Using Reflective Teaching Program to Explore Health-Promoting Behaviors in Nursing Students

Background The attitudes of nurses toward health promotion affect patients. However, current classroom teaching does not provide nursing students with actual experiences. An experiential and reflective teaching design will help nursing students practice actual health behaviors and record their feelings. This will help nursing students better understand the difficulties and feelings experienced by nurses when encouraging patients to make behavioral changes in clinical settings. Purpose This study aimed to explore the experiences and factors affecting health-promoting learning with reflective teaching in nursing students. Methods This explorative study integrated the "reflective assessment, engagement, and action-reflection" strategy of reflective teaching into the standard health-promotion teaching curriculum to understand the experiences of nursing students when executing health-promoting behaviors. Fifty-seven second-year nursing students from a university in northern Taiwan participated in this course, which was conducted between September 2017 and January 2018. The data were collected from the contents of the reflective journals written by the nursing students and analyzed using thematic analysis. Results The three health-promoting behaviors performed by most of the students were regular exercise, balanced and healthy diet, and adequate daily water intake. The feelings experienced by the nursing students during the execution of health-promoting behaviors included easier said than done, compromise and adjustment, and continuation of health behaviors. Accommodation, peer encouragement, and support were important, facilitating factors of health-promoting behaviors in this study. Conclusions/Implications for Practice The results of this study may serve as a reference for nursing lecturers when employing reflective teaching in the classroom. Reflective teaching designs for actual experiences help nursing students experience the crucial factors and benefits of executing health-promoting behaviors.