5 minute read
Danielle Mashon and Tenley Elliott
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
prevention, digital literacy and safety, puberty and growth, friendship and healthy relationships, became part of HAPE, whereas personal and international learning topics, such as citizenship, responsibility, respect, and engaging with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, became part of the Core Values Program. Homeroom time became an opportunity for students and their pastoral care teacher to build relationships and trust. In all three timetabled spaces (HAPE, CVP and homeroom) we used the IMYC Big Idea and IMYC Personal and International Learning Goals to guide learning. We utilized student reflection and the IMYC Personal Learning Goal Thoughtfulness as a key modality of learning to fulfil our aim of learning for understanding and to encourage competency development over time. We found that our initial curriculum review represented a positive step forward in our delivery of a rounded middle school program which, importantly, reflected our own aims, context and capacity.
Reflection upon the initial curriculum review led to a desire to improve our middle years program further; to strengthen its alignment with our new place as a Nord Anglia Education school, we wanted to ensure our school Core Values formed the basis of all learning, and we wanted to identify our next steps in order to approach learning about adolescent mental health and wellbeing in an integrated and holistic way. Our review identified the following needs:
Ensure learning around mental health and wellbeing forms part of our comprehensive safeguarding practices.
Clarify how learning around mental health and wellbeing will build upon our broader school-wide Core
Values and be approached in specialist and generalist learning settings, eg Health and Physical Education and homeroom / pastoral care.
Foster further collaborative practice and integration of health specialists in all learning settings (ie nurse, socialemotional coach, social worker, psychologist).
Provide additional resources and training to our learning community about adolescent mental health and emotional wellbeing. Increase dialogue and information sharing between school and families regarding adolescent mental health and wellbeing. Deliver school assemblies and whole-school initiatives to increase awareness and reduce stigma around mental illness and wellbeing. Strengthen our link to the IMYC ‘5 Needs of the Adolescent Brain’, the foundation from which the IMYC was created.
By identifying these next steps, we believe we are in a positive position to strategically improve support of adolescent mental health and wellbeing in our school. Whilst we are still in the beginning phases of our curriculum revision, and have not yet implemented nor evaluated the impact of our program, we trust that by mirroring a process which supported significant success outcomes previously, we will also find a similar degree of improvement with our current review. Finally, we hope that by sharing the impact of regular and strategic curriculum review in our school context, we may support other schools in their process of reflection.
Reference
Blakemore S (2018) Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain. New York: Doubleday
