Mental health and wellbeing in schools
Mental health and student wellbeing in the middle years Danielle Mashon and Tenley Elliott on how strategic curriculum review supports improved wellbeing As educators of middle years students, we have the privilege to witness one of the most transformational periods in one’s life. From an increased desire to seek and take risks, to an increased valuing of peers and social relations, we observe young people as they explore and ignite a new personal sense of self and identity. With an expanding body of neuroscientific research on adolescent brain development, we are able to better understand adolescent behaviour and decision-making during this unique growth period (Blakemore, 2018). Furthermore, important evidence from neuroscientific research reveals that up to three-quarters of mental illness appears before the age of 24 (Blakemore, 2018). Put simply, a growing body of research is placing adolescent mental health and wellbeing at the center of a more integrated approach to adolescent health. Therefore, prioritizing adolescent mental health and wellbeing in schools has become increasingly common. However, a critical question arose in the context of our school, the Nord Anglia International School of Rotterdam: how do we ensure mental health and wellbeing is not one more ‘add-on’ to an existing course, but rather is part of a comprehensive approach to adolescent health and wellness? What follows explains how our school enacted regular cycles of curriculum review to prioritize adolescent mental health and learner wellbeing to enhance the program offering in our middle school. For contextual purposes, the Nord Anglia International School of Rotterdam (NAISR), formerly the American International School of Rotterdam, is proud to have delivered an international education to both expatriate and Dutch
national families for 60 years. In 2012, we were amongst the first few schools in the world to pilot Fieldwork Education’s International Middle Years Curriculum (IMYC) for students ages 11-14, and we haven’t looked back since. And in 2018 we joined the global family of Nord Anglia Education schools and embarked on a new strategic direction aligned with our new family of schools. Given these changes, and the secure establishment of our middle years program, we felt the middle school was an appropriate setting to approach a critical reflection of health and wellbeing education. Creating space for adolescent mental health and wellness was built upon an existing process of curriculum review; between 2014 and 2017 we identified a need to improve our delivery of pastoral care, service learning and health learning in our secondary school. However, many of the curricula we explored appeared too prescriptive and/or culturally specific for our needs, given our small and diverse student body. Moreover, we wished to maintain the integrity of the IMYC in our middle school, in terms of philosophy, approach and goals for learning. Since we felt it inappropriate to simply add a PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education) or similar course to our current curriculum, we instead decided to amplify the offerings of our IMYC program to include a Health, Advisory and Physical Education component (HAPE) for 20 minutes per day in our timetable for homeroom, and a discrete Core Values Program (CVP) class to develop students’ personal and international learning through service initiatives. In this approach, health learning topics such as healthy eating and active living, disease and illness
Put simply, a growing body of research is placing adolescent mental health and wellbeing at the center of a more integrated approach to adolescent health. Therefore, prioritizing adolescent mental health and wellbeing in schools has become increasingly common. Spring
Autumn |
| 2019
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