In this paper, we aimed to discuss the relevance of the constraints-led approach for nurse education. We see this approach as an important innovation compared to traditional education in which students merely have to follow-up verbal and/or written explicit instructions. With the application of the constraints-led approach in nurse education, students are facilitated to learn attuning to contextual information, already when learning basic nursing skills, through search, discovery and exploration. Based on nonlinear pedagogy and self-organization, we tried to explain the importance of learning through the interaction between student, learning environment and task. With this paper, we want to emphasize the importance of designing learning exercises that facilitate nonlinear learning and self-organization. Adding a limited number of explicit instructions to help students in accomplishing a learning exercise may be beneficial in some situations.
