If you can, let her hatch some eggs, it's a great experience, and you'll get healthy happy chicks and hen with little to no effort from you. You can find fertile eggs from small farmers or feed stores.
However, if you simply cannnot have more chickens right now, I have used this technique and it seemed to help break a hen from her sulking brood (she was chased off her fertile egg nest by a dominant hen and didn't settle well enough for me to want to give her any more eggs, so I didn't use her to brood this time.)
This is what I did. Every time I was out, I gently lifted her out from the nest box and set her down away from the coop in the main yard next to some really, really yummy treats that she liked. (They have to be really special treats for her that the others cannot steal from her.) It's also best if she has to walk a ways to get back to the coop and that there are enough treat so she has to linger a little to eat it all.
At first she was annoyed, but ooooh, those were her favorite treats. I kept doing this over the week, at least several times each day, and eventually I saw her out more and more so that by the end of the week she came and ran to great me with the treat bucket. Brooding was finished.
She may have just been ending her brood, but I really do think it helped. We've used positive food reinforcement for training dogs a lot, so I tried the technique with her as a chicken and I honestly think it did help. Animals are amazingly driven by their appetites.
HTH
Lady of McCamley
