While all school transitions are important, the middle to high school shift stands out. It coincides with biological, social, and cognitive changes in young people that began in early adolescence but continue into high school. These changes can be quite stressful, often disrupting students' academic performance and social and emotional well-being…

Recent decades have seen a rise in mental health problems among children and adolescents. Despite a proliferation of studies describing effective school-based mental health programs, reviews of current research in this field suggest a strong lack of consensus concerning the definition of school mental health and its constructs. In the present…

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbates the mental, emotional, and behavioral (MEB) health problems of children and adolescents in the United States (U.S.). A "collective" and "coordinated" national economic and social reconstruction effort aimed at shoring up services to promote children's MEB, like the Marshall Plan that helped…

As outlined in this article, conceptual physical education (CPE) uses a text and classroom sessions to teach healthy lifestyle concepts and principles as well as self-management skills that promote lifelong fitness and active living. CPE programs are meant to be an important part of quality physical education (PE) programs. A dozen reasons are…

Students learn in conjunction with others, and effective teaching and learning incorporates academic, social, and emotional components. Strategies, such as self-compassion training and gratitude training, can be implemented in a college classroom to promote mental health and academic flourishing. Self-compassion involves treating yourself with the…

Guidance for schools regarding the promotion and enhancement of psychological wellbeing represents an invitation to intervene to promote effective, evidence-informed, whole-school approaches for school staff, students and parents. With its transdiagnostic approach and evidence from empirical literature, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is…

A number of states have taken steps toward promoting student wellness, with many of their state boards of education in the middle of the action. This article contains some examples of states leading on student wellness by addressing physical fitness, social and emotional learning (SEL), and mental health supports. The Every Student Succeeds Act…

Background: The health of children is undeniably important. Especially with the soaring epidemic of childhood overweight and obesity, physical health is a large concern. Emotional health is also an area of great significance, because it is essential to overall health. Children's health promotion interventions have been developed and implemented;…

Objectives: Schools can provide an optimal environment for promoting children's health behaviours. The Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) model addresses 10 aspects of the school environment that can be used to promote student health behaviours and academic outcomes: namely, Health Education; Nutrition Environment and Services;…

In this article I propose that curriculum and instruction are inextricably intertwined, curriculum development should be an important function of educational supervision, and supervision should foster a multidimensional curriculum developed by teachers. The proposed curriculum framework includes cognitive, social-emotional, moral, cultural,…

Dialogue journals are a form of writing in which a student and a teacher carry on a conversation over time. This paper addresses the benefits of using dialogue journals for promoting a positive social-emotional learning (SEL) environment for children in school settings. Educators and researchers have increasingly acknowledged the importance of SEL…

The challenges presented by the growing prevalence, burden, and unmet service needs of youth mental health problems are formidable. During the past decade, scholars and other stakeholders of the Missouri Prevention Center (MPC) have been using a prevention and implementation science approach to develop, implement, evaluate, and disseminate…

Recognizing the effects of trauma besetting many of their students, many states, districts, and schools are revamping approaches to making schools physically and psychologically safer. Many of the steps to establish safer, more supportive schools are aligned with those needed to create trauma-responsive schools. State boards of education are…

Mental health issues continue to present barriers for Canadian children, in terms of both psychological and academic outcomes. Growing numbers of students are placed "at risk" as a result. A mental health promotion approach suggests that students can develop a number of skills and competencies, namely those related to social-emotional…

It is the position of the National Association of School Nurses (NASN) that the registered professional school nurse (hereinafter referred to as school nurse) be knowledgeable about and participate in the implementation of Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) approach in the educational setting (ASCD & Centers for Disease Control…