Fundraising With Jigsaw Puzzles
Health Education K-12 Resources
For more information, please E-mail us if you have any questions, ideas, comments, corrections, etc.
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Health Instruction
Descriptors:
1. Health Instruction includes: Planned, sequential curriculum that addresses the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social dimensions of health.
2. Health Instruction includes topics such as personal health, mental and emotional health, injury prevention and safety, nutrition, prevention and control of chronic and communicable disease, and prevention of substance use and abuse.
3. The emphasis of health instruction is on skill development.
4. Health Curriculum is taught by qualified certified teachers trained to teach the subject.
--Keep this in mind: Since skills must be the focus (how to make choices, how to read labels, how to protect yourself....not ONLY the nutritional content of food, or how germs are spread), clinicians are NOT a first choice as your educator, because "they know the content," and are clinical in background. Clinicians SHOULD BE USED TO REINFORCE, not as the primary eductor (would you use a teacher to do a medical assessment?)
--Health instruction is not physical education. Therefore, unless you have the training, being a coach doesn't qualify you to serve as a health instructor.
--"Since a teacher can't give an injection or play the role of health provider in a clinical setting, then the nurse, often an untrained educator, should not be allowed to teach in a classroom. Nurse and Docs are great resources, but they are not teachers. Let's use qualified practitioners."
5. Theory-based and researched health curricula should be developed, or selected, and implemented. These recommended curricula are comprehensive and have shown to have impact on drug, tobacco, nutrition and other health behaviors:
Growing Healthy (K-6th);
Know Your Body (Pre-K - 6th)
Michigan Model (K-8)
Teenage Health Teaching Modules
(THTM) (7th - 12th grades)
Pejsach's Pointers
There is a difference:
Health Instruction is not synonymous with health education, since teachers of health are not necessarily health educators. Health education requires much more than a teacher of health can provide in 50 hours of health instruction per year. Health Education requires an array of activities that may include, and are not limited to, active participation in the other areas of coordinated school health, an understanding of the theoretical basis of behavior change, community empowerment, and asset mapping. The Health Educator requires a higher degree of training in health process, usually, than the teacher of health.
For more information on defining the "health educator," go to this site: http://www.nchec.org/.
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