a reflective assignment that connects theory and leadership actions, the student learning outcomes can be achieved at an enhanced level.19 Therefore, using reflective learning as a teaching strategy to convey leadership concepts and skills will add significant value to the lesson.

Leadership Fable Implementation

The innovative, active teaching strategy of using a leadership fable to highlight skills and concepts was initially implemented in a freshman honors course over the last 2 years. The small class size (n = 25) provided a stable environment to test and refine this strategy before expanding it into larger, undergraduate leadership courses. The course is a 3-credit-hour elective for honors students and was conducted by the school of nursing faculty. The topics covered in this course include ethical principles in the context of health-related situations and a module on leadership ethics. A flipped classroom format was used for the live class sessions, for which the students completed preparatory assignments (readings from the textbook, assigned articles, and websites and short videos) to provide an introduction to the topics. The live class time featured debates and discussions, group work, and engaging learning activities.

To prepare for the leadership ethics class session, students were instructed to read Ubuntu! An Inspiring Story About an African Tradition of Teamwork and Collaboration7; define selected terms (organizational culture, conflict of interest, the leader [servant, transformational, authentic], power, succession planning, Ubuntu); view instructor-selected short videos about ethical leadership and on the concept of Ubuntu; and read 2 instructor-selected articles from the nursing literature connecting ethical leadership to the nursing workplace environment.20,21

During the class discussion, students discussed the ethical principles that were evident in the Ubuntu fable and how these principles contributed to the plot. Next, the Ubuntu philosophy was examined as a guide for life, as well as what the impact would be if Ubuntu was no longer valued. To add a context for students, they were asked to describe how they could incorporate Ubuntu's philosophy in campus life and use the principles of Ubuntu in their student life during the next 4 years. The level of the discussion questions was strategically arranged to increase in complexity, beginning with remembering and advancing to understanding/applying, and ending with evaluating/analyzing. Following the group discussion, students formed small groups for the in-class application activity. For this assignment, groups created a brief role-play skit to highlight some ways in which the Ubuntu philosophy can be incorporated into their student life.

Implications

This article highlights an innovative idea of introducing leadership concepts and skills through the pairing of a leadership fable with the reflective learning process. In a survey conducted to assess the impact of the learning activities on achievement of the class objectives, students viewed the leadership fable assignment favorably, commenting it was a "good way to learn how to be a good leader" and "to teach us different methods of leadership." The use of leadership fables is recommended to nurse educators who teach leadership content, as a creative, innovative, and engaging teaching strategy. This strategy can easily be modified for any level of nursing student across all levels of nursing education where leadership is a key curriculum concept.

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