Reflection of Health Education Teacher Standards

1. Standard 1: Content Knowledge

         The National Health Education Standards (NHES) were developed to ensure students of all grade levels are given the skills to establish and promote health-enhancing behaviors. In order to ensure this, teachers need to have a wide variety of content knowledge. Throughout the readings and in class experiences thus far, I have gained significant insight of best practices for creating a health education classroom curriculum that incorporates a variety of content knowledge. When creating a unit plan I ensured to not only incorporate my understanding of health education but also digital literacy skills, literacy skills and theoretical foundations of behavior change and learning. For instance, each lesson is directly aligned with NYS health standards as well as the Common Core English Language arts standards. With my knowledge of digital literacy, I was able to create lessons that incorporated technology that will allow the students to have authentic audiences for multimodal projects and incorporates digital literacy practices students value. Within the unit plan, each lesson is created with multiple health content knowledge in mind to maximize student outcome. For example, the big idea of my unit plan was goal setting and how it is essential to health-enhancing behaviors but each lesson within the plan incorporates other important health aspects such as wellness, mindfulness and drug and alcohol abuse.

2.   Standard 2: Planning

           As a future health educator, it is important to have a deep understanding of not only the National Standards for Health Education, but also National Health Performance Indicators, New York State Health Education Standards, ISTE Standards for Students and Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS). These sets of standards are the foundation for planning lessons that are relevant and meaningful to health education instruction. Teachers are expected to implement these standards in ways that strengthen students’ ability to prepare for, and respond to, challenging tasks, think for themselves, and communicate effectively both now and in their future. Throughout my health education courses at Sage, the textbooks, articles, and engagements helped illuminate how to use standards while planning in a way that promotes student success on both formal and informal assessments. This semester, I had the opportunity to create a unit plan on goal setting. While planning this unit I made sure to address National Health Education Standards & Performance Indicators, New York State Health Education Standards, ISTE Standards for Students and CCLS. I used my knowledge of standards to develop a unit plan as well as to create standard-aligned assessments in order to gauge my students’ progress toward each standard and goal. I will continue to link my standards to assessments and objectives while creating lessons and unit plans as well as attend ongoing professional development on standard shifts to ensure I plan lessons that a relevant and promote health education learning. While creating and planning lessons within my unit plan I made sure to incorporate instructional practices such as technology, group discussions, videos, project based learning strategies, and articles that are developmentally appropriate, and allow student choice in order to promote engagement.

3.   Standard 3: Implementation

               My education thus far has allowed the opportunity to develop a greater expertise in identifying and effectively planning and developing health education lessons that incorporate best practices to support all students regardless of their background. As a future health educator, I will reflect back to my understanding of foundations of health and promote meaningful peer collaboration, small group discussions, and whole group discussions in which all student’s funds of knowledge are valued and built upon to promote a successful learning environment as well as provide authentic learning opportunities. Students personal interest and motivators will be used when implementing this unit plan. This unit plan implements instructional strategies that incorporate technology and media such as videos about each topic and the opportunity to create a multi-modality project. Modifications were put into place within the lessons to ensure all students feel supported regardless of their level, or physical ability. When implementing this unit plan, I will avoid feedback such as “good job” as these comments lack depth. I will use more specific praise points and language to push my student’s’ thinking. I will also plan and incorporate purposeful language and open-ended prompts that coincides with my student’s strengths’ and needs, ultimately, deepening their critical thinking.  These prompts will allow me to fade into the background and allow my students’ to shine. The unit plan I created will be implemented to a fourth grade class. This unit plan can easily be modified to be implemented in grades 3-6.

4.   Standard 4: Assessment

           Assessments are an essential component of health instruction. Teachers must conduct and analyze the results of assessments to identify students’ current levels, track student progress, and inform future instruction. Therefore, teachers must have knowledge of multiple assessment tools in order to develop a more comprehensive portrait of their learners. My course work as well as observation hours have encouraged me to learn how to effectively incorporate assessments within instruction. With my knowledge of the many different types of assessments and how standardized assessment and formal written assessments provides only one measure of students’ learning, I created a unit plan that incorporates a variety of formative and summative assessments. This will allow me to view this data alongside of other assessments/ observations to gain a more comprehensive picture of my student’s performance. Formative assessments such as worksheets, exit tickets, projects (creating a brochure and multimedia project), group discussions and observations are used to assess student progress. The formative assessments chosen will help me plan my instruction/alter it to meet the student’s current needs. Summative assessments that are used within the unit plan are quizzes and unit assessment. These summative assessments will allow me to evaluate my students progress throughout the unit.

5.   Standard 5: Professionalism

  Developing positive, reciprocal relationships with parents, colleagues and students is critical to successful health education teaching. To establish these positive relationships, educators need to engage in and reflect on professional learning opportunities in order to meet the diverse needs of all learners. As educators, it is our responsibility to bridge the home-school gap by creating classroom environments where parents and schools come together to support and improve the learning of the students. We need to ensure we are opening up our classrooms and encouraging family and community involvement. To effectively foster a meaningful health education experience, I was aware of my language when speaking to families and collogues. I ensured my language used during conversations represents the full extent of student competencies and the nature of learning contexts which ensured I am positively reflecting my students. I will continue to provide frequent, strength-focused updates on student progress as I collaborate with families and colleagues. The classroom I observed in had an “open-door policy” in which all families and members of the community feel welcome. This policy encouraged open communication, feedback, and discussion that allowed parents to see the educator valued the input they provide.