Level Up Health Education

Dive Into The Skill of Analyzing Influences

• Jeff Bartlett • Episode 5

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In this episode, Jeff answers a question about teaching and assessing the skill of analyzing influences, or National Health Education Standard 2.

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Welcome to the Level Up Health Education Podcast. My name is Jeff Bartlett, and I'm here to help you level up your health education teaching. Today's question is from Erin, and I see Erin is another Massachusetts health education teacher just down the road from me. Thanks for writing in, Erin. She says, Hi Jeff, how do you teach and practice the skill of analyzing influences? I am teaching this unit with my seventh graders this year, and it has been quite challenging. Appreciate any insight you may be willing to offer. And that's a great question, Erin. Thank you for asking that. National Health Education standard number two is focused on the skill of analyzing influences. And this is a skill that, in my experience, is one that middle schoolers sometimes have the most difficulty grasping. It can be pretty complex to break down, but luckily there are plenty of skill cues and plenty of ways to go about teaching that skill itself. So as I answer this question, I want to go over briefly what the skill is. I want to highlight some of the performance indicators. And in my world, those would be from the middle school grade strand. And then yeah, we'll get into some teaching strategies and some different ways that I go about teaching this as well as assessing the skill too. So standard two of the Shape America National Health Education Standards is that students will be able to analyze influences that affect health and well-being of self and others. That others piece, helping not just yourself but others, was one big revision when they revised these new standards a couple years ago. All of the skills that you'll see ask students to essentially apply them not only for the health and well-being of themselves, but for other people as well. So this skill is dealing with how people, how things, etc., um really around us affect our thoughts, our feelings, our behaviors, our actions, and ultimately our health, but also other people around us too. And one thing I want to emphasize within this uh with these performance indicators and the rationale are that there are all different types of influences. And in the rationale, they talk about personal values and beliefs, perceived and social norms, families, peers, schools, communities, culture, media and technology, policies in the environment. And so we know that these are all factors that can help uh can affect health behaviors and outcomes. And it's really up to you to figure out what influences you want students to be able to analyze. So some people think that's giving teachers too much of a leeway and having to figure that out. Other people really like the flexibility. For me, I like the flexibility. Um, actually, the standard was my first kind of exploration into the national health ed standards. Back in my maybe second year of teaching, uh, there was a project that I inherited from the teacher before me about family and friends, and it was essentially a peer support project. But there it wasn't skills-based, there's really nothing there except for looking at people around you and why they were positive influences on you. And so I took the what were then the performance indicators from the national health ed standards um and I turned them into discussion questions. So this standard itself is kind of cool for me to really break down a little bit. Um, and I want to say that that was not a skills-based activity at all, but it was my first introduction to what these performance indicators are. The performance indicators in the middle school strand. I want to bring a highlight to the verbs, right? So the verbs are what we want students to actually demonstrate. And all of them, there are four in the middle school grain span. They all have either analyze or apply, right? So we have to make sure we define what that means to students. So in our health ed curriculum, we say when we're analyzing something, we're examining something closely, we're trying to figure something out, maybe we're answering questions and things like that. And depending on which skill cues you pick, this could be around individual influences, they could be community influences. We definitely look at how different influences uh expand outwards beyond ourselves, to our community, and to society. And we do that within our three grade levels as well. As my time and teaching has gone on, we've shifted. We are in seventh grade right now analyzing the influence of technology on health, specifically digital and social media. They spend a lot of time on screens and on phones and on apps and things like that. Um, and in grade six, we're also talking about analyzing influences within the context of uh vaping and advertising as well. So there's a lot of ways you can go about this, but no matter what you do, you need a way for students to show that they know how to do this skill. And that comes down to skill cues or steps to analyze influences. And we use these for a variety of reasons. We know that it makes it easier to assess our students. It also using the skill cues or a progression of steps uh allows us to provide better feedback to our students in the form of checklists or rubrics and things like that. And then ultimately, we're able to communicate to students that I'm really looking to see that you can demonstrate this skill. And so when I'm looking at a skill cue or a series of steps or developing questions to ask students, my overarching question is do these questions or these skill cues or these steps, do they allow my students to demonstrate this skill? And so I come back to the performance indicators here as well. For example, if I look at uh 2.82, right? So that's standard two in the eighth grade middle school grade span. Number two, if they're analyzing individual, interpersonal, community, societal, and environmental factors that influence health behaviors, outcomes, and equity, I need to make sure that students know about all those things first and then try to find a series of uh skill keys or steps that will help them get there. So to come back to one of the original parts of the question as far as how do I teach and practice this skill, I want to bring up um a couple ideas. So I have some sentence frames and acronyms and steps that I have students go through. Um in eighth grade, I've introduced an acronym that I call ICE. Now that acronym is not as I think in, I guess, in vogue. That's not the right word, but it is uh certainly that acronym means different things now for a variety of reasons, but it is three steps. Students identify an influence, they break, they apply health content, and then they provide an explanation. So the first step is, and I'll link to a um a step-by-step progression of this in the show notes. The first step is students identify what is the influence, and it could be internal, it could be external. This would depend on uh what is being analyzed here. And then the health content area depends on what we're doing. If you're not teaching this in a specific functional health content area, like I mentioned in eighth grade, uh, when they do this, it's within the content area of human sexuality. In grade seven, when we analyze influences with a different set of skill cues that I'll go over in a minute, uh, we're analyzing technology. You can come back to a dimension of wellness. So that's always my default if we're trying to explain how something influences health and wellness of ourselves or others, no matter what skill I'm teaching, I come back to a different dimension of wellness. And that's why we also start all of our grade levels, all of our um units off, sorry, not units, all of our um classes off, learning about the different dimensions of wellness. It could be a health behavior, it could be a health content area, it really depends. And then the explanation is okay, well, how does that influence impact that content area, right? So for example, if you are analyzing social media and I'm gonna use the six seven trend because it drives me bananas, and even my six-year-old and my three-year-old know about it, and they don't have social media or any any technology like that, right? Um, but you might say something like, hey, that six seven mean hat meme or or video or whatever it is, six seven trend, right, has influenced me to shut that down the hallways when I'm in school. Um, but now I have detention because I'm disrupting the learning environment or whatever, right? So what's the influence? What's a health content area? What's the explanation? This might make more sense as you look at it visually in the link document in the show notes, but I think back to the example there and thinking about Instagram, right, as an influence that's social media uh potentially affecting body image, right? Which is a health content area that we go over uh when we have time to in our human sexuality unit, and then you provide that explanation, right? So Instagram may influence someone's body image negatively because they are constantly comparing themselves to what they see on the internet or something like that. Uh in seventh grade, we use sentence frames and we use more just steps to allow students to, I guess, easy more easily access the skill of analyzing influences. And I find that using sentence frames like this allow us to really focus on scaffolding where we can keep those in place or take them away as needed. So students are identifying the influence, they are looking at what is that impact, how does that have an impact on their behaviors, and then what's the ultimate impact on health? So this is modified from skill cues from RMC Health, and you can find those online. They have a lot of great resources. If you're looking for ways to really go about teaching a skill almost immediately in your classroom, and you're not sure about different steps to teach, they have a great website. I don't think they're fully updated to the new national standards yet, but um they are definitely, excuse me, definitely a good source to go from. So we modified that from RMC Health. So again, as an example, let's say we have TikTok, and in my notes here, I mentioned uh may influence you to shout something funny in the hallway, right? And then how does it impact health? Well, it it impacts my social wellness because maybe I got a detect a detention, now I'm missing hanging out with my friends. Um, in the RMC Health, initially they had number three talk about how the influence in this impact on behaviors had an impact on your future. Um, but we changed the that to the ultimate impact on health so we could connect it to a dimension of wellness, as I mentioned earlier. Um, although we could still do that uh and say how it affects the future. So that's something I'm thinking about as well. As far as teaching tips, my biggest teaching tip for any skill is to follow the skill development model. This is really important. It is what a skills-based curriculum has that's curriculums that are based on skills don't, and that's a logical progression through skills, right? And so you want to make sure you're introducing the skill. I have an example of a unit hook uh in a previous podcast episode, the bowl of milk that I use when we're analyzing influences. And that's just one way to get students really thinking about why the skill is important, and you also want to make sure you model and model, model, model, model away and remodel and do it again as often as you need to. One of the reasons why we always try to have uh at the start of class just a brief period of time to review is because that's one more opportunity for us to model skills and for students to see it in action. Another thing I would keep in mind as far as a teaching tip is to select influences that are relevant to your students and the needs of your students now or what they're into or their interests, but also to the help to the health content area that you're covering. So, for example, I mentioned how we talk about analyzing influences within human sexuality. We have a lot of different options there. We know students come in with a lot of different comfort levels, but that subject on its own is one that we can really analyze a ton of influences. And we can do that in a way without ever knowing what students' actual thoughts and perspectives are as well, too, which is another conversation for another day. Um, but bringing in case studies and scenarios, I think, are also relevant. So uh this skill definitely applies into other skills. So when we talk about decision making later on in our curriculum, we always come back to one of our steps, identifying influences. So uh we can really like keep things going and revisit things as well, kind of loop that back. And I and I find that once you view things through an analyze and influences lens, you start to notice it everywhere. And maybe your students will, maybe they won't. One other thing to think about too is that with this skill is that students can demonstrate this in so many different ways. And so a tip that I would have is to give them choice about how they demonstrate their ability to analyze influences. So, for example, no matter what skill cues that you used, um that you use and whether they're the ones I shared or not, uh, students could share their ability to analyze and demonstrate their ability to analyze uh by writing. They could write a report or an analysis, they could get creative and do so in a in a story or a mock news article or something like that. They can use audio, they could record a brief podcast, they could do something like a TED talk, they could make a video, they could give a presentation, they could make a social media post or a PSA or make posters for the classroom in the hallway, so all sorts of ideas. And all of these things can still assess the skill and the skill cues, but it allows students a flexibility to demonstrate proficiency really in their own way, and it keeps keeps you with the same rubrics, you don't have to print out like four different rubrics, that gets annoying, and that's something to think about. So I rambled a little bit there, but with analyzing influences, this is a really important skill. And what I I always come back to with students is that every action we engage in, there's a reason for that action, and that sometimes is other people. I often point out the same, you know, all these kids with the same type of water bottles or wearing the same types of shoes, right? There's an influence there. Now, maybe you're influenced by peers, maybe you just like it and it fits your uh personality or your curiosity or your fashion sense, right? But there's a reason behind everything we do. In addition to that, everything we do has an impact on our health. Sometimes it's not always apparent in the moment. Sometimes it's not apparent for years down the road, right? Additionally, influences are positive or negative, and sometimes they change. And I mentioned that in my previous, or not previous, but a couple episodes ago when we talked about um the unit hook for analyzing influences, is this allows students to really see how things impact them now, but could impact them in the future, right? And so it's almost giving them the ability to really predict the future too. So those are my thoughts on analyzing influences. Uh, middle school can be hard, seventh grade is hard, but the seventh graders are out of the three grades I teach, the it's the grade that I'm having the most difficulty with. Um but check out the show notes for some of the links to the things I've talked about. Um, I'll link to the podcast episode, I'll link to my document with the acronym I use, I'll link to RMC Health and the National Health Education Teacher uh toolkit as well. And I'll also link to see if you have any more questions. So thanks for sending that in, Aaron. Hopefully that is helpful. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Level Up Health Education Podcast. My name is Jeff Barlett, and if you like this, please share it with your favorite health educators. Please subscribe on your preferred podcast platform. I also have a free newsletter, the Level Up Health Education newsletter, and you said you can find a link to subscribe in the show notes. And as always, thanks for your support.