New HHD Curriculum Teaches Adolescents Communication, Decision-Making, and Goal-Setting Skills

Adolescents face hard decisions and conflicting expectations as they move through their teenage years. A new curriculum from Health and Human Development Programs teaches basic life skills to help young people make positive connections and healthy decisions.

Building Foundations: Developing Skills for Life, a new module in the nationally recognized Teenage Health Teaching Modules Series (THTM), applies what has been learned from research on academic success, resiliency, and asset building: that life skills are an essential component of successful adolescent development.

The curriculum teaches three critical life skills: Communication, Decision Making, and Reaching Goals. Most of the lessons in Building Foundations open with a passage from a novel, short story, or poem that illustrates a theme related to communication, decision making, or reaching goals. Students read, analyze, and write about the text and then focus on learning and practicing some aspect of the skill.

For example, in one lesson, entitled Are You Listening, students read a short dialogue that illustrates a miscommunication between two speakers. With the teacher’s help, they map the conversation to indicate the difference between what one speaker said, and what the other seemed to hear. Next, the students write a paragraph about a time they felt really listened to and understood. In class, they practice listening and speaking effectively with a partner. Finally, for homework, students interview a family member about a time when he or she felt really listened to, and then write a summary of this person’s experience.

A lesson on decision making has students break into small groups to consider the relative importance of decisions they might face, such as what to wear to school, whether to study for a test, whether to get into a car in which the driver has been drinking, whether to talk to an adult about a depressed friend, or whether to have sex.

In addition to building communication, decision making, and goal-setting skills, Building Foundations also reinforces students’ literacy and critical thinking skills. To help teachers match classroom learning to curriculum standards, the module includes a chart to show how the National Health Education Standards can be addressed by the lessons.

The THTM series is the first comprehensive school health education curriculum at the secondary school level to undergo a large-scale controlled evaluation, which showed that the curriculum produce positive effects on students’ health knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported behaviors.

For more information on Building Foundations or the THTM series, contact Erica Macheca.