HEAD START®

Laying a Foundation in Health & Wellness

Training Guides for the Head Start Learning Community

Table of Contents | Preface | Introduction | Module 1 | Module 2 | Module 3
| Continuing Professional Development | Resources

Continuing Professional Development

| Some Concrete Actions to Take |

Head Start staff members are encouraged to think about health in a very broad way. Laying a Foundation in Health & Wellness asks each staff member to realize that her job is important in supporting the health of Head Start children, families and fellow staff. Some staff are actively involved in health education or health services; others’ roles are less obvious but no less important.

Each staff member can use this guide as a “screen” through which to view his job. Questions such as the following can be used to put the “screen” in place:

• How do I, in my day-to-day activities, support health in Head Start? How do I support physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and environmental health?
  
• My coworkers come from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds; they represent many health beliefs and practices. How can I use my understanding of their beliefs to help people of similar beliefs to improve their health?
  
• What do I do, day to day, to model healthy behaviors that will lead to long-term health? What am I trying to improve about my own health? How can I apply what I am learning about changing my own behavior to helping others who wish to change theirs?
  

Some Concrete Actions to Take

(1) Do the Head Start performance standards that are relevant to your position in Head Start encourage you to support health in a wholistic way? What specific directions for supporting health do they give? Do they fall short in any way?

Are there changes that you need to make in your program to achieve the Performance Standards for Health? How can you build on the standards to achieve excellence in your program’s support for child, family, and staff health and wellness? Which ideas from this training could help you to meet and exceed the Performance Standards?

(2) Select a period of time within this program year to gather with other staff members in your program and decide what you can do to improve health for yourselves. Choose a common challenge to health (e.g., Does everyone want to eat lower-fat food? Would everyone like to take a quiet-time break once during the day? Would it help if you could plant a tree somewhere near the center?).

Plan to support each other. Assign tasks to make these goals become a reality.

(3) After staff have chosen some health behaviors to change, work together to make those changes a reality. Then, let parents know about your successes. If several staff members were able to lose weight, what worked? If you were able to incorporate a few minutes of quiet time into each day for the children and the teaching staff, how could the parents carry out that at home? Teaching others is an excellent way to reinforce our own behavior.

Ask parents to tell of ways that they have tried to work toward wellness—successes they can share with the staff.

(4) Develop at your center a resource place for multicultural healing. Ask staff and parents to bring in strategies for health and healing that have worked for their families and their communities. Even include ideas that may have seemed strange to them but that they know other people swear by. Then look for resources, including national organizations, to help you evaluate health and healing beliefs that differ from the mainstream.

(5) Review the Head Start definition of social competence. Now and then at team meetings ask a staff member to bring up for discussion an example of a child or a family member whose social competence has been affected (positively or negatively) by either getting or lacking some basic health need.