The document summarizes Shauna Ayres' practicum at Counter Tools in Carrboro, NC during the summer of 2016. It outlines Counter Tools' mission to provide tools and assistance to public health practitioners and researchers working on policy interventions. It then describes the deliverables Ayres created, which included a youth empowerment curriculum and a political climate assessment tool. The youth empowerment curriculum consisted of 10 lesson plans that were 90 minutes each, focused on the community, and included a final project.
3. Counter Tools
“Counter Tools provides technology tools, training, and technical
assistance to public health practitioners and researchers who are
working to enact and enforce policy, systems and environmental
interventions to promote public health.
We believe in the power of communities to organize for collective
action to advance place-based public health. We equip and enable our
partners to collect, organize and disseminate granular, local data that
can mobilize stakeholders and build support for health-promoting
policy.
Our technology tools demonstrate local public
health problems, solutions, and policy
compliance in data, images, maps and stories.”
15. Allocate tasks to avoid confusion
List all materials no matter how obvious
List all preparation that needs to be done prior to the
lesson
State the lesson objective and SMART goals
Duration
Format
Facilitators’ responsibilities
Activity w/ short summary
Purpose--relating back to goals & objectives
*use symbols and abbreviations for quick reference
Warm up
Short lecture
>>Break<<
Main activity
>>Break<<
Discussion
Game (if time permits)
Dismissal
18. Activity Guide
Directions for activity
Questions to ask the students that
encourages critical think and discussion
Guiding points for the facilitator to
reference to keep discussion on track and
ensure goals and objective will be met
Hi my name is Shauna Ayres. I am a 2nd year MPH student in Health Behavior and I had the opportunity to complete my practicum at Counter Tools this last summer.
So this is where we will be going today. I’ll give a very brief background of CT, highlighting their mission statement. Next I will discuss my practicum deliverables, in particular the youth empowerment curriculum, describe my creation process for developing the curriculum, highlight some key components, and then give an activity example.
Counters Tools is a rising non-profit in Carrboro founded by UNC’s own Allison Myers and Kurt Ribisl. Here is CT’s mission statement. As you can see, they are dedicated to empowering communities and using technology to demonstrate public health problems, solutions, and policy compliance in a variety of mediums.
During my time at CT, I was responsible for two main deliverables. 1. Developing a Youth Empowerment Program Curriculum which was overseen by Beth Turner and Jennifer Grant and 2. Developing a Political Climate Assessment Tool, which was overseen by Nina Baltierra. All my mentors were fantastic and I learned so much from all of them, however in the interest of time, I will just be discussing the former.
Honoring their mission statement to empower communities, CT partnered with Citizen Schools to disseminate the Youth Curriculum I developed. A little background on Citizen Schools; it is an organization that allows various businesses, non-profits, etc. to lead afterschool programs in disadvantaged schools aimed at promoting student achievement and applied learning. CT and Citizen Schools were a perfect match for increasing community involvement at the youth level.
Lowe’s Grove Middle School is one school Citizen School’s has chosen to focus on and where the curriculum is being implemented. It is part of Durham Public School District in a lower-middle income area. It has approximately 700 students, about 70% African American 21% Hispanic.
I approached the development process using a design thinking strategy shown here. At this point, I had already empathized or understood both organizations’ ambitions to empower youth in the communities …
…and defined the CT and Citizen Schools objectives. Citizen Schools had broad, unspecified criteria, but CTs and myself wanted the program to be engaging, fun, and above all something the kids looked forward to at the end of a long school day.
I generated many ideas in the ideate phase drawing from literature, existing programs, and qualitative interviews with middle schoolers and their parents. I met with Beth and Jen weekly to discuss and develop ideas. I essentially had a laundry list of ideas that I picked from to develop a prototype…
This prototype is the deliverable I completed for the practicum.
Now CTs is currently testing it at Lowe’s Grove. I recently chatted with one of my preceptors, Jen, and she reported it has been well-received, but as expected in the testing phase, it has been adapted as needed.
Thus through this seemingly messy and iterative process, I did come up with, what I think are, 10 engaging and creative lesson plans.
Now I’ll show you some key components. Included in the prototype was an explanation of the lesson plans which provided a quick guide on how to use the curriculum.
If needed, I created accompanying Activity Guides, Worksheets, and Materials for each lesson. And listed them in a summary table.
10 lesson plans were written for facilitators in this format. It included allocation of teaching tasks, materials, preparation, goals and objectives, and a breakdown of how the lesson would be administered such as time, format, purpose, etc.
Each lesson was generally structured using this pattern.
I also developed 10 simple powerpoints to accompany each lesson. They include directions, visuals, videos, and repeated symbols to communicate effectively what students should be doing throughout the session.
This is an example of an activity. The class was first asked to define community.
They discussed the internal and external influences on a community and what makes a community the way it is. Who holds the influence? Power? Why? All complex, but important questions. Students were encouraged to talk about the cause and effect relationships they live and observe in their communities every day. For example the link between food deserts and obesity.
Then the students were asked to express their interpretations of their communities by creating maps of them.
This is the associated activity guide for this lesson which gives facilitators more detailed directions than the lesson plan. It also provides probing questions to encourage critical thinking and a list of take-away points to cover.
A key component of the curriculum was to allow for students to share their feelings and ideas. As you can see some of the students here are sharing their community maps.
So I’ll leave you with a question, what would your community map look like?