My focus for designing a wellness program and implementing it is to take an integrative approach. This approach has grade level ES and MS teams grade level teams and HS departments creating and collaborating with the counselor (wellness coach) to adapt the current curriculum delivered in units of study (i.e., LA, SS, math, etc.) to find natural integration opportunities for PERMAH and the Character Strengths. The same collaboration and design work go into choosing strategies that can embed wellness practices into the culture of the classrooms and advisories. My Wellness@ES resource site is filled with PRIME and SECONDARY strategies to support this integrative approach.

I also put forth a few ideas on collaborating to review the purchased SEL curriculum to teach the provided standalone lessons.

In my mind, this dual (hybrid) approach gives the teacher a vast toolkit for teaching wellness. In both the integrative and standalone purchased curriculum approaches, the teacher can proactively plan according to the developed scope and sequence of standards while being nimble and ready for just-in-time teaching when specific wellness needs are presented by the students.

So how might a school move forward using this dual (hybrid) approach? I sat in a PD session yesterday that offered the first steps of a model that one might use. The topic was health which our teachers are teaching within our units of study and through some standalone lessons. The grade-level teams worked with a spreadsheet (see below) that listed the standards with some criteria for the teachers to respond to. This audit will provide data to further develop the scope and sequence of the standards.

As you can see, the grade level teams were asked to designate if the standards are being assessed (planned for next year) and what they are teaching by quarter. If they are not teaching the standard, they check whether it is feasible to add the standard for the future. The teams went through this process for both integrations through super units (i.e., units of study) and standalone lessons using the provided spreadsheet for their respective grade levels.

Whether it be wellness or another subject area, it makes sense for teaching teams to have this opportunity to map out where they are and where they are going. I can see us using this protocol when we move forward with a wellness program at my elementary school.

 

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

Chart by Dan Keller