Tabletop exercises in the nursing classroom: An introduction for nurse educators

A long-standing gap exists between graduate and newly licensed nurse abilities and employer expectations. The National League of Nursing has charged nurse educators to address health and welfare through innovative learning to improve student decision-making for patient care. How, then, can a nurse educator link education to practice, innovate learning, and improve student decision-making for patient care? One option is to use tabletop exercises in the nursing classroom. The tabletop exercise provides a structure for participants to use available knowledge for decision-making to identify or use a process in context. Though often include disaster scenarios and common in disaster education, these exercises have broad healthcare applications to link education to practice. Tabletop exercises are an active, low-stress, high-impact learning strategy carried out in the classroom with students sitting at desks or tables. In an exercise, there is a scenario, a facilitator, participants, and for the given circumstance, an objective, and participants solve an identified problem by making decisions. The after-exercise discussion identifies exercise outcomes. Remediation occurs for identified gaps. This article introduces what tabletop exercises are, provides educator considerations for developing a nursing classroom exercise, and influences to implementing the exercise and its outcomes.