(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  An article in Issue #5, 2015 of Journal of Developmental And Behavioural Pediatrics describes the impact of one student's disruptive behaviour on another student in the class. "Marcus is a 10-year-old boy who was followed by his pediatrician for several years. She knows him as a socially engaged, active athlete, playing soccer and baseball, out-going, and a good student. He has been in good health. At the beginning of this year, a new student was placed in Marcus's fourth grade class. This student is disruptive, impulsive, and abusive. He has frequent violent outbursts, yelling, kicking, and throwing objects, including recently throwing a desk across the room. The school has made efforts to manage this student. The teacher sets up behavior contracts, and the school has temporarily suspended the child; however, the school is unable to remove the child from the classroom. Many students, including Marcus, have been significantly affected by this disruption. Marcus describes the classroom environment as “tense.” He reports he is never sure what is going to make the student “so mad.” Over the last 3–4 months, Marcus developed nightmares, enuresis, and trichotillomania." Here is the dilemma confronting the teacher and the school. Do they continue to accept the disruptive student or do they suspend the student for the good of the others? Who is responsible for providing the support, both to the disruptive student and to other students affected by the situation? Read more>>
Note: This dilemma is one of the topics on the agenda of the ISHN-ASCD-EI dialogue on integrating health and social programs within the core mandates, constraints and concerns of education systems. For more on that dialogue, go to this web page.

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  An article in Issue #6, 2015 of Journal of Health Psychology reports on a small study of tThe impact of a school-based gardening intervention on intentions and behaviour related to fruit and vegetable consumption in children. The results of this singke school study are positive but the explanation of the result is equally interesting. The Theory of Planned Behaviour was used to explain the results. "Measures of the Theory of Planned Behaviour and fruit and vegetable consumption were taken pre- and post-intervention. Repeated measures analysis of variance and hierarchical regression analysis indicated that the intervention group increased daily consumption of fruits and vegetables and increased intentions, attitudes, norms, and perceived behavioural control related to fruit and vegetable consumption. Attitudes, norms and perceived behavioural control significantly predicted changes in fruit and vegetable consumption." It is this combination knowledge, practical experience, changes in attitudes, intentions, percveptions of control/health beliefs and the other aspects listed in the article that we need to consider more often. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  Two contradictory news stories this week underline the differences of opinion of well-respected authorities as they both tell parents what to do with their kids after school. Scroll trough the news reports in this week's update from ISHN to its members and you will find a Canadian study, followed by an editorial from a major newspaper, telling parents that they need to let their kids play outside freely. In the same week, we have a story from the UK, where the police are "slamming" parents for leaving their children at a swimming pool (presumably with qualified life guards) while they went shopping. In previous weeks, we tracked the stories of the Baltimore parents who had their children taken from them by Child Protection Services for letting them walk home from school without supervision. Consider all this disagreement in the context of the social/political norm that that parents know what is best for their children and that schools should respect their privacy and decisions. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  A special issue (Issue 2-3, 2015) of Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation examines the use of school psychologists as systems-level consultants as a strategy to deal with the complexities of the multi-level changes required to introduce and sustain comprehensive approaches to school mental health promotion. An interdisciplinary perspective is used to select the articles which cover topics such as Interdisciplinary Collaboration Supporting Social-Emotional Learning, Ecologically Based Organizational Consultations, the Competencies for Systems-Level Consultants, Multi-Tiered Systems of Support, Collaboration Between School Psychologists and Administrators and Critical Features and Lessons Learned for Implementation. Read more>> Readers may also be interested in a similar ISHN description of a systems-based approach to SMH that is based on capacity and capacity-building at this web page.

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) Formative evaluation results of eleven pilot schools participating in the ASCD Healthy Schools program (detailed planning and assessment guide, technical advice, networking) identifies "nine levers of change: principal as leader of the HSC efforts; active and engaged leadership; distributive team leadership; effective use of data for continuous school improvement; integration of the HSC process with the school improvement process; ongoing and embedded professional development; authentic and mutually beneficial community collaborations; stakeholder support of the local HSC effort; and creation or modification of school policy related to HSC that increased the likelihood that school improvement via health promotion would be pursued and sustained." The study was based on "Pre- and post-site visits along with in-depth interviews with school teams, teachers, students, administrators, community stakeholders and other involved individuals, school site report reviews, Healthy School Report Card results and school improvement plans were used for evaluation purposes. " The article concludes that "integration of health and education can become a sustainable and integral part of a school’s culture." Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  As noted often in this blog, educators often encounter several different, often competing, multi-intervention models that are meant to act as planning and implementation frameworks. These include healthy schools, community schools, safe schools and many more. An article in Issue #2, 2015 of School Psychology Quarterly describes how two of these models, which have been developed for similar but yet different purposes, can be combined for greater effect. The authors note that "Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) and Social Emotional Learning (SEL) are 2 of the most widely adopted, evidence-based approaches that have been advocated to address student mental health and externalizi8ng behaviour. These universal prevention approaches, however, stem from different theoretical camps and are often advocated and implemented apart from one another."..T"he purpose of this study was to examine the independent and combined effects of PBIS and SEL on student mental health outcomes. A quasi-randomized control design at the classroom level was used to make comparisons across 4 conditions: business-as-usual (BAU), PBIS alone, SEL alone, and COMBO condition with regard to their acceptability to teachers, integrity of program delivery, and student outcomes. As predicted, the COMBO condition produced significantly greater improvements in overall mental health and reductions in externalizing behaviors when compared to all other conditions. The results also indicated that the PBIS- and SEL-only conditions were both able to produce significant improvements in overall mental health functioning as compared with the BAU control." Now, if we can persuade the well-meaning mental health agencies to build on these existing models rather than develop yet another competing one based on "positive mental health" or on preventing specific mental health illnesses, school systems will be less distracted by competing frameworks. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)   An article in June 2015 Issue of Journal of School Health examines school staff perspectives on the challenges and solutions to working with court-involved students. The article begins by noting that " Over 25% of children experience trauma, including physical, sexual, emotional abuse, and witnessing substance abuse or violence within their household.[2] Among court-involved students, exposure to trauma is even more substantial,". The background is not surprising "Not surprisingly, court-involved youth may encounter more academic challenges than other students. For example, foster youth are assigned to special education services more often than non-foster youth,and almost 50% demonstrate behavioral or emotional problems. Youth in the juvenile justice system exhibit much higher rates of behavioral and emotional disorders and are more likely to experience school discipline, suspensions, and expulsions,requiring teachers to focus on socioemotional and behavioral issues in the classroom that impede learning.Although schools should acknowledge student capabilities and needs,targeted school services and resources are lacking." The authors suggest that teacher perceptions may be critical. " Teacher perception of student behavior can impact student success. Cox et al[28] reported that teachers who worked in a juvenile residential school facility perceived students as apathetic about class work. However, court-involved students may be too distracted by previous trauma to be attentive in the classroom, and school personnel can misinterpret this behavior as oppositional or reflecting mental health disorders.This may contribute to higher rates of school suspensions and expulsions...Exploring perceptions of teachers and school staff, addressing training gaps, and providing needed resources to school personnel may be key to making this happen." Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service) The articles in Issue #2, 2015 of European Journal of Education form a special issue on one of the pillars used by UNESCO and many countries to frame the purposes and goals of education and school systems. The title of the issue asks "Learning to Be — Idealism or Core Business?". As many will know, the 1996 Delors report to UNESCO introduced four pillars around which education and learning should be organized: learning to know; learning to do; learning to live together; and learning to be. ‘ The earlier UNESCO report, the Faure report, had been focused on "learning to be" and expressed grave concerns that educational purpose may end up being subject to technical, vocational and economic interests rather than a liberating force for universal progress and humanism. This special issue takes us back to this debate. Many of the articles in the issue address this question directly and through examples of various national education systems in Latin America, Germany, Canada, England. "Do Our Education Systems Do Enough to Enable Learners to Flourish as Independent, Autonomous and Well-Balanced Individuals? For those who wish to gain a deeper understanding of the forces and debates shaping school systems as we seek to integrate health and social programs more firmly within education systems, this issue is a must read. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  An article in Volume 36 of the Annual Review of Public Health describes some of the lessons we have collectively learned about complex interventions to improve health, especiually the ways that complex systems thinking is being used in clinical settings. "Complexity—resulting from interactions among many component parts—is a property of both the intervention and the context (or system) into which it is placed. Complexity increases the unpredictability of effects. Complexity invites new approaches to logic modeling, definitions of integrity and means of standardization, and evaluation. New metaphors and terminology are needed to capture the recognition that knowledge generation comes from the hands of practitioners/ implementers as much as it comes from those usually playing the role of intervention researcher. Failure to acknowledge this may blind us to the very mechanisms we seek to understand. Researchers in clinical settings are documenting health improvement gains made as a consequence of complex systems thinking. Improvement science in clinical settings has much to offer researchers in population health." This succinct summary, presented in the abstract, captures many of the lessons that need to be applied. Since ISHN sponsors a Wikipedia style web site that uses the slogan "where (research) evidence meets (professional) experience, and since many of the summaries in that web site attempt to explain these new ideas based on ecological, systems-based thinking, we highly recommend this article. Read more>>

(An item from the ISHN Member information service)  An article in Issue #6, 2015 of American Journal of Public Health contends that the 200+ health awareness days, weeks and months do little to promote health or well-being. Schools are often a big part of these awareness activities, often viewing the participation in these days to be akin to addressing the problem. The authors "contend that health awareness days are not held to appropriate scrutiny given the scale at which they have been embraced and are misaligned with research on the social determinants of health and the tenets of ecological models of health promotion. We examined health awareness days from a critical public health perspective and offer empirically supported recommendations to advance the intervention strategy. If left unchecked, health awareness days may do little more than reinforce ideologies of individual responsibility and the false notion that adverse health outcomes are simply the product of misinformed behaviors. Read more>>