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.

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Example 1

For this example, the unit that is being taught is Promoting Mental and Emotional Health, and the Healthy Behavior Outcome (HBO) for this lesson is MEH-1: Express feelings in a healthy way (HECAT Appendix 3).

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  1. In this lesson, students learn about feelings, appropriate ways to express feelings, benefits of expressing feelings in healthy ways, and the potential consequences of not expressing feelings in healthy ways.
  2. The teacher begins the lesson by showing the students a set of pictures of people who are happy, sad, and angry. The teacher asks the students the following questions:
    1. Have you ever felt happy?
    2. Have you ever felt sad?
    3. Have you ever felt angry?
  3. The teacher then explains that there are healthy and less healthy ways to say and show our feelings.
  4. The teacher asks the students the following questions and asks a variety of students to share their answers:
    1. What are some things that make you happy?
    2. What are healthy ways to express happy feelings?
    3. What are less healthy ways to express happy feelings?
    4. What can happen if we express happy feelings in less healthy ways?
    5. Why is it important to use healthy ways to express happy feelings?
  5. The teacher repeats Step 4 for the feelings of sadness and anger.
  6. The teacher ends the lesson by asking the students to meet with a partner and explain why it is important to express all feelings in healthy ways.

Example 2

For this example, the unit that is being taught is Preventing Violence, and the HBO for this lesson is V-3: Prevent bullying (HECAT Appendix 3).

  1. The teacher asks students what they think the words “teasing” and “bullying” mean. The teacher calls on several students to share their answers aloud.
  2. The teacher summarizes the students’ responses and explains:
    1. Teasing is a form of communication between people. When done in a positive, healthy way, teasing can help people bond and build relationships.
    2. Teasing is done when you are having fun and joking around with someone.
    3. Teasing does not physically, emotionally, or mentally hurt another person.
  3. The teacher asks the students the following questions:
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    1. Have you ever been teased?
    2. How did it make you feel?
    3. When is it ok to tease another person?
  4. The teacher next explains:
    1. Bullying is when someone is hurt by unwanted words or actions, usually more than once, and has a hard time stopping what is happening to them.
    2. Bullying is different than teasing. Bullying is wrong because it is meant to hurt another person physically, emotionally, or mentally.
    3. It is always wrong to bully others.
  5. The teacher asks the students the following questions:
    1. Have you ever been bullied?
    2. How did it make you feel?
    3. Why is bullying always wrong?
  6. The teacher reads a story about bullying and why it is wrong to bully others.
  7. The teacher concludes the lesson by asking a question: 
    1. Why is it important to not bully others?

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