I am not a leader.

I think nursing schools should be promoting followers not just leaders. Followers are better prepared to work as team members in the real world of nursing. It isn't necessary for a student to act in a leadership during clinicals, in fact, doing so may alienate mentors and colleagues and interfere with valuable learning opportunities.

You just have to know when to take charge. As a nurse you are the leader in your patients care. You are the one that is delegating to the nurses aid. You are the one that brings together the interdisciplinary teams. You advocate to the doctor what your patient needs. Does this mean you need to lead all the time? No, you work with a team but just gotta know and be able to step in to lead when the situation calls for it. Show your clinical instructors that you can do both.

You decide who you are, not some prof. What they may "see in you" is what they think you should be. Leader, follower, or something in between; the choice is yours. Personally I think you should tell this Prof. to shove it. You said you get good grades, you don't need him/her to tell you who you are. The person who knows you best is you.

While I am an ER Nurse, I don't automatically take the role of a leader. If anything, I'm more of a reluctant leader. I'll jump in and take that role if nobody else is doing it but a lot of that reluctance is because of my previous training and experience in a leadership role. I very much can start stepping on toes, sometimes quite hard, if I'm not careful. In some situations, I'm more likely to take lead simply because of my background, which is that of a Paramedic. In that role, I'm very used to being the team lead. Sometimes I will defer to another person simply because someone else needs the experience of being a team leader.

While you don't have to be a leader, you do need to know how to do it. The reason is that when you graduate, you very well may end up taking a job where you are the lead team member by virtue of your degree and license. Some of my classmates were hired on to work in skilled nursing facilities and that's where a large number of our LVN workforce works. My classmates are all RN licensed and simply by virtue of being an RN, they hold a higher license level and have sometimes been assigned as Charge after only a couple days of orientation. In my role, while I'm not assigned the duties of the Charge Nurse, I do supervise other members of my department and I do coordinate care tasks with other allied health professionals.