Are you on board with skills-based health education but wondering what your next steps should be? Have you started to transition but are getting stuck? If so, the next few blog posts are for you!

After getting many questions about the “how to” of skills-based, we are creating a series of posts to help you feel more comfortable with the “how to” of skills-based health education. We are going to start with the curriculum!

Why do we start with curriculum? Well . . . in the many years that Holly and I have been doing this, we have learned that having your written curriculum aligned with the NHES, with the skills “on top” and with your unit objectives planned out makes it much for likely for you to have a successful transition to the approach. It doesn’t matter if you are looking at your own class or your K-12 curriculum – the steps are the same. In this post, we will run through the basics and provide some tips. It’s a little long but worth the read!

TIP: Even though it is hard, we strongly recommend that you do not try to retrofit your current curriculum into a skills-model. We completely understand the urge…but it never works quite right!

If you can go through this process with an open-mind and “clean slate”, it will go much more smoothly. We promise that you will be able to fit many of your activities back into the curriculum once you have completed the process!

Step 1: What do YOUR students need?

Our students are our top priority. It is critical that we are constantly asking ourselves – what do my students need in order to be healthy? What issues are they facing? What do we want them to be able to do with this new learning?

Take some time to brainstorm. Look at data, talk to various stakeholders, ask students, use your experience and create a list of what your students need. This list can include topics, skills and specific behaviors. For now, anything goes! Once you have your list, set this aside and then move on to step 2. You will revisit this list later in the process.

Step 2: The Framework

We suggest creating a template that looks something like this:

List the grades down the side	List the NHES Skills across the top
		NHES Skill (Analyzing Influences)	NHES Skill (Decision-Making)	NHES Skill (Interpersonal Communication)	NHES Skill (Advocacy)
	Grade (grade 6)
	Grade (grade 7)

We feel that putting the skills “on top” like this is important for a couple of reasons:

• It clearly puts the emphasis on the skills & provides a frame for each unit
• It sets you up for skill development within the unit
• Allows you to where content fits across various skills

We also suggest starting by matching one topic within one skill. Once you get more comfortable you can add multiple topics under a skill. Start out simple and then add as you go! However, when you set up your units in this way, you will begin to see that certain topics will naturally “fit” with certain skills.

We do not recommend keeping the topics as the focus and integrating more than one skill within the topics. In this model, it is less likely that students will develop the skills to proficiency – you won’t get the same depth or the same levels of skill performance.

Step 3: NHES Performance Indicators

Next, you will look at standards 2-8 of the NHES (standard 1 is the “topic” standard, it isn’t a skill). Decide which performance indicators you will teach from each standard and in which grade. You want to make sure that you cover all performance indicators within each grade span though don’t feel like you need to cover every skill (or performance indicator) every year. It is unlikely that you have time for that.

Another tip: For the skills of decision-making, goal setting and advocacy – you’ll cover all performance indicators each time you teach these skills. Each of these skills, and the associated performance indicators are all part of the process of actually implementing the skill.

In our experience around 4 skills per year is usually a good fit. It is OK to have some “blank” boxes in your chart. By mapping out which performance indicators and which skills are taught each year you will begin to see a flow or progression. You are also able to revisit and reinforce previous learning. When implemented, your students will appreciate a thoughtful progression… though they may not realize it.

After this step, your framework might looking something like this (note the performance indicator numbers):

	Analyzing Influences	Accessing Valid & Reliable Info, Products, and Services	Decision-Making	Goal Setting	Interpersonal Comm.	Advocacy
Grade 6	2.8.2 2.8.3 2.8.4	3.8.1 3.8.3 3.8.5	5.8.1-5.8.7			8.8.1-8.8.4
Grade 7	2.8.5 2.8.6 2.8.7	3.8.2 3.8.4	Review Decision Making, but not formally assessed.	6.8.1-4	4.8.1 4.8.2

Step 4: Match Topics and Skills

Here is where we revisit the topics you listed out in step 1. You will take those topics (in blue below) and put them “under” the skills wherever you think they fit best. Remember there is no right answer here! You should go with your gut and the needs of your students. You can always tweak it later but we have found that teachers know the best fit!

Your framework now looks like this:

	Analyzing Influences	Accessing Valid & Reliable Info, Products, and Services	Decision-Making	Goal Setting	Interpersonal Comm.	Advocacy
Grade 6	2.8.2 2.8.3 2.8.4 Social media	3.8.1 3.8.3 3.8.5 Nutrition and physical activity	5.8.1-5.8.7 Vaping			8.8.1-8.8.4 Texting and driving
Grade 7	2.8.5 2.8.6 2.8.7 Impact of media on multiple health behaviors	3.8.2 3.8.4 Stress & Mental Health		6.8.1-4 Dimensions of wellness	4.8.1 4.8.2 Alcohol use and other drugs

Step 5: Integrated Objectives

Each box inside your framework is now a unit! Your next step is to create your unit objectives. Start with the stem of the Performance Indicators and then integrate the topics. For example, the unit objectives for interpersonal communication in 7th grade would be:

By the end of this unit, students will be able to:

• Apply effective verbal and nonverbal communication skills to enhance health in situations relating to alcohol and other drugs.
• Demonstrate refusal and negotiation skills that avoid alcohol or other drug use.

While this step may seem a little tedious, it is actually really important. As you continue in the process, it will help you develop assessments that evaluate your intended outcomes, stay focused within each unit, avoid activities that do not support the “end game” for each unit and help you build purposeful and effective units to meet the needs of your students.

We will end this post here! We hope you found this information helpful! A good way to sum up the first 5 steps of the process:

“If you don’t know where you are going,
you’ll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra

Our next post will cover the remaining steps of the curriculum development process – developing assessments through lesson planning!

Let us know any tips or additional questions you have in the comments!

Holly and I just finished a 2 day skills-based health education workshop with some amazing educators in Maine. People left feeling excited, energized  . . . and a little overwhelmed. Making a significant change in the way you are teaching can be a daunting task, no matter how committed, passionate and ready you are! This can be particularly hard due to the “implementation dip” that we know occurs after learning new material.

The implementation dip refers to the phenomenon of the fact that you leave a professional development feeling confident and ready to make a change but then . . . when you go to implement your new learning, it isn’t as clear or as easy as it was in your head after you left the conference. In other words, you experience a dip. You begin to try out your new ideas and confidence drops a bit. Or you weren’t able to get started right after the PD and now you aren’t really sure where you should start or even how to start. This is the implementation dip.

The good news is, this is temporary – and you can move through it. Not only that, once you move through this dip, you often come out more confident in your new learning. Hold steady – it is important to not let this dip prevent you from moving forward! With all new learning and trying a new strategy comes bumps in the road. Just like we tell our students – you just keep trying, you will get there. Whether you recently attended a PD or are pulling from an event you attended before and are now trying to make the shift to a skills-based approach and are hitting some bumps along the way – read on!

One thing you need to remember is that change is hard and often uncomfortable because we are pushing ourselves outside of where we have become comfortable. This means you may feel overwhelmed, have lessons flop, look at an assessment you gave students and think “well – that didn’t go quite as planned”. You may find that you have trouble getting student buy in at first because they are unfamiliar with your new approach, or have difficulties convincing a co-worker about this new(er) way of teaching health. Don’t get discouraged!

Here are some strategies to overcome the implementation dip:

• Find Your Inspiration – No matter what obstacles you face – it is key to find your inspiration and to leverage the support of your #SkillsBasedHealth #HealthEd community to keep moving forward!
• Write Down your Goal/Plan – Maybe your inspiration is your students, your own professional growth, the approach itself, the challenge of making a change . . . whatever it is, write it down! We know from research that writing down and intention makes up far more likely to achieve it. Stick it somewhere that you can see it often so that it can serve as a reminder to keep going!
• Seek out Support – There is no need to suffer alone. Reach out to us, join (or create) a learning network of teachers who are embracing a skills-based approach, review the materials, use social media such as twitter, Facebook, or Voxer to ask for support. There are lots of people willing to help and offer ideas.
• Try something new – Sometimes the hardest part of getting started is to just DO IT. Be willing to be open with yourself and your students. Let them know you are trying something a little different and that you are all in this together. They will feed off of your confidence
• Keep Skills as the Primary Focus – While this may seems like a no brainer (we know, we know), it is easy to get pulled back into the land of content because that is where we are/were comfortable. Refer back to the skill cues, consider the outcomes you want from your students, and then make a plan. If you keep in mind that everything you do in the classroom leads to student outcomes you are more likely to be thoughtful in the activities and assessments you select.

We can all get bogged down by life, dwell on our mistakes or failures and feel that we aren’t going to be able to actually make a change. But when we push through and persevere – that is the good stuff – that is progress, and growth and expanding our limits!

No matter where you are in the process, remember:

“Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.” ~Arthur Ashe

Every change you make will lead to more changes and eventually you will reach your goal of being a kick@ss skills-based health educator!

Images from:

https://maths-no-fear.wikispaces.com/Workshop+Resources

https://pixabay.com/en/keep-calm-and-carry-on-message-1426602/

https://www.pexels.com/search/success/