Whole Child Tenets for Healthy, Safe, Engaged, Supported, and Challenged Learning PDF

Whole Child Tenet #1 Healthy Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle. 1. Our school culture supports and reinforces the health and well-being of each student 2. Our school health education curriculum and instruction support and reinf...

Whole Child Tenet #1 Healthy Each student enters school healthy and learns about and practices a healthy lifestyle. 1. Our school culture supports and reinforces the health and well-being of each student 2. Our school health education curriculum and instruction support and reinforce the health and well-being of each student by addressing the physical, mental, emotional, and social dimensions of health. 3. Our school physical education schedule, curriculum, and instruction support and reinforce the health and well-being of each student by addressing lifetime fitness knowledge, attitudes, behaviors, and skills. 4. Our school facility and environment support and reinforce the health and wellbeing of each student and staff member. 5. Our school addresses the health and wellbeing of each staff member. 6. Our school collaborates with parents and the local community to promote the health and well-being of each student. 7. Our school integrates health and wellbeing into the school’s ongoing activities, professional development, curriculum, and assessment practices. 8. Our school sets realistic goals for student and staff health that are built on accurate data and sound science. 9. Our school facilitates student and staff access to health, mental health, and dental services. 10. Our school supports, promotes, and reinforces healthy eating patterns and food safety in routine food services and special programming and events for students and staff. Whole Child Tenet #2 Safe Each student learns in an environment that is physically and emotionally safe for students and adults. 1. Our school building, grounds, playground equipment, and vehicles are secure and meet all established safety and environmental standards. 2. Our school physical plant is attractive; is structurally sound; has good internal (hallways) and external (pedestrian, bicycle, and motor vehicle) traffic flow, including for those with special needs; and is free of defects. 3. Our physical, emotional, academic, and social school climate is safe, friendly, and student- centered. 4. Our students feel valued, respected, and cared for and are motivated to learn. 5. Our school staff, students, and family members establish and maintain school and classroom behavioral expectations, rules, and routines that teach students how to manage their behavior and help students improve problem behavior. 6. Our school provides our students, staff, and family members with regular opportunities for learning and support in teaching students how to manage their own behavior and reinforcing expectations, rules, and routines. 7. Our school teaches, models, and provides opportunities to practice social-emotional skills, including effective listening, conflict resolution, problem solving, personal reflection and responsibility, and ethical decision making. 8. Our school upholds social justice and equity concepts and practices mutual respect for individual differences at all levels of school interactions—student-to-student, adult- tostudent, and adult-to-adult. 9. Our school climate, curriculum, and instruction reflect both high expectations and an understanding of child and adolescent growth and development. 10. Our teachers and staff develop and implement academic and behavioral interventions based on an understanding of child and adolescent development and learning theories. Whole Child Tenet #3 Engaged Each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community. 1. Our teachers use active learning strategies, such as cooperative learning and project-based learning. 2. Our school offers a range of opportunities for students to contribute to and learn within the community at large, including service learning, internships, apprenticeships, and volunteer projects. 3. Our school policies and climate reinforce citizenship and civic behaviors by students, family members, and staff and include meaningful participation in decision making. 4. Our school uses curriculum-related experiences such as field trips and outreach projects to complement and extend our curriculum and instruction. 5. Each student in our school has access to a range of options and choices for a wide array of extracurricular and cocurricular activities that reflect student interests, goals, and learning profiles. 6. Our curriculum and instruction promote students’ understanding of the realworld, global relevance and application of learned content. 7. Our teachers use a range of inquirybased, experiential learning tasks and activities to help all students deepen their understanding of what they are learning and why they are learning it. 8. Our staff works closely with students to help them monitor and direct their own progress. 9. Our school expects and prepares students to assume age-appropriate responsibility for learning through effective decision making, goal setting, and time management. 10. Our school supports, promotes, and reinforces responsible environmental habits through recycling, trash management, sustainable energy, and other efforts. Whole Child Tenet #4 Supported Each student has access to personalized learning and is supported by qualified, caring adults. 1. Our school personalizes learning, including the flexible use of time and scheduling to meet academic and social goals for each student. 2. Our teachers use a range of diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment tasks to monitor student progress, provide timely feedback, and adjust teaching-learning activities to maximize student progress. 3. Our school ensures that adult-student relationships support and encourage each student’s academic and personal growth. 4. Each student has access to school counselors and other structured academic, social, and emotional support systems. 5. Our school staff understands and makes curricular, instructional, and school improvement decisions based on child and adolescent development and student performance information. 6. Our school personnel welcome and include all families as partners in their children’s education and significant members of the school community. 7. Our school uses a variety of methods across languages and cultures to communicate with all families and community members about the school’s vision, mission, goals, activities and opportunities for students. 8. Our school helps families understand available services, advocate for their children’s needs, and support their children’s learning. 9. Every member of our school staff is well qualified and properly credentialed. 10. All adults who interact with students both within the school and through extracurricular, cocurricular, and community-based experiences teach and model prosocial behavior. Whole Child Tenet #5 Challenged Each student is challenged academically and prepared for success in college or further study and for employment and participation in a global environment. 1. Each student in our school has access to challenging, comprehensive curriculum in all content areas. 2. Our curriculum and instruction provide opportunities for students to develop critical- thinking and reasoning skills, problem-solving competencies, and technology proficiency. 3. Our school collects and uses qualitative and quantitative data to support student academic and personal growth. 4. Our curriculum, instruction, and assessment demonstrate high expectations for each student. 5. Our school works with families to help all students understand the connection between education and lifelong success. 6. Our curriculum and instruction include evidence-based strategies to prepare students for further education, career, and citizenship. 7. Our extracurricular, cocurricular, and community-based programs provide students with experiences relevant to higher education, career, and citizenship. 8. Our curriculum and instruction develop students’ global awareness and competencies, including understanding of language and culture. 9. Our school monitors and assesses extracurricular, cocurricular, and community- based experiences to ensure students’ academic and personal growth. 10. Our school provides cross-curricular opportunities for learning with and through technology. WELLNESS Wellness is an interactive process of becoming aware of and practicing healthy choices to create a more successful and balanced lifestyle. Wellness is: A direction in which by its nature, moves us toward a more proactive, responsible and healthier existence. The integration of the body, mind, and spirit. The loving acceptance of ourselves today and the exciting free search for who we choose to become tomorrow. Choice living; a compilation of the daily decisions we make that lead us to that person we choose to become. Wellness is the framework that you can use to organize, understand, and balance your own growth and development. Everything you do, every decision you make, every thought you think, and every attitude and belief you hold fits into this framework made up of the following six basic concepts: 1. Social Wellness o involves developing friendships, healthy sexual behaviors, and the ability to interact comfortably with others. Social wellness is important for maintaining harmony in personal and community environments. The social dimension encourages contributing to the common welfare of your community. It emphasizes the coexistence of you, society, and the environment along with the pursuit of harmony in your life. As you become socially well, your impact on society and nature becomes more apparent. Throughout your journey, you’ll seek out ways to preserve balance around you. You actively seek ways to enhance relationships through better communication and encouraging a healthy living environment. You will learn it is better to live in harmony than in conflict. o Social wellness provides the foundation for interaction and participation with and commitment to students, parents, and the community that are rooted in mutual respect, interdependence, and cooperation (Sackney et al., 2000; Strout & Howard, 2012). Educators must engage in opportunities that allow them to interact and socialize with other individuals outside of the workplace to meet their social wellness needs. 2. Intellectual Wellness o involves the strong desire to learn from challenges and experiences. Intellectual wellness is important for encouraging ongoing intellectual growth and experiencing creative yet stimulating mental activities that will provide you with the foundation to discover, process, and evaluate information effectively. An intellectually well person uses the available resources, in and out of the classroom, to expand their knowledge and skills for the betterment of society. As you grow, you will continually seek issues relating to problem solving, creative thinking and learning. You will actively seek the opportunity to expand and challenge your mind through creative endeavors. Your natural instinct to remain abreast of current issues will surface and become satisfied through reading books, magazines and newspapers and pursuing other interests. o The pursuit of one’s intellectual passion is essential for educators’ relational and instructional engagement with students. It helps them stay current with evolving research and follow through with emerging best practices. 3. Spiritual Wellness o involves the willingness to seek meaning and purpose in human existence; regardless of your religious beliefs. Spiritual wellness is important for allowing you to be open to diverse multi-cultural beliefs and backgrounds because of your comfort level with yourself and with your belief structure. Spiritual wellness coincides with the exploration of the meaning of life. It seeks the development of a deep appreciation of all life and natural forces in existence. The question "Who am I and why do I exist?" is the starting point of your journey into spiritual wellness. Through your journey, you will observe and appreciate the beauty of your surroundings and begin to learn the value of things you cannot understand. As you grow spiritually, you seek a harmony between your emotions allowing for avoidance of emotional peaks and valleys. You continually allow your actions to be guided by your beliefs and values. o Spiritual wellness allows educators to find their purpose and passion within the profession, enabling them to serve students equitably. Spiritual wellness is unique to each individual in how he or she will cultivate the understanding to support this dimension. 4. Emotional Wellness o involves having the ability to acknowledge and accept a wide range of feelings in oneself as well as in others. Emotional wellness is important in order to be able to freely express and manage one's own feelings, to develop positive self- esteem in order to arrive at personal decisions based upon the integration of one's attitudes and behaviors. Emotional wellness centers on the acceptance of your emotions and feelings. Included is the ability to realistically evaluate your limitations and effectively cope with stress. An emotionally well individual maintains healthy and satisfying relationships with others. On the path to emotional wellness, your acceptance and awareness of a wide range of feelings in yourself and others becomes more apparent. The ability to manage, understand and express your emotions will be enhanced leading to the development of relationships based on mutual commitment, trust, and respect. o Emotional wellness is a major component of an educator’s daily life because it affects interactions with students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. For example, educators often need to manage their personal feelings of frustration to deal positively with students’ challenging behaviors 5. Physical Wellness o involves regular physical activities, proper nutrition and health care, such as exercise or sports, and personal hygiene. Cardiovascular strength and endurance, muscular strength and endurance, and flexibility are all also part of physical wellness. Physical wellness is important because activities leading to high levels of wellness, including nutritional knowledge, exercise, and appropriate use of the medical system are encouraged while detrimental activities, including the consumption of drugs and excessive alcohol are discouraged. Throughout your journey to physical wellness, you will strive to spend more attention to building flexibility, cardiovascular, and muscular abilities. The relationship between sound nutritional practices and your health becomes more apparent and appreciated. You will understand your body’s warning signs and take responsibility by appropriately adjusting your lifestyle. o Educators often feel so extended by the day-to-day demands of their professional and personal lives that they don’t make time for physical wellness. School districts can support physical wellness by providing discounted gym memberships, access to school gyms with  designated hours for educators to use district equipment, group exercise classes, or physical wellness challenges. 6. Occupational Wellness o involves the integration of various components of the wellness framework into planning for a healthy future, such as career, family and future wellness. It also involves gaining personal satisfaction and finding enrichment in your life through work. Occupational wellness is important because it develops the understanding that decisions and values may change as new information arid experiences are attained. Your choice of profession, job satisfaction, career ambitions, and personal performance are all important components of occupational wellness. You will begin to value the importance of not only your own personal satisfaction, but also your contribution to society. You will choose both paid and unpaid activities based on your skills, talent, and values. You are on the right path when your work and hobbies are exciting and rewarding. o Schools have a moral obligation to build educator capacity and to retain and value each educator as a contributing member of the collective school district 7. Environmental wellness o establishes the physical and mental foundation that grounds an educator’s work, administrators and systems must create and maintain environments that minimize stress for teachers and students and support overall wellness. 8. Financial Wellness o Financial wellness has a direct effect on educators’ ability to support their life, health, and mental well-being