October is Health Literacy Month. SHAPE America defines health literacy as, “…the ability to access, understand, appraise, apply and advocate for health information and services in order to maintain or enhance one’s own health and the health of others.”
As health educators, it is important to teach our students to be health literate. Health-literate students can understand how their decisions affect their health and well-being and the health and well-being of those around them. Health educators work toward their goal of improving their students’ health literacy every day. By using best practices in health education, specifically a skills-based health approach, health educators teach and assess health literacy skills that students will use throughout the rest of their lives.
According to Benes and Alperin (2022), a skills-based health education curriculum is “a planned, sequential, comprehensive, and relevant set of learning experiences implemented through socio-ecological and socio-cultural perspectives and participatory methods, in order to support the development of skills, attitudes, and functional knowledge needed to maintain, enhance or promote health and well-being of self and others across multiple dimensions of well-being.”
In skills-based health education, plenty of teaching and learning time focuses on skill practice, with the ultimate goal being skill transfer outside the classroom. Linking health literacy with skills-based health education, educators can have a powerful and long-lasting impact on student development and decision-making long after they leave our classrooms.
From an underage drinking prevention perspective, students who have had time to develop the ability to say “NO” to alcohol and understand the reasoning behind their choices are more likely to say “NO” when presented with a real-life dilemma involving alcohol.
Free Resources to Build Health Literacy
The free lesson plans and resources from Ask, Listen, Learn: Kids and Alcohol Don’t Mix can be used to teach students health literacy skills. Skills from the SHAPE America National Health Education Standards, such as interpersonal communication, decision-making, practicing health behaviors, and advocacy, naturally align with the functional health knowledge presented in the resources from Ask, Listen, Learn. Intentionally planning to use resources from Ask, Listen, Learn in your curriculum means you are helping to create relevant learning experiences for your students.
Effective health education focuses on reinforcing protective factors and improving self-efficacy by addressing skills (CDC, 2019). Resources from Ask, Listen, Learn help students practice decision-making and interpersonal communication to improve their health literacy by improving functional content knowledge and skill competency. Implementing these activities in middle school can help lay the foundation for making healthy choices throughout adolescence.
What could that look like in a health education classroom? Let’s take a look.
Improving Interpersonal Communication Skills
Interpersonal communication skills promote health and well-being in various contexts (SHAPE America, 2024). Many performance indicators from the National Health Education Standards could be used to build health literacy that can help prevent underage drinking. In my middle school health classroom, my focus for interpersonal communication is on using refusal skills to enhance health in situations involving underage drinking.
Starting the Conversation
I use the video “How Alcohol Affects Your Developing Brain” to begin the conversation about underage drinking prevention with my students. Pairing the video with a visible thinking routine (I suggest the “Chalk Talk” or “Creative Question Starts”) demystifies underage drinking in a non-judgmental way. I want my students to understand that their brains are still developing, and alcohol use can affect their developing brains. Right away, students are building the functional health content knowledge they will use in their discussions about underage drinking to understand how alcohol affects their developing adolescent brain.
With their interest piqued, I have students dive into more Ask, Listen, Learn resources focused on each part of the brain. The Ask, Listen, Learn videos are informative without being judgmental; they are concise, clear, and engaging. Students rotate through stations, working in small groups to determine the role of each part of the brain, how alcohol affects the individual parts, and how those effects can be dangerous to them.
Armed with functional health knowledge, I challenge students to use that information while demonstrating a refusal skill, saying “NO” to underage drinking. They can’t just repeat information, though. They have to find a way to break it down so a middle school-aged peer could understand it. For communication skills to transfer outside the classroom, students must communicate authentically as their middle school selves. The challenge of breaking down scientific information into age-appropriate dialogue to use in a real-life situation can help students support the health and well-being of themselves and others.
Completing the above activity helps students build their communication abilities in different contexts. Even though they are not assessed on these specific performance indicators, students also collaborate and negotiate with their peers when working in small groups.
Health teachers who are unfamiliar with Ask, Listen, Learn resources can use the program’s facilitators guide and turnkey lesson plans to easily implement these resources in a variety of ways to best meet their students’ needs. The program includes seven lessons on alcohol’s impact on the developing brain and one on cannabis. These lessons and activities are available at no cost to download on the Ask, Listen, Learn website.
Extending the Lesson at Home
The free resources for parents and families from Ask, Listen, Learn provide opportunities for health educators to connect with caregivers to extend learning beyond the classroom walls. The information provided by Ask, Listen, Learn can easily be shared in classroom newsletters or through a weekly school update. Enlisting families’ support and building their capacity to have conversations about alcohol helps improve protective factors that can positively influence adolescents to make healthy decisions about alcohol use; consistent messaging further emphasizes this message when all stakeholders are on the same page.
Additional Practices for Using Ask, Listen, Learn Resources
Health teachers should also bring this content into the rest of the school building and community whenever possible. In addition to connecting with caregivers, teachers can enlist the support of school staff, such as administrators and school counselors, when promoting a common language about underage drinking.
Although we celebrate Healthy Literacy Month in October, health literacy and underage drinking prevention are important throughout the year, and Ask, Listen, Learn’s resources are a great way to empower your students with the skills to say “NO” to underage drinking and “YES” to a healthy lifestyle.
Additional Resources
- The Essentials of Teaching Health Education: Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
- CDC’s Characteristics of an Effective Health Education Curriculum
- SHAPE America’s 2024 National Health Education Standards Educator Kit
This post is sponsored content from Responsibility.org. Ask, Listen, Learn: Kids and Alcohol Don’t Mix is an underage drinking prevention program for grades 4-8 provided cost-free by Responsibility.org. Both science- and evidence- based with interactive lessons, animated videos, and a standards-aligned curriculum, the program teaches students what the developing brain does and how alcohol negatively affects it.
Find out more about Sponsored Content.
Jeff Bartlett
Jeff Bartlett is a middle school health education teacher in Massachusetts. He also works as a consultant on Responsibility.org’s Ask, Listen, Learn program. Bartlett was the 2021 SHAPE America National Health Education Teacher of The Year.
