Educational approach
The Mental Health and High School Curriculum Guide uses activities and strategies which engage young people in their learning, and challenge them to explore the issues.
The lesson plans in this guide are comprehensive, easy to implement and fun. The interactive teaching strategies used in the activities provide opportunities for building students’ skills in participation, communication, relationship-building, teamwork, and critical thinking. Many of the activities in the lessons are designed to be completed by teams of students working together.
The activities address a range of learning styles by incorporating both experiential and reflective elements, and using guided discussion to assist students to process and share new experiences and information.
The lessons include both print-based classroom activities
and web-based audio-visual activities. The lessons, each of which is designed to fit into 50 minutes of classroom time, are written in the form of lesson plans that can be easily implemented by teachers without additional training.
Teacher tips are provided to highlight the sensitive aspects of certain lessons, and offer suggestions about strategies that are designed to teach about as well as model mental health.
Teachers can integrate their assessment of student learning through this resource with their assessment plan for the course with which they are using these materials.
