In the United States, the prevailing view of health, including the design of the U.S. healthcare system, has historically posited that to improve health one must focus on better understanding what causes poor health or disease. This emphasis on disease reduction or risk prevention, also known as a pathogenic approach to health. This article…

Data show that centenarian populations mostly consume a whole-food, plant-based diet, live an active lifestyle, and avoid toxins. Many Americans, however, do the opposite and succumb to numerous health-related diseases at a much earlier age. The lesson presented in this article was designed to help the health educator to use this data in their…

There are numerous ways a health educator can conclude a unit of instruction to demonstrate student learning. One approach is to utilize a national health education standard to reflect upon and tie units together at the end of the curriculum. The lesson presented in this article was designed to illustrate this methodology and add to the health…

The release of the 2024 SHAPE America National Health Education Standards provides an updated take on the learning standards used to teach students how to become healthy and well. In this revision, the standards emphasize both individual and collective health and well-being; greater inclusion of strengths, assets, and opportunities to practice and…

By integrating Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI theory) into health and wellness education, we can honor student uniqueness, promote inclusivity in the learning space, and increase the adoption of positive health behaviors. The MI theory proposes that every individual possesses unique strengths and weaknesses for learning that…

Escape rooms are an increasingly popular activity that many people engage in recreationally. This modality adapted for education purposes consists of a series of content driven puzzles and challenges that lead students to transverse their way out of a room. The purpose of this article is to: (a) align escape rooms with educational theory (b)…

THE FUSED health education series was developed as a one-stop guide for developing a quality curriculum for teaching health education. This first, two-part article introduces a new approach to teaching health education called THE FUSED Technique. THE stands for Teaching Health Education and FUSED stands for Functional (data driven) information,…

Social Media is a part of life these days, a majority of students use social media as a way to interact with each other, get information and keep up with current events. As teachers we can embrace this and help guide our students on how to use social media as digital citizens properly. This is how two professionals use twitter to engage themselves…

Part 1 of this article described THE FUSED Technique (Ford & Knutson, 2024) as a new pedagogical approach to teaching K-12 health education, blending or fusing the best aspects from the standards-based and skill-based health education teaching models. THE stands for teaching health education and FUSED stands for functional (data driven)…

This article aims to showcase instructional strategies in a middle and high school health education classroom. The strategies highlighted include word(s) and pictures(s) of the day postings, journaling, a scavenger hunt, writing a one-minute paper, conducting a three-part interview, and playing a myth versus truth game.

The association between the health of children and adolescents with their academic success is gaining more attention nationally. Consequently, the United States federal government has enacted policies to support environmental health improvement in schools, while health- and education-focused organizations have partnered to offer guidance in…

This article discusses core teaching practices for health education by defining, unpacking, and describing the use of core practices in teacher education. Core practices offer health teacher-educators and health educators a set of teaching practices that can be introduced during professional preparation and then refined and mastered as health…

It is important that educators understand how to adapt their health education lessons to ensure they are inclusive of all students. This article provides six strategies for teaching health education to students with intellectual disabilities, both in the classroom and in physical education class, to improve their health literacy.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, educators grapple with the challenges of creating meaningful content in online courses in higher education. Specifically, designing an online curriculum that increases student motivation, student engagement, and student learning. Learner--Learner (LL) interactions are a key component in not…

Typical health lessons are taught in a classroom setting, where students sit in their chairs and passively receive information. This instructional method may not be the optimal approach, as Ratey discovered in his famous experiment that the human brain is more aroused when the body is physically and actively engaged in the learning environment.…