Student Engagement in HPS Roadmap

Introduction

Student engagement is a core component of a Health Promoting Schools (HPS) approach.  This roadmap is a guide for the process of fostering meaningful student engagement in a HPS approach including essential components and resources to support the work. This roadmap may be helpful for you if you are planning, developing or implementing a project, initiative or strategy related to school health promotion and you would like to engage students in a meaningful way. We know there are many routes to meaningful engagement of students; this is only one pathway based on a combination of research and practice efforts developed, implemented and evaluated by the UpLift Partnership in Nova Scotia between the years of 2019 – 2024.

Phase 1: Creating Conditions

When beginning a student engagement project, people may think the first step is to recruit children and youth and start planning. Yes, ensuring young people have a meaningful and authentic role in shaping what happens is important. However, there are some initial steps to take before you and the students involved start identifying and working on a project. 

This section is about that preparatory work. It includes pausing to assess your own capacity, skills, energy and interest, assessing the school environment, and building partnerships with and amongst both adults and students involved. These steps help create a container for positive experiences that support personal growth and school well-being, situated within and attuned to the community it impacts most. 

Stage 1: Self-Reflecting

It’s important to first spend time reflecting on your own values and how your perspectives shape your approach. Regardless of your intentions, how you show up for young people has a significant influence on how well-received and trusted you are. Before you initiate a student engagement project, you can set yourself up well by grounding yourself in student engagement and health promotion principles. The resource examples provided will help you reflect on and learn about your own perspectives and help to strengthen your foundation in student engagement and HPS principles.

Stage 2: Investigating the School Environment

Meaningful student engagement projects are informed by a strong understanding of the student community, who they are meant to serve.  Therefore, an early step in this process is building your understanding of the school environment. This includes learning about available resources, culture, history, school priorities, existing relationships and previous challenges and successes. This foundational understanding enables you to assess the ‘readiness’ of the school community, identify considerations that could impact implementation, and provides insight into what may be priority areas within the school community. These resources provide examples of assessment activities we have used to engage students, teachers, administrators and staff in understanding the foundations of the school community.

Stage 3: Building the Foundation for Partnerships

Building authentic and trusting relationships is a best practice in student engagement work. Relationship building early-on with school staff, administrators, teachers and students fuels enthusiasm, energy, motivation and commitment throughout the engagement process.  Once you’ve undertaken an assessment of the school environment, look at what connections and relationships already exist. We encourage you to spend time building your understanding of the community that you’re working in by asking about and meeting with those who have been involved with or interested in student engagement and health promotion activities in the past. Additionally, it is important to showcase what you can offer to the partnership by highlighting how your skills, background and expertise are of value to the school community. This can be done through active ways including helping to support and operationalize student-led HPS projects, or more subtle ways such as being involved in other student initiatives across the school. These resource examples provide ideas and activities of how to foster strong partnerships with school community members, including students!

Stage 4: Fostering an Inclusive and Productive Team 

Teamwork makes the dreamwork! Once you have a good understanding of the physical and social context of the school community, it is now time to foster a strong student team. In our experience, a strong team is one that welcomes a variety of perspectives and values different ways of knowing and learning.  This can be fostered through intentional team building exercises and experiential learning to help build trust throughout the group, aid in compromise and foster peer-to-peer relationships. Some examples include check ins, and check outs, activities to create a safe space including opportunities to share pronouns and develop community agreements, as well as interactive games to energize the group. It is also important to foster productivity within the team by creating a plan for consistency to keep the students engaged throughout the project. This can look like scheduling structured check-ins, outlining roles and responsibilities, and updating the students on the project during waiting periods. Showing up and being reliable is important for building students’ trust and keeping the momentum for action going. The resource examples are some of many to provide ideas and activities of how to foster a safe, supportive and fun team with students! 

Phase 2: Envisioning & Taking Action

In phase one you built a stronger understanding of the community and context for this work.  You explored your own perspectives and learning edges, investigated the opportunities and limits for this school community, and started laying the foundation for strong relationships amongst partners and within the group of students you’re working with. Now, the prep work you’ve done becomes a jumping off point for the exciting phase of imagining what’s possible and taking action.   

In this phase, you will work with students to build a shared understanding of what well-being is, identify opportunities for action, support students through decision making and then taking action to make change.

Stage 5: Exploring Well-being

What does well-being mean to you? What does it mean to the last student you spoke with? Depending on their experiences and perspectives, people’s understanding of well-being, and their ability to articulate, it can vary greatly. Young people are frequently treated as recipients of knowledge developed by adults or “experts”. Facilitating informal, open and creative opportunities for students to reflect, share and develop ideas with each other, reinforces that their perspectives and insights are worthy of a forum and respect from their peers and adults alike. This can reinforce your role and commitment to supporting students as change makers, while further establishing a shared vision for well-being in their school community. Additionally, working with a group to share ideas and come to agreement about a concept can reinforce expectations of trust and collaboration in a team environment. 

This is also an opportunity to help students understand that health and well-being are more than individual concerns; they are impacted by the social and physical environment. When students see this perspective, they can grasp their potential as agents of change who can collectively influence the well-being of a whole community by addressing social and environmental factors. The resources provided outline activities and guidance of how to support students in understanding what well-being means to them through a health promotion lens.

Stage 6: Ideation and Brainstorming

In the process of exploring what well-being is, project ideas have probably already popped up. If you’ve taken note of them, you get to revisit them now, reminding students that they are being heard! This step involves time to brainstorm and imagine what can be done in the school community without expectations or boundaries. This may involve gathering more information by conducting surveys or interviews with the school community to learn more about their ideas related to health and well-being. These resources provide great ideas for brainstorming and visioning during this stage.

Stage 7: Narrowing the Focus

Narrowing the focus may be the hardest part with so many great ideas by the students, but it is important to focus on moving forward with a project that is a priority to the student group and the school community.  This involves students learning about a democratic approach to decision-making such that they learn how to prioritize based on the different needs of the school community and different perspectives of those involved. It is important in this stage to differentiate between the needs and wants of the school community to ensure students lead a project that will help support the greater good of the school community that will impact many, rather than a more individual-level project that will only impact some. This also involves facilitating methods to help combine similar thoughts and identifying main topics of concerns and ideas while also ensuring all students voices and opinions are heard – not an easy feat! By going through various activities that represent these priority setting actions students can learn how to bring together different opinions and compromise on a project that includes all perspectives in some shape and form. These resources provide thoughtful and intentional ways to help with priority setting with students.

Stage 8: Action-oriented Learning

Bringing students’ ideas to life is one of the most important parts of the project (as shared by students)! Engaging students from the start to finish of a project allows them to fully understand how their ideas can be actioned into real-world, tangible projects to make their school a healthy place.  This stage is a combination of all steps coming to the forefront and involves the evolution of envisioning, narrowing the focus, and then operationalizing these concepts into action. The opportunity for students to see the ‘finished’ product is crucial for them to understand that they truly have the power and ability to move their great ideas into action.

Phase 3: Reflecting & Learning

Stage 9: Reflecting and Celebrating

Celebrate good times, come-on! Celebrating and taking time to recognize and reflect on the great work students have done is an important part of the process at the end, but also during the project steps. Acknowledgment of their hard work helps students to build pride in their work and understand that their ideas, thoughts and opinions can make impactful change. Celebration of successes, reflection, and recognition of the work can look different across projects including presentations of projects, certifications, or a party, yet the common thread is for students to recognize the importance of the process beyond the product. Although this is one of the last stages in the roadmap, reflection and celebration really should be happening throughout the project. Asking students to reflect throughout the process is important for learning, adaptation and awareness of the strengths and opportunities for improvement during different stages of the project. The resources provided include prompts and ideas of ways to reflect and celebrate with your student group!

Stage 10: Evaluating

Evaluating the process of engagement is a useful strategy to assess impact of the engagement activities, improve the process by identifying strengths and opportunities for improvements to guide future planning and stay accountable to specific goals or objectives. Although noted as the last stage to engagement, evaluation can happen during any time point to help assess the process and outcomes of any HPS project from the perspectives of all who are involved – especially students! Gathering input from students throughout the process about their likes, dislikes, ways to improve and desired outcomes helps to make the process more relevant to students and better fit their needs. Going a step further, evaluation itself can also actively engage students by having them be involved in shaping their own experiences through participatory mechanisms such as having them involved in planning, reviewing or implementing the evaluation. The resources below provide examples of how to assess youth involvement in HPS projects from the perspectives of different school community members.

General Resources

There is no shortage of resources available online to help guide your engagement with students in school health promotion. Below are a few general resources we find helpful to review before, during and throughout the process. Some resources focus on youth engagement in general, while some relate specifically to student engagement in HPS.

Note from the Authors

This roadmap is informed by several sources and practical observations. Sharing these resources is not a statement of total endorsement and we acknowledge all sources may have their flaws and evolve over time. We encourage that you explore them with a critical eye, integrate what you find useful and adapt as you feel fit to your context. 

The term student and youth are used interchangeably throughout the roadmap and the terms are meant to refer to school-aged children and youth between the ages of 5 – 19 who attend elementary, junior/middle and/or high school. Resources are meant as a guide and may need to be adapted based on the age and cognitive ability of the students you are working with.

Acknowledgements

This resource was created through the UpLift Partnership (2019–2024), a school-community-university partnership that supported HPS in Nova Scotia, Canada through boosting youth engagement efforts across the province. Funding for this work was provided by the Public Health Agency of Canada with matching funds from private donors through a fundraising consortium led by Dalhousie Advancement.

We would like to acknowledge and sincerely thank many team members who contributed and were engaged in the development of the roadmap including students, Youth Engagement Coordinators, UpLift administrative staff members, and partners. Team members contributed through various avenues including research participation, contribution of content, prototype development and through feedback.