Three Ways to Level Up to Skills-Based Health
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Hello, Reader! I see many lessons and published curricula that claim to be skills-based when, in reality, they're based on skills. That doesn't mean they're bad lessons, but they're not as advertised. In today's newsletter, I want to give you three quick ways to shift from being based-on-skills to being skills-based. Content-Based vs. Skills-Based Health EducationHealth curriculum units exist on a continuum, from being fully content-based, to being based on skills, to being fully skills-based. Here's an image of a slide I've used to identify some differences between a lesson designed with content as the focus and a lesson designed with skills as the focus. Let's take a look: As noted in the image, the content-based lesson isn't bad. In fact, many health education classrooms could benefit from a sequential lesson like the one described. But if we're out to be skills-based and assess the National Health Education Standards, that's not it. While we can still assess functional health content in the content-based class, there's no mention of skill practice, and we can't be sure if the content information is useful or functional. Students are given information and asked to recall it. They're not using the information, and they're not using any skill. For reference, the objective for refusal skills that's in the sample skills-based lesson is an infused version of performance indicator 4.8.5. Although we can't determine what goes on in the entire lesson based on the bullets provided, the skills-based lesson includes the components of skills-based health that you'll see mentioned in The Essentials of Teaching Health Education by Holly Alperin and Sarah Benes (2022):
Making the Shift: Three StrategiesSo, how do we move along the continuum? I understand how overwhelming the shift can be; when our department made the shift years ago, we went unit by unit throughout the year. We were meeting daily to revamp lessons and assessments. It's a lot! When I present my workshop, "Level Up to Skills-Based Health Education," I share eight strategies teachers can self-select to level up their current lessons and units to skills-based health education. Since the last time I led that workshop this summer, I've thought about and reworked some of these and want to share three with you today. Before I begin, and I'm adamant about this: The key distinction between a content-based health curriculum and a skills-based health education is the use of the skill development model to introduce, model, practice, and assess skills. You can read a summary of the skill development model here. That said, not everyone has time to rework their entire curriculum to include all the steps of the skill development model right away. In a perfect world, you'd be planning backward. As adamant as I am about using the whole skill development process in a curriculum, teachers need to start small and make little changes that immediately benefit their students. If you use these three steps as a sort of triage, then you can go back and be intentional about planning skills-based units when you have time. Strategy 1: Add Skill-Building Activities to Preexisiting Lessons or AssessmentsAdd a skill from the National Health Education Standards into your content unit. Look at your content to find natural fits where skills can naturally land. Food label analysis or meal planning could work if you're teaching about nutrition, so there's Standard 7: Practicing Health Behavior. If your content area is vaping, give students a scenario and have them use a decision-making process (Standard 5) to arrive at a solution that improves health and well-being. Use these as assessments instead of quizzes or tests. Create discussion questions about the skill for group work, or throw a role-play together: role-plays work for many of the NHES skills. RMC Health has a library with activity ideas if you're looking for skill cues and activity ideas. Strategy 2: Focus on Feedback and Self-AssessmentPart of teaching skill development is providing feedback to students or having them give feedback to each other. Students could also self-assess their work. Once you have determined your skill cues and objectives, develop success criteria and put them into a rubric or checklist for students to use. Allow students to revise their work based on the feedback they receive. This serves two purposes: skill practice and feedback are cornerstones of skills-based health education, and they help promote skill application and transfer outside of the classroom. This is the shift from discussing a skill to using a skill. It requires you to be intentional with how a skill fits into your lesson. Strategy 3: Implement Participatory MethodsThink critically about the activities you have in a lesson and determine if there are changes you can make where the students are directly involved in their learning. This could mean adding intentional discussions, visible thinking routines, debates, peer teaching, simulations, a gallery walk, etc. These changes will make your class more interactive and dynamic for students. You may see increased motivation and student buy-in; students will also practice communication and collaboration skills when working with their classmates, which never hurts. You might even see your students show their creative side, too. I'd also use the word engaging here because, with participatory methods, the students' brains are doing the work. (Personal Pet Peeve: many tasks students are asked to do in school appear to be "engaging" but aren't, from a cognitive perspective. But that's a different topic for a different day.) ConclusionTeachers should start small when shifting to skills-based health education. The strategies I discussed above provide different entry points for teachers who want to begin teaching skills-based health. Start by adding to what you already teach; after that, you can think about removing lessons or topics, combining them, or whatever you need to do. Thanks for reading! Jeff B. PS: As a reminder, I'm hosting a free "Evening Enlightenment" program on the HPE Collective on Sunday, 8/25, at 8PM Eastern. It's free to join! Join us to discuss "Mastering Classroom Conversations: How Can We Create Meaningful Discussions With Our Students." PPS. If you're interested in working over the long term to update your curriculum to skills-based health, there's a link to instructional coaching services at the end of this email.
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