More PRIME Instructional Strategies

Here are a couple more PRIME instructional strategies for your wellness teaching toolkit>

• Wellness Partners – How about introducing the term “wellness partnering” (i.e., coaching) as a technique that students can apply to support each other using their knowledge of the character strengths? What comes to mind in applying this strategy is that students will need lots of time and practice with their strengths of Emotional and Social Intelligence to be helpful partners. Active listening lessons can be a good starting place to help students see themselves as coaches. As you design and implement this strategy, one helpful approach can be the act of students working together to write wellness prescriptions for in the moment responsive needs and a wellness plan to be proactive in preparation for upcoming events.

• Wellness Prescription Writing – Your students probably don’t know what a doctor’s prescription pad is so the first step will be to teach them what it is. The next step for classroom integration is to come up with ways to have students write wellness prescriptions for themselves and for the class as a whole when they see a need. You can print out your class designed wellness prescription pad that can be as simple as just having “Wellness Prescription” at the top or you can build in some scaffolding with PERMAH and/or Character Strengths listed with checkboxes that need to be applied. The prescription writing can be a very “sticky” tool/idea in the minds of your students as they in time can call out in responsive fashion to in the moment class events to state “we need to write a wellness prescription for this!”.

Images: Students | Prescription