Creating a Healthy School Using the Healthy School Report Card


Book Description

Successful students are not only knowledgeable but also emotionally and physically healthy, motivated, civically engaged, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond their own borders. To help students meet this standard, a school must use a coordinated, evidence-based approach that supports learning, teaching and student growth in short, the school must create a healthy school community. This action tool, and accompanying online scoring and analysis tool, offers a practical strategy for structuring your school environment to support the development of students who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to make healthy choices. Updated to reflect current research, new standards, and best practices, the second edition of the action tool guides you through the four steps of the Healthy School Report Card process with rationale, tips from successful participants, and easy-to-use tools. Tools for organizing can help you develop a school-level process for working with your community. You can then use the scoring tools to assess your school's current health programming and create an evidence-based environment that supports learning and teaching. With the tools for reporting, you can use the Healthy School Report Card to meet required guidelines and identify and prioritize areas for improvement. The data you collect can assist your ongoing efforts to garner the support of policymakers, family members, and the community.




Safe and Healthy Schools


Book Description

A hands-on resource for practitioners, this book provides step-by-step guidance for developing a comprehensive school safety plan. Moving from needs assessment to implementation and evaluation, chapters describe research-based strategies that are readily applicable in K-12 settings. Special features include reproducible checklists and other planning tools. Described are proven ways to: create a low-crime environment, identify and support high-risk students, reduce bullying and harassment, improve the schoolwide disciplinary system, and draw on community resources for change.




Schools That Heal


Book Description

What would a school look like if it was designed with mental health in mind? Too many public schools look and feel like prisons, designed out of fear of vandalism and truancy. But we know that nurturing environments are better for learning. Access to nature, big classroom windows, and open campuses consistently reduce stress, anxiety, disorderly conduct, and crime, and improve academic performance. Backed by decades of research, Schools That Heal showcases clear and compelling ways--from furniture to classroom improvements to whole campus renovations--to make supportive learning environments for our children and teenagers. With invaluable advice for school administrators, public health experts, teachers, and parents Schools That Heal is a call to action and a practical resource to create nurturing and inspiring schools for all children.




Creating a Healthy School


Book Description

Successful students are not only knowledgeable but also emotionally and physically healthy, motivated, civically engaged, prepared for work and economic self-sufficiency, and ready for the world beyond their own borders. To help students meet this standard, a school must use a coordinated, evidence-based approach that supports learning, teaching and student growth in short, the school must create a healthy school community. This action tool, and accompanying online scoring and analysis tool, offers a practical strategy for structuring your school environment to support the development of students who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to make healthy choices. Updated to reflect current research, new standards, and best practices, the second edition of the action tool guides you through the four steps of the Healthy School Report Card Canadian Edition process with rationale, tips from successful participants, and easy-to-use tools. Tools for organizing can help you develop a school-level process for working with your community. You can then use the scoring tools to assess your school's current health programming and create an evidence-based environment that supports learning and teaching. With the tools for reporting, you can use the Healthy School Report Card Canadian Edition to meet required guidelines and identify and prioritize areas for improvement. The data you collect can assist your ongoing efforts to garner the support of policymakers, family members, and the community.




Health Education


Book Description

The skills necessary to plan and deliver efficient health education programs are fundamentally the same, whether it's in a classroom, workplace, hospital, or community. Health Education: Creating Strategies for School & Community Health, Third Edition provides the tools to make appropriate programming decisions based on the needs of the clients and the educational settings. It encourages the systematic development of sound, effective, and appropriate presentation methods and demonstrates the evolving state of health education. The philosophy presented in this text is based on the premise that the core of health education is the process of health education. It is a must-have resource for health education methods courses.




School Climate Change


Book Description

Students and educators today face obstacles to student achievement, well-being, and success that are above and beyond traditional instructional and assessment concerns. From low school morale to bullying to shootings, school climate has become a national and global concern. Research overwhelmingly indicates that a positive school climate promotes cooperative learning, group cohesion, respect, and mutual trust--all of which have in turn been shown to improve the learning environment. In short, a positive school climate is directly related to improved academic achievement at all levels of schooling. In this ASCD Arias book, Peter DeWitt and Sean Slade explain the most important aspects of school climate and how we can make positive changes in our schools. Readers will learn * How to engage students and school stakeholders. * How to empower staff and students and foster autonomy so people take ownership of their ideas and the learning process. * How to promote inclusivity and equity throughout the school. * How to create a welcoming, cooperative, and safe school environment that nurtures students' social-emotional needs.




When Are We Going to Teach Health?


Book Description

Fact: Health improves learning. Yet nationwide, elementary school students spend twelve times more classroom hours studying history than health. Worse, most kids don't get enough physical activity and over 5 million underage youth vape. In When Are We Going to Teach Health?, Duncan Van Dusen, the CEO of one of the most widely used youth health education programs in the world, makes a novel, sometimes irreverent, case for prioritizing "Whole Child" health and SEL in K-12 schools.  He shows why health drives academic success, what makes teaching health effective, and how to create a school environment that delivers and sustains healthy behavior. Using case studies, tips, and recommended actions, he describes proven youth empowerment and skills-based health education techniques to increase kids' physical activity and healthy food choices and to decrease youth vaping. Half of the proceeds from this book will fund health education in low-income schools.




Becoming an Emotionally Healthy School


Book Description

Includes CD-Rom Pupils can fulfil their potential only when they are healthy, happy and at ease in all areas of their lives and the National Healthy Schools Standard (NHSS) is designed to give practical support to help schools achieve this through creating an environment which reduces health inequalities, promotes social inclusion and raises educational achievement. The book provides the reader with: " an overview of the National Healthy School Standard (NHSS) " insight into the theme of emotional health " a range of case study examples to draw on as exemplars of good practice " knowledge and resources required to undertake a school based audit on emotional health and well being " resources to implement an emotional health and well being curriculum. Becoming an Emotionally Healthy School helps school staff, people working with schools and healthy schools co-ordinators to create, develop and promote a whole school approach to emotional health and well-being. The book offers advice, handy hints and support at each stage of the process and provides all the resources that will be required, including an emotional health curriculum that can be delivered with small groups or whole class groups.




Making every school a health-promoting school


Book Description

No education system is effective unless it promotes the health and well-being of its students, staff and community. These strong links have never been more visible and compelling than in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. A health-promoting school (HPS) approach was introduced over 25 years ago and has been promoted globally since; however, the aspiration of a fully embedded, sustainable HPS system has not yet been achieved, and very few countries have implemented and sustained the approach at scale. How can we make every school a health-promoting school, and how can we implement, sustain and scale up the approach at country level, particularly in low- and middle-income countries? All stakeholders involved in identifying, planning, funding, implementing, monitoring and evaluating the HPS approach will find some answers in this publication, which summarizes the experiences of eight countries spread across the world.




Creating a Healthy School Together


Book Description

Dutch schools increasingly work towards stimulating healthy choices among adolescents through the Dutch Healthy School-approach. However, interventions and programs are difficult to sustainably embed and maintain in every day practice, and long term effects remain limited. In order to achieve (sustainable) implementation of Healthy School initiatives, it is advocated that the dynamic nature and the complexity of real-life practice needs to be embraced rather than avoided. Two central themes seem to arise when looking at indicators for successful implementation: a) contextualization is key to ensure that local initiatives are tailored to the dynamic and unique context of the school, and b) stakeholders in a school need to feel ownership and need to be empowered by means of leadership, collaboration and community involvement. In order for stakeholders to address these themes, a focus on the concept of ‘building community capacity’ can be an interesting strategy. This pertains ‘the development of knowledge, skills, ownership, leadership, structures and systems to enable effective health promotion’. Despite the fact that community capacity has long been recognized as an important indicator of program success, there is no simple, clear approach available to translate this into a strategy for practice, and to measure the development and impact of such a strategy. This dissertation aims to explore whether and how building community capacity can work as a strategy to (sustainably) implement a context-specific a broadly supported Healthy School-initiative in Dutch secondary schools. In the Fit Lifestyle at School and at Home (FLASH) intervention four prevocational schools in the Netherlands were encouraged to create a Healthy School community that specifically stimulated physical activity and healthy dietary behavior among pupils.