Core Teaching Practices for Health Education

Core practices—content-specific practices that offer strategies to support student learning—are common in many subject areas but have been curiously missing for health educators . . . until now.

Core Teaching Practices for Health Education is a compact and precise book that serves up effective core teaching practices for preservice and practicing health educators as well as for health teacher educators. Teachers can apply the evidence-based practical tips and strategies the minute they step into their classrooms; even veteran instructors will discover new teaching tactics that will be useful.

Core Teaching Practices for Health Education offers the following:

• Twenty-first-century teaching skills that are specific to health education
• Practices that are highly transferable across the spectrum of health education and applicable across grade levels
• Fifteen concise and practical chapters, each of which details a core practice in action, explains the practice, gives additional examples of the practice, and provides clear guidance on how to use the practice in health classrooms

Great Prep for Teaching Assessments Such as the edTPA
The text is a great resource for aspiring teachers as they embark on their student teaching semester and as they prepare for teaching assessments such as the edTPA, increasingly required in many states. They will learn how to design lesson plans, unit plans, and complete health education curricula to effectively teach health concepts and skills; this directly relates to the video portion of the edTPA. In addition, the book’s final two chapters directly relate to the Analyzing Teaching portion of the edTPA

Ideal for Preparing Curriculum
In addition, Core Teaching Practices for Health Education is ideal for teachers who are charged with creating health curricula for middle and high school programs—and for other teachers who are thrust into the role of health educators with little or no health education background.

Book Organization
Core Teaching Practices for Health Education is organized into three parts. Part I introduces the idea of core practices and focuses on planning to teach health education (e.g., big ideas, enduring understandings, essential questions, sequencing health content, assessment). Part II explores the pedagogy of health education, including organizational routines and procedures, building a safe and caring environment that is focused on learning, and adapting instruction to meet the needs of students. Part III guides readers through reflective practices on teaching and lesson improvement. Each core practice has its own chapter.

Perfect Companion to Two Other Guides
This affordable guide is a perfect companion to Essentials of Teaching Health Education, Second Edition, by Sarah Benes and Holly Alperin (Human Kinetics, 2022) and Health Education edTPA Online Preparation Guide by Stacy Furness (Human Kinetics, 2022). For future teachers in states that require the edTPA, these three resources supply everything they need to become successful health educators.

Preservice teachers, current teachers, and health teacher educators will find Core Teaching Practices for Health Education to be of lasting value as they use the book’s health-education-specific teaching practices to improve teaching and learning.