Best assignment?

How about case studies? They are an excellent way to introduce students to real-world problems. It also allows them to model nursing behavior and see some of the pathology behind the theory. Give them all the info and have them chart it.

What about let's say writing an essay. Let your students go to a child development and interact with the kids and compare the Erick Erickson Theory of development. Or to Another place play with it. You can use another theories like Maslow or Carl Rogers.

For our mental health class, we had a few case study assignments. Usually we would get a "report" from the nurse (podcast by our instructor), then we'd have questions that incorporated management/delegation/understanding diagnoses/meds and side effects...

We would have to write a paper with our answers as well as evidence based rationales.

We were not usually given diagnoses, so we used data to come to our conclusions.

One example was a regular ER that could only admit one pt. we had to choose between different substance abuse/intoxified pts to admit. Explain why: alcohol for dts so it's priority...

What about let's say writing an essay. Let your students go to a child development and interact with the kids and compare the Erick Erickson Theory of development. Or to Another place play with it. You can use another theories like Maslow or Carl Rogers.

We had this assignment during fundamentals. We had to do two papers like this. One for older adult and one for toddler and preschooler. We actually were required to incorporate all of the major developmental theories.

We were required to provide service in a senior center for the first paper, and we observed at a child care center for the second paper.

These were at least 12 pages each and APA. They required the use of journal articles as well as our evidence of a manifestation of the developmental levels.

Students could watch a movie, or movie clips, with characters with mental illness (e.g., Silver Linings Playbook, Girl Interrupted, As Good As It Gets) and analyze the character's behavior, create a nursing plan, the underlying patho, reaction to treatment, etc. It could make for a fun group project.. watch the movie together with popcorn while completing a nursing assignment… sign me up!

I showed the movie a beautiful mind and we did nursing diagnosis and pathos. The for another day I showed clips from what about bob- it was fun and they learned. For my class on death and dying I showed you don't know jack- about dr death jack kevorkian. It was great for ethics discussions.

Show a clip of a show like House MD or WebTherapy. Split the class into groups and have them identify at least X many errors in therapeutic communication and give an appropriate alternative. This is especially beneficial because NCLEX is laced with questions on therapeutic communication.

Give students a psych med or class of meds. Have them fill in a chart with indications, common and critical side effects, monitoring, pt teaching. Helps reinforce psychopharmacology that will likely be where most non-psych nurses (i.e. most students) use a great deal of psych content.