Skills-Based Health Education: 7 Ways to Level Up Your Teaching

You can improve your skills-based health education teaching and curriculum without a major overhaul. In today's episode, I go over 7 strategies you can use in order to "level up" your SBHE teaching and/or curriculum. These strategies work for both new and veteran teachers alike.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• RMC Health: Skill Cues
• The Essentials of Teaching Skills-Based Health Education

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Transcript

Tempo: 120.0

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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 review seven ways that you can, quote, level up your skills-based health education teaching, whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro. First, though, I am planning my first guest interview, and we're going to be talking about using AI and health education today. So if you have specific questions about that topic, about workflows, about programs, about prompts, please let me know either via email, which is in the show notes, or by clicking the send Jeff a message link in the show notes as well. You can text one in there or even leave a voicemail. And we will do our best to get to all questions. We may need to uh you know combine some and things like that, but we'd love to hear from you. I have my own questions for my guests, but I'm sure all of you have questions as well. And now on to today's episode. I get a lot of questions from teachers about how to start out with skills-based health education. And so I want to tell a quick story about my first experimentation with the national health education standards and skills-based health education. And this was for a seventh grade unit. This was my first or second year of teaching. And when I started teaching, I inherited a project and it was called the Family and Friends Project. I could probably find those original documents for this project, I think, uh, on my backup drive for my computer or the computer I had back then. Uh, I might even be able to find a hard copy somewhere at work, but I'll explain what I can remember. The gist of the project was this. Students identified family members or friends and wrote a little bit about them. We're talking just a few bullet points, nothing crazy, nothing substantial. I don't even remember the exact prompt or description for the project or a rubric or anything like that, but I think it might have been geared towards support networks and how people in your life support you. Most students did this on a poster. This was way before we were one-to-one. And some students were more creative than others. And I remember having just piles of posters in my room to grade. Anyway, this was not a skills-based assessment. The curriculum at the time was not skills-based. So when I started taking grad classes uh at BU with Sarah Bennis as my advisor, I started looking at different performance indicators for the National Health Edwards. So by the time I adjusted this, this would have been my second or third year teaching. And I looked at National Health Ed Standard number two, analyzing influences. And my first foray into these standards, it was not to make anything skills-based or to develop a skills-based assignment or a project. I simply took a look at the performance indicators and I created discussion and reflection questions for students to answer as part of the project. So I added a personal reflection onto this pre-existing project. And that was it. That was before we took the deep dive into revamping our whole curriculum. It was before anything else. It started with, I think, two or three performance indicators and reworking them into questions for students to answer. So that's my way of saying, and I still hesitate to promote this, but start in a way that works for you. Your skills-based health at journey should start in a way that works for you. Think of a small way to start and then start even smaller than that. Forget about one entire unit or one lesson or even just one assignment. Start with one performance indicator. Work that into whatever you're doing, and discuss your questions in my place were a great place to start. Now, I do want to be clear that a skills-based sub-led curriculum versus one that's just based on skills or one that is heavily content-based. The difference is the development of skills, not just practicing a skill once, not only explaining it, but the development of skills over time using the skill development model. I actually had Holly Alpern in my classroom the other day, the other co-author of The Essentials of Teaching, Skills-Based Health Ed, the textbook. She was in my room observing two of her practice students from the University of New Hampshire. And this was something that she was talking about with myself and with her students as we were talking about curriculum after they taught. With that being said, though, I understand more than anyone the realities of day-to-day teaching. Starting small does make things realistic. And by beginning in a place that works for you, you're more likely to keep that ball rolling, gain momentum, and make the actual shift. So, where do you start if you're brand new to skills-based health ed? Where do you start if you've been doing this a while and want to tighten things up? Let's talk about where you can begin. When I present on leveling up to skills-based health education, there are eight different tasks that I talk about. Now, what I'm about to talk to you, or sorry, there are seven that I talk about, not eight. Um, I do have plenty docs and templates and that sort of thing for most of or even all of these steps. I'm not going to give all of them away on this podcast. I mean, as you know, I do have a consulting business, wink wink, if you want to explore this further. But for this information, I want to explain how you can start to do this on your own. Step one, focus on the skill development model. The five steps of the skill development model are the steps that make a skills-based health education curriculum skills-based. As I said earlier, the key to a skills-based curriculum is skill development. So introducing the skill, explaining its importance, modeling the skill, giving students plenty of practice and feedback opportunities, and then promoting skill transfer. This is the way. Make sure this happens. So you could take a look at the skill development model and start to align your curriculum and your units to fit with it. Option number two, outline your unit based on the skill development model, which is after you look at the skill development model above. So make a note of which step occurs in which lesson. If you take your scope and sequence, find where you're implementing step one, find where step two might fit in, find all of the practice opportunities to slide those in, find where you're doing your summative assessment, and go from there. Option number three, examine and update content-specific resources. We know content is always changing, and you can choose how you want to teach functional content knowledge in your classroom. But this step could mean one of two things. Yes, it could be updating resources to make you have the most up-to-date information, but it could also be swapping content in and out. So maybe vaping is no longer an issue in your school. Definitely not the case in my school, it is still an issue. But maybe your students are doing a lot of online gambling or sports betting. You can easily swap out the functional content knowledge that you're teaching within whatever skill it makes sense to do that for. And so whatever changes are better serving your students could fall under this step. Option four, identify performance indicators to create new objectives. Take a little look at exactly what you want students to be able to do based on performance indicators from our Shape America National Health Ed Standards, and then create new objectives for your students. Once you have objectives, you can then figure out exactly how you're going to teach students and what they're going to have to demonstrate within your unit. Option five, prepare your skill practice progression. How will students practice a skill that you're teaching them? What's the progression? What scaffolds will you use and then eventually take away? How much practice is individual practice versus group practice versus maybe whole class practice? In this step, we'd also want to think about how you're going to give feedback too. Maybe your feedback is one-on-one to each student, maybe it's peer feedback, maybe you're reviewing whole class feedback at the start of the next lesson. Whatever works for you. Option six, implement participatory activities and active learning strategies. One of the key components of skills-based health ed is participatory methods. So figure out what that looks like for you. For example, maybe you have students complete case studies from the perspectives of social media experts, third-unit on analyzing influences if you're analyzing technology. Maybe you have students create an informative visual on how vaping affects specific body parts. Whatever this means for you, create activities that require students to do the work and use their brains. Engagement is not just students being busy, it's cognitive engagement. Having students complete a task that requires them to use their brains. Option seven, select or create skill cues. If you know what skill you're going to teach, what are the steps of that skill? These become your skill cues. You can come up with your own, you can use some that already exist. I do a combination of both. Holly and Styler's books have a ton of information on skill cues, as does RMC Health, which is a website I'll link to in the show notes and I'll link to their book as well. You really want to be able to answer this question. What are the steps of the skill that students should be able to demonstrate? I will say I did create a skill queue once and had an acronym of ICE for analyzing influences. It's been in my email newsletter and that didn't age well. But anyway, you can come up with your own. They don't have to be an acronym for students to remember. It could just be a multi-step process. Or take a look at what's already out there, because there are plenty of great resources on skill cues. The good thing about the above steps is that anyone can use them, whether you have just learned about skills by self-ed or you've been doing it for a while. I know for me, I change up skill cues if they're not working for my students. As one example, we also swap out content resources or topics as needed. In one example with nutrition, uh, we just replaced my plate with the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate because the current uh upside-down food guide pyramid that was put out by um RFK Jr. didn't make sense for us and what we were teaching. So we did some research and used the Harvard Healthy Eating Plate because it is it was and it has been created free of any type of political influence. So find what you need to do, level yourself up and make that happen. As always, thanks for listening. And as always, I'm curious to what this might look like in your curriculum or in your classroom, or if you have any other things that might have worked for you to help you level up your teaching. Maybe you've tried some of these steps. I'm interested in how they worked out for you. So please let me know. Again, in the show notes, you'll see a link to send me a message, or most of you are on my newsletter. You can send me an email. Uh so again, check out the show notes for a few resources and a link to subscribe to my newsletter. And as always, thanks for your support.