From leadership research to district action: School of Nursing Climate Commitment: Nursing Faculty Bring Climate to the Classroom

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

In 2021, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) added “the impact of climate change on environmental and population health” into The Essentials: Core Competencies for Professional Nursing Education. Presently, little guidance exists for nursing faculty new to climate education. The year prior, the Nurses Climate Challenge (NCC)—a campaign to educate 50,000 health professionals about health impacts of climate change—launched the School of Nursing Commitment through a series of focus groups and collaborative content development. With an aim of increasing access to knowledge and tools to support education about the health impacts of climate change, the NCC Commitment partners with nursing schools and provides a community of practice. Partner schools use NCC resources in courses and report the number of students educated. Within three years, 61 nursing schools in 30 states joined the Commitment. Participants included academic health centers, research institutions, multi-state schools, and small private colleges, and programs ranged from AD to PhD. Faculty (1) integrated resources into didactic and clinical settings, such as population or organ-system content, leadership, and policy; and (2) used resources to support assignments. In four years, faculty reported educating over 37,700 students, using NCC resources in 439 educational sessions. The Commitment may be valuable for faculty fulfilling AACN Essentials by bringing climate change to the classroom, community, and bedside. Furthermore, the Commitment may be a replicable model for health professional education and inspiring action on climate change.

Study methods

Development of the SON Commitment began with two virtual focus groups of 12 faculty members total from 12 different universities with content expertise at the intersection of climate change and nursing education in late 2019. The NCC steering committee introduced the SON Commitment concept and presented faculty with draft commitment language, which included a description of the partnership, a summary of NCC resources, expectations of the NCC and the schools of nursing (see Table 1), and anticipated benefits for partners. Focus group participants were asked to provide feedback related to desirability, perceived value, feasibility of implementation, and missing components. Faculty feedback was incorporated into the development of the SON Commitment prior to the launch [38,39].

Limitations

While the NCC SON Commitment seems to serve as a beneficial program for nursing students across the U.S. (and potentially beyond), the program has limitations. First, because the NCC SON Commitment does not require a signed contract, faculty and nursing schools are not beholden to their agreement to participate. In some cases, this has impacted the nursing school’s public announcement and promotion of the partnership, utilization of NCC resources, education tracking, and participation in the faculty community of practice.

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Shanda Demorest; Cara Cook; Elizabeth Schenk; Lisa Whitfield Harris; Andrea Earley. School of Nursing Climate Commitment: Nursing Faculty Bring Climate to the Classroom. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2024-05-03). https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph21050589

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.