Addresses Personal Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs

Description: An effective health education curriculum fosters personal attitudes, values, and beliefs to support positive health behaviors. Attitudes are the way a person thinks and feels about something or someone, values are individual beliefs that motivate people to act one way or another, and beliefs are ideas that a person accepts or considers to be true.

An effective health education curriculum provides instructional strategies and learning experiences that motivate students to critically examine personal perspectives, thoughtfully consider new arguments to support health-promoting attitudes and values, and generate positive perceptions about protective behaviors and negative perceptions about risk behaviors. Students develop attitudes, values, and beliefs that support healthy behavior through experience and exposure to others modeling the health-enhancing attitudes, values, and beliefs.¹

This characteristic is not values clarification (e.g., engaging students in a debate that focuses on whether marijuana should be legalized for recreational use); instead, it describes learning experiences that encourage students to critically think about how their own attitudes, values, and beliefs support the adoption of healthy behaviors.

It is important to establish and maintain a classroom climate in which the teacher and the students consistently model and endorse healthy attitudes, values, and beliefs. It is the teacher’s role to be the “bridge builder” to help students to take the functional information learned and apply it to their lives and to foster new attitudes, values, and beliefs needed to adopt healthy behaviors.

Example 1

For this example, the unit that is being taught is Mental and Emotional Health, and the HBO for the lesson is MEH-4: Prevent and manage emotional stress and anxiety in healthy ways (HECAT Appendix 3).

1. Students have already learned strategies for preventing and managing stress. For this activity, students will select two strategies to practice and incorporate into their personal wellness plans.
2. Once students have selected the strategies of interest, they will practice those strategies for a week and keep a daily journal of the following:
   1. How often strategies were practiced
   2. How they felt before and after
   3. If the strategies helped to relieve stress
   4. Why practicing stress management techniques is important
3. Students will reflect on how this experience has affected the way they perceive stress and their abilities to control the way they respond to stressful situations (e.g., test taking, disagreements, peer pressure).
4. Students will incorporate at least one strategy into daily practice as reflected in their personal wellness plans that are submitted to the teacher.

Example 2

For this example, the unit that is being taught is Safety, and the HBOs for the lesson are S-3: Use safety equipment appropriately and correctly and S-4: Apply safety rules and procedures to avoid risky behaviors and injury (HECAT Appendix 3).

1. After students have learned about protective equipment needed for sports and recreational activities, students internalize the importance of wearing helmets while riding a bike or participating in other activities such as skateboarding.
2. Students work with a partner to respond to the following questions:
   1. What are the benefits of wearing a safety helmet?
   2. What is your personal level of risk of not wearing a safety helmet?
   3. What are the potential consequences for not wearing a safety helmet?
   4. What are potential barriers (or reasons for not wearing a helmet) that you or your peers might face?
   5. For each barrier you wrote down, think of one solution or strategy you could use to overcome that barrier.
3. Students write a reflection in their personal wellness plans about what they have learned; their perception of personal risk; how the lesson’s content may influence their values, attitudes, and beliefs; and what their intentions are for using safety helmets and following safety rules in the future.
4. These intentions will be incorporated into their personal wellness plans and shared with the teacher.

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