Health Education
Our health education trainings focus on research-based strategies that encourage students to maintain healthy behaviors, change unhealthy behaviors, and delay the onset of risky behaviors. The training sessions prepare educators to plan and assess skills-based health education and to provide students the opportunity to practice and master those skills.
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Introduction to Skills-Based Health Education: Daily Lesson Planning, Mastery, and Assessment
Session Description:
Maintain healthy behaviors, change unhealthy behaviors, and delay the onset of risky behaviors for all students. Research shows that to reach these goals, health teachers need to specifically teach health skills. Teachers will first have an opportunity to explore the new Colorado Health Standards (effective 2020) and the National Health Standards to better understand the role that health skills play in comprehensive health education. Teachers will then learn how to supplement current unit and lesson plans with explicit health skill instruction. Teachers will leave the training with a foundational knowledge of skills-based Health Education, lesson plans that focus on student skill development, criteria of what student mastery should look like, and performance-based assessments that can be used in their classroom.
Participants Will Be Able To:
- Identify key shifts within the new Colorado Comprehensive Health Education Standards and connection to National Health Education Standards;
- Explain the purpose of skills-based health education
- Utilize the Health Skills Progression Model to guide learning activities and teacher planning;
- Develop lesson plans to teach the introduction, reinforcement, and mastery of health skills.
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Building a Safe and Inclusive Community in the Health Education
Session Description:
In the health education space, students are often asked to reflect on their own health practices and explore potentially sensitive topics. In order to develop student knowledge of health skills and concepts, teachers must first create a space where students feel safe and empowered to be themselves. In this training, participants will begin by understanding the role their own identities, along with student identities, play in creating safe and inclusive health education classrooms. The remainder of the training will be devoted to learning and applying teaching strategies grounded in culturally responsive and trauma-informed research. This hands-on training will give participants an opportunity to learn about these teaching practices and practice applying them through scenarios, interactive activities, and discussion.
Participants will be able to:
- Define safety and inclusion;
- Create vision and mission for safe and inclusive community in health education;
- Utilize teaching practices to foster safe and inclusive community in health education.
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Practice, Practice, Practice: The Road to Students Mastering Health Skills
Session Description:
Practice makes perfect. When it comes to skills-based health education, practice is the hinge that connects instruction and mastery. Providing real-life, engaging practice opportunities in the health education classroom is vital to ensuring that students develop their health literacy. In this training, participants will first have the opportunity to evaluate their current classroom structures and curriculum for opportunities that help students practice health skills as well as prepare them to apply the health skills to their daily lives. After evaluating their own classroom practices, participants will learn strategies for incorporating practice opportunities in their classroom and will create plans for their use in the Health Education classroom.
Participants Will Be Able To:
- Evaluate personal classroom practices for student Health Skill development;
- Apply best practices that facilitate student mastery of Health Skills;
- Design engaging practice opportunities for Health Skills.
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The Joy of Assessment: Empowering Students and Teachers through Mastery
Session Description:
Go beyond paper and pencil tests. Health skills require assessments that are intentionally designed to measure a student’s understanding and abilities. This training will help shift the use of assessments solely as accountability tools to building the understanding that assessments are an opportunity for both the teacher and student to share in the joy of learning a new skill or concept. Participants will leave with a menu of assessment options that go beyond multiple choice and short-answer responses. Participants will also leave with creative ways to collect and track student data to show growth and inform instructional next steps.
Participants Will Be Able To:
- Summarize the benefits to both teachers and students of measuring mastery;
- Create valid and reliable assessments aligned to Colorado’s Comprehensive Health Education Standards;
- Utilize best practices for data collection to show student growth;
- Analyze student data to determine instructional next steps.
