Students' and experts' perspectives on three learning and teaching activities

Nursing is a profession that closely related to human life, and nurses are required to demonstrate critical thinking and creativity in providing health care services. However, traditional teaching approaches usually limit students' autonomy and freedom of expressing their thoughts and feelings. In order to develop the corresponding competence of nursing students, I adopted three teaching innovations, namely writing poems, composing songs, and using role plays in a nursing problem-based learning class in a university in Hong Kong. According to students' reflective notes and comments from two international expert reviewers, participating in these activities is a valuable experience and students were able to develop clinical reasoning, empathy, team spirit, motivation to learn, creativity, and ability to summarise and reconstruct knowledge. It is hoped that more innovative learning activities will be implemented, to prepare professional and ethical nurses in the future. It is also hoped that this study could provide other PBL educators some insights in innovative problem-based learning activities.