Shifting Health Education From Self to Others

I want to encourage you to think about a mindset shift. A mindset shift relating to your curriculum. A shift relating to your students. Ultimately, a shift in how you decide to teach health education. This shift is based on changes made to the SHAPE National Health Education Standards in 2024, specifically the addition of "...the health and well-being of self and others" at the end of every standard.

Old: "How do I stay healthy?"

New: "How do my actions, choices, and skills affect both me and others?"

Traditional health education focuses on improving individual outcomes. I would argue that even traditional skills-based health education is focused on improving individual health outcomes. That is shifting, though. 

In today's podcast episode, I talk through how to make that change: using information from the NHES to help you, what it could look like for each skill, and why we should make this mindset shift. This is very much a work in progress for me, but as I continue to work on it, things become clearer.

I'll be honest: I ramble a little in this one. It could be a little tightened up. Heck, I barely talked about the language shift in the NHES I mentioned in the opening paragraph of this email. But, I think you'll get the picture.

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AI Disclaimer: I outline or script my podcasts; all words are my own.

Transcript

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Welcome back or welcome to the Level Up Health Education Podcast. My name is Jeff Bartlett, and I'm here to help you level up your teaching. In today's episode, I want to talk about a shift, and I want to encourage you and challenge you to think about a shift, a shift in your thinking about your curriculum. For so long, health education has a has been about individuals' health and the health of one person, teaching individuals what they can do to be, quote, healthy, whatever that means. What do they need to do for their nutrition or exercise? How can they make good decisions? How can they set goals for themselves? And I want to encourage the focus from shifting or of shifting the mindset of how do I stay healthy to the mindset of, well, how do my choices and my actions and the skills that I use or don't use, how do they affect not only me, but also other people? This is a shift that is based on the changes that were made in the national health education standards put up by Shape America back in 2024. So before we get going, I want to highlight some of those changes that can help you encourage this new mindset. The information I'm sharing comes from the Shape America National Health Education Standards Educator Toolkit. And when they are talking about what has changed in the national standards when they were updated in 2024, they highlight a couple things. So one of the things that I want to highlight, one of the items, is that they are focusing on overall health and well-being that, quote, capitalizes on the strengths and resources within a student, their family, school, and community, and the emphasis on, quotes, preparing students with the skills and functional health info they need to make meaningful steps to support their health and way be well-being throughout their lifetime and understand health as it relates to those around them. So there's a shift, and it's outlined in this visual that I'm looking at from health or health behaviors to overall health and well-being. And the biggest one that I want to emphasize today is that shift in the middle, and it's a shift from enhancing personal health to supporting health and well-being of self and others. And underneath that it says to focus not only on the individual, but also those surrounding them. So there are new concepts in these standards, including strength in assets, um, health literacy, boundaries, consent, equity, communicating with others, all sorts of things that help us make this mindset shift. For so long, health education has been taught through that individual lens, right? About individual choices and what people do people do for themselves. But again, this new shift encourages us to think about how health impacts others. It also encourages us to zoom out and look at larger systemic or social structures that impact health as well and to address these big picture causes. For example, let's take exercise. If we're teaching the benefits of exercise, right? I can wake up in the morning before school, I can go down to my basement, hop on my bike, which is hooked up to a trainer, which is connected to a computer, which is connected to the internet, which gets me on Zwift and allows me to work out or race against other people virtually, right? And I can do that, and that's great. There are a lot of things that allow me to be able to do that. And a lot of those things, right, are based on where I live, where I was born, my education, all these things that other people don't have access to. So we can also look at it through this lens of the social determinants for health. At shape, uh, at Shape in Kansas City, I went to Drew Miller's presentation on the social determinants of health, which was phenomenal. And I'm going to definitely incorporate some of that information into my teaching as well. So my point is that yes, we're telling someone to exercise and look what I can do, that's great. But why am I able to do that? Why aren't others necessarily able to do that? What factors outside of their control can impact that? But I want to get back on track because now I'm shifting gears a little bit here as well. By focusing on how how health impacts others, we also have a greater ability to connect to different dimensions of wellness, which is something that I've been thinking about as well. When we introduce our 10 dimensions in grade eight, and we do three in grade six and in grade seven, right? We're then thinking about how does working on this wellness for ourselves impact those around me. This also ties into our skills from our national standards, which I'll get to in a minute. And no matter what we're teaching, even with an individual behavior, whether it's setting of a goal or making a decision, we can ask students to really think about how does this affect others? And we're going to get into detail here by breaking down these different standards from our national health ed standards and connect this mindset to each one. For example, if we take a look at analyzing influences, I think about Performance Indicator 283 to analyze how various influences affect the health and well-being of people and communities in different ways. That one is ideal to see how health affects and impacts people differently, because you can take a look at different types of influences and think about how they impact people differently based on a variety of factors. If we look at the skill of accessing information, and I should have said I'm using the middle school performance indicators here, I think about standard 382 and identifying supports and barriers to accessing valid and reliable health info, products, services, and other resources. So maybe there's a case study you put out to your students and ask them like what are these barriers that are preventing people, whether they are internal barriers like influences or external barriers like accessibility, accessibility to different things, why can't they get this information and really thinking about it through that lens? If you look at interpersonal communication, there are so many that make sense here. It's hard to pick a specific performance indicator that would cover this because in some ways they all do. But how does your communication or lack of communication or your communication style, how does it affect a relationship? How does it affect a friendship? How might it negatively affect relationships with people around you or positively? These are all questions you can have students think about. And yes, communication can be a skill that they practice individually, right? Making sure they're using effective skills or uh communicating boundaries or using refusal skills, all those things are great. But then thinking about okay, by doing these or not doing these skills, how are we impacting others, positively or negatively? Decision making, the whole skill makes sense, right? How do my decisions impact others? Middle schoolers who I teach are very egocentric. They think a lot about themselves. If you're working with a decide model, when we're looking at evaluating the decision, that's a great opportunity to discuss the impacts of a decision, not only on yourself, but on other people. And based on the scenario they're working through, you can specifically identify those people. We also go back to thinking about when you need to make an individual decision, a supported decision, or a collaborative decision, as outlined in Performance Indicator 583. Goal setting. We can think a lot about this as well, thinking about how you might collaborate with others to support each other as you work towards a common goal or a shared health goal. And again, thinking about how the goal might impact other people, whether it's accomplished or not, is something to think about here. When we shift to practicing healthy behaviors or self-management, the whole idea about encouraging and modeling behaviors fits into play here, right? So if you want, for example, to be the person who is saying no to different substances, or you want to be someone who is choosing to do something about your nutrition, right? Pre-game with your sports team, um, really encouraging and modeling those behaviors, what can what impact can that have on your teammates? As one example. And then we shift to the skill of advocacy and thinking about the idea of advocating for different audiences and what the impact of advocacy is, or on the other end, what is the impact of not advocating? If we don't address this issue, what might happen? And so when you're looking at these standards and standard 881 about analyzing opportunities to advocate for the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities, that's something I'm thinking about here as well. And 882, where you are determining if you are collaborating individually, or sorry, if you are advocating individually or collaboratively, that ties into play here. So this also works with different functional content examples. I think about vaping, and there's a scenario with peers and how your actions may not only impact you but others. For example, if you choose a refusal skill that helps you, great. But maybe you choose a refusal skill that can help your friend get out of the situation too. Or on the other end, if you choose to vape, what are the consequences if we trickle down, right, to other people in your life? Maybe the sports teams that you're on, maybe you're standing academically in your school with your family. When we talk about the content area of mental health, how can we support friends, peers, and family? What's what are the benefits of doing so? What are the drawbacks or negatives of not doing so? So hopefully you can see now that this is not the hardest shift to make. It's not really a hard mindset shift, but I think it's something that is important to point out. And so, how do we make this happen? Well, let's talk strategies. First, I would look at what's already in your curriculum. That's what I say, number one, when you're looking at making any changes, look for opportunities that already exist. If you are teaching decision making, if you are teaching goal setting or communication, there are already opportunities for students to analyze and take a look at how their decision, skills, and health behaviors affect others. You could tie reflection questions onto the end of assessments or projects and skill practices. You could use visible thinking routines that get students to really think this through. And again, I would find relevant performance indicators similar to the ones that I've talked about. So, why should we do this? Well, doing this helps our students realize that health and wellness go way beyond them as individuals and that they have power. And that power can help impact people positively or it can have a negative effect on people. It also connects individual behaviors or actions that people take to larger, more systemic forces, right? Really taking a look at big picture causes, whether it's social determinants of health or otherwise. It also emphasizes the importance of support when trying to improve our health and how other people can help us achieve what we're trying to do. And it also really interconnects uh relationships and community well-being with individual health. We are then also building student response uh responsibility socially by getting them to think about things outside of just themselves, and it also helps with empathy and perspective taking. So I highly encourage you as you're going through your teaching in the next couple days and the next couple weeks to really think about how I can shift my students' mindset from hey, how do I stay healthy, to how do my skills, choices, actions, etc. affect not only me, but other people. As I listen back on this, it seems a little scattered. I had uh an outline here and it was a little bit messy, but maybe I should have tightened it up a little bit. I'm not sure. But anyway, thank you for listening. I'd appreciate any feedback, and uh, we'll see you next time.