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Section 4 Teaching, Learning and Assessing Health Education 4.1 Teaching and learning Teaching, learning and assessing health education should be seen as three linked aspects of one process. Teaching and learning experiences that aim to develop young people's skills and provide opportunities to explore beliefs, attitudes and values require to: be interactive and encourage critical thinking promote responsibility and reflection on the part of the learner. Schools will want to ensure that: classroom activities are supported by appropriate resources teachers are comfortable and confident with the content, methodologies and resources programmes are regularly monitored and evaluated. As with any curriculum area, there is a need to ensure that an appropriate variety of teaching and learning approaches, including class discussion and pupil enquiry, is used in health education activities. Learning experiences in health education provide opportunities for young people to explore a range of issues and situations relevant to their own lives and to the society in which they live. Their knowledge, skills and attitudes will be developed through the use of a range of teaching and learning approaches, including participatory methods such as brainstorming, case studies, games, simulation and role-play. The nature of these activities enables young people to develop the core skills of communication, working with others and problem solving, as well as negotiation, decision-making and investigation skills. Thus the processes involved in pupils' learning to take responsibility for their health become as important as the content of the programmes. Within any class, pupils have different levels of maturity, confidence, experience, physical condition and ability. These differences affect pupils' readiness to take responsibility for learning about and looking after their health. Teaching and learning in health education must take account of pupils' needs through: sensitivity and respect for individual differences exploring pupils' pre-existing knowledge and beliefs as a basis for further learning and teaching adapting tasks, pace, resources and pupil groupings to pupil needs incorporating sufficient opportunities for taking responsibility through reflecting and through working with others using assessment to plan and monitor progress and provide appropriate challenge taking account of pupil and staff views on the relevance of the programme working in partnership with parents and the wider community and using their input to develop shared approaches to specific aspects such as food, drugs and sex education. In the context of health education, teachers and managers need to bear in mind a number of important considerations. These include: identifying needs through: consultation with pupils involving parents in discussion taking account of the school environment local and national research findings creating a climate between staff and pupils that will encourage honest discussion and a feeling of trust using teaching methods and learning opportunities that match identified needs taking opportunities to use ICT as a means of enhancing learning and teaching in health education using learning materials that are relevant, up to date and easy to use providing support for colleagues who want to work in this area. [RETURN TO 5-14 ONLINE] [BACK] [INDEX] [NEXT] © The 5-14 Curriculum (Scotland) Guidelines were produced by the Scottish Executive and Learning and Teaching Scotland and are reproduced with permission from the Queen's Printer for Scotland.