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Running head: PROGRAM DESIGN 1
PROGRAM DESIGN 2
Program Design to Promote Social Goals in American K12
Schools
January 15th,2018
Program Design to Promote Social Goals in American K12
Schools
Explanation of Each Initiative
The three main initiatives of promoting social goals in
school will include: promoting moral and character education,
improving children’s health and nutrition, and creating school
communities through extracurricular activities, after school
programs, and school spirits (Rissanen et al. 2018).
Comment by Evelyn Young: The 3 initiatives are clearly
stated. Although did Rissanen et al. propose these 3 initiatives
to promote social goals in schools? If these are your arguments,
take credit for them. No need to give credit to Rissanen et al.
for formulating the thesis for your paper.
I think that your paper could have used an introduction followed
by the thesis statement.
Explanation of Each Initiative
Moral education is meant to promote good conduct among
school-going children, not just within their immediate social

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relationships, but also in their dealings with their fellow
citizens. This initiative is premised on the need for students to
possess clear ideals and judgments on what action are right and
what are wrong, including the determination of students’
conduct through a constant reference to those ideals. Moral
education will be offered as a social goal to enlighten students
on a system of rules and norms that regulate the social
interactions of people on concepts of welfare, such as harm,
trust, justice, and rights. For some students, issues related to
values, personal feelings, and societal norms are constructs for
discussions and are as such viewed as being influenced by the
manner in which morality taught or experienced in schools,
churches, and social institution settings. Moral education will
be meant to reduce criminal and deviant behaviors among
students. Moral character is required in schools because many
parents do not teach their children morality issues.
The health and nutrition initiative is meant to improve the
physical and mental well being of students. This initiative has
the potential to improve the quality of students’ urban life,
strengthen the ability of poor children to excel in their studies,
and to compensate them for the substandard home and school
environments spawned by competitive, inequitable social order.
Health and nutritional initiatives will be strengthened through
planning and introducing curriculum on nutrition with
educational activities. These will include physical activities,
which are combined with the farm to school programs that
motivate students to consume healthy diets. Indeed, the hybrid
school-based nutritional programs have major influence on
attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors associated with fruits and
vegetable consumption diffused throughout a bigger urban
community (Dudley Cotton & Peralta, 2015). This hybrid
intervention includes combining district strategies, local school-
based strategies, and home-made strategies developed by
teachers. This intervention leads to a higher change in teacher
influence on students’ attitudes towards healthy diet, across
gender, grade, race, and ethnicity. Sick children in the

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contemporary world spend a large fraction of their time on
mobile and social networks, and are exposed to several kinds of
interactive advertising, the health and nutritional strategy will
encourage healthy habits that will be provided through a
combined approach on a school-based and media intervention.
For instance, numerous studies indicate that the efficacy of this
strategy rests in its ability to increase fruit5 and vegetable
intake among American children (Dudley Cotton & Peralta,
2015). Healthy eating by school-going children is important
for good health and development. Schools can pay an integral
role in the education and promotion of healthy eating and living
among students. Comment by Evelyn Young: Are these
initiatives that have been implemented or strategies that you
propose should be implemented? If the former, write in the past
tense with evidence supporting the programs. If the latter, put it
in the strategies section of your paper. Comment by Evelyn
Young: Children in general spend a large amount of time on
social media, not just sick children. They can all benefit from
media intervention.
Further, initiatives aimed at establishing a sense of
community among students are useful strategies for developing
effective student-teacher relationships. In this perspective,
relational communities promote human interactions and social
ties that draw students together. Relational communities can be
viewed as networks of individuals who interact within formal
learning institutions, and as members of informal groups
(Peterson, 2017). Common interests, histories, and experiences
draw these individuals together and form the basis upon which
social relationships develop and grow. In community of
students, a special form of cohesiveness is developed among
members. A genuine sense of community emerges after the
group members have committed themselves to taking major
risks and sharing meaningful experiences. In so doing, the
group members become tolerant and accepting of each other. A
sense of belonging and relatedness can be developed among
students. Such feelings of belonging and relatedness can be

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extended to everyone in the group, such as students, teachers,
parents, and non-teaching staff members. Sports, symposiums,
and other extracurricular activities will strengthen the school
community initiative. Students can be encouraged to bond to the
larger school community through involvements in
extracurricular activities or providing support athletic events.
They can also be encouraged to participate or attend games
events, and get involved in school activities in order to develop
a positive school spirit. This additional bonding to the school
has the potential to increase the sense of community among the
students and the sense of connectedness to the teachers.
Comment by Evelyn Young: This sounds somewhat
conversational rather than scholarly. Do you have citations to
support these arguments?
Benefits and Drawbacks of the Program Comment by Evelyn
Young: Earlier, you identified 3 initiatives: moral and character
education, improving children’s health and nutrition, and
creating school communities through extracurricular activities.
In this section, you should describe the benefits and drawbacks
of each program. I really only see the benefits (and a bit of the
drawbacks) of a program aimed at developing students’ social
capital.
The programs meant to foster social goals in schools
generate various benefits to students. Firstly, children can be
offered the opportunities to belong to positively-oriented peer
groups. Usually students who belong to positive peer groups are
often exposed to modeling of pro-social behaviors. Avgitidou
(2001) indicates that children develop shared beliefs and values
which they practice in the establishment and maintenance of
their peer relationships, for example, when empathy is
understood among students as showing concern and interest for
someone by being able to understand, empathy is closely related
to pro-social behavior Avgitidou (2001). Comment by
Evelyn Young: I would recommend consolidating all of the
benefits to a program on building students’ social capital into
one paragraph. Don’t mention too programs, as you would need

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to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of each. Stay centered on
one initiative such as Character Counts, the benefits and
drawbacks of Character Counts, and what new strategies you
would try to address the issue of students’ moral development.
Secondly, the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention (2004) indicates that programs which
can make students get more attached to their schools are often
considered as models for violence prevention. Results from the
National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent Health demonstrated
that student connectedness reduced negative behaviors in four
domains of adolescent health and morbidity: emotional health,
violence, substance use, and sexuality (Holtzapple, Griswold,
Cirillo, Rosebrock, Nouza & Berry 2011).
In addition, these programs afford adolescents with
the opportunity to develop social capital in form of positive
relationships with adult activity leaders. Resnick (1997)
suggests that the leading factor supporting positive outcomes
and preventing youth participation in negative behaviors is
connectedness to an adult role model.
Student participation in these programs has also been
connected to reduction in externalizing tendencies such as
aggressive behaviors, deviant behaviors, and juvenile
delinquencies. Most significantly, addressing student behaviors
and skills that would prepare students to be successful in the
workplace as these programs sharpen students’ skills in areas
such as people skills, communication skills, and life skills
(Holtzapple, Griswold, Cirillo, Rosebrock, Nouza & Berry
2011).
On the other hand, literatures also indicate that
participation in such programs is strongly connected to higher
school performance, higher academic aspirations, and increased
rates of high school graduation. For instance, according to
Elliot (1998), students in implementing schools had
significantly greater gains in standardized academic test scores
than did students in comparison schools. Ryan and Bohlin
(1999) also supported that the character education as with its

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twin goals of intellectual and moral development, should be
implicit in all of the school’s undertakings.
On the downside, a major drawback is these social goal
programs may bring up operational and labor cost that could
bring financial challenge to schools, especially for those
districts that have decreased school funding due to education
budget cut. For example, district-wide training may require a
significant amount of funding committed (Holtzapple, Griswold,
Cirillo, Rosebrock, Nouza, & Berry, 2011).
Secondly, character education may bring conflicts
because morality and ethics are relatively subjective with
various standards. The values taught in schools may cause
difficulties for administrators and educators as the standards of
behavior differ. Students come from various religious and social
backgrounds with different values and expectations.
Controversies arise when what are taught at school do not align
with student parents’ values.
New Strategies to Implement these Initiatives and Goals
Comment by Evelyn Young: Same here. You have
identified many strategies for addressing students’ character
education. However, you also need to discuss strategies to
develop ways to address the issues of health and nutrition as
well as creating school communities through extracurricular
activities. One new strategy for each is sufficient for the
purposes of this paper.
There are various strategies that can be employed to effectively
implement these programs in a way that generates successful
outcomes. First, it is important to establish and maintain a
culturally relevant environment for different student groups. A
respectful environment is also culturally relevant. Educators
who have classrooms that are comprised of mainly students
from culturally diverse roots can establish classroom
environments that provide curriculum that reflect the cultures of
the students. Culturally relevant teaching will require the
recognition of minority cultures as valuable experiences upon
which to build strong student relationships that extend to their

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moral, health and social outcomes (Sleeter, 2001). In so doing,
students can develop mutual respect and celebrate both as
individuals and members of a specific culture (Sonn, Bishop, &
Drew, 1999). Students can experiment with new behaviors for
social change with encouragement and support while critically
evaluating the society. More importantly, students will be
benefited by developing a strong sense of community, reducing
cultural barriers and to improving global awareness and
tolerance for other culture, thus to prepare our students to be
the future leaders in the globalized world in this imagination
age (Alverez, 2018).
In addition, it is important to identify the resources that
can be helpful with the successful implementation. This will
require both human and financial resources (Lee, B. R. & Barth,
R. P. (2009). Careful implementation of these interventions is
usually critical to the attainment of the effects that the
evidences predict. First, a written description of the contents of
the programs to be delivered should be developed. For instance,
when it comes to a class lesson meant to discourage substance
abuse, there will be need to develop manuals that document the
materials to be covered during each classroom session, detailing
the descriptions of the class activities, and copies or handouts.
In addition, training programs should be introduced to improve
and sharpen the skills of individuals who will carry out the
programs. Training programs should be provided to educators
and present comprehensively written training manuals or
workshops that discuss the philosophy behind the interventions
and the provision of clear, concrete descriptions of the
instructional process and contents to create a structured learning
environment.
Ongoing assistance and intervention should be provided
to those who will implement the programs. For example, State
of California has required K-12 schools to embody character
education and moral education into core curricula and school
culture. These should include provision of on-site supervision,
training, and consultation forums. These efforts must be

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accompanied by identification of student needs. Some students
face bully problems, while others need technology skills, others
suffer from poor state of physical and mental wellbeing.
Therefore, these instructional programs should be designed in a
manner that is tailored to meet the specific needs of each
student group (Archer & Hughes, 2011). Approaches should be
flexible so as to be applicable to all students in all situations,
and Interventions should also be structured enough to be easily
applicable, though tailored, and followed by all students and
multiple sector staff (Gonsoulin, Darwin & Read, 2012).
Further, appropriate channels or modes of delivering
these learning contents should be identified. For instance,
programs such as the Capturing Kids’ Hearts Campus by
Designed Model that has been widely adapted in the US is
considered to be both a character education and violence
prevention intervention because it aims to improve students’
connectedness to school through enhancing protective factors
and targeting modifiable risk factors such as inappropriate
behavior, poor social coping skills (Holtzapple, Griswold,
Cirillo, Rosebrock, Nouza & Berry 2011). Besides that,
strategies aiming to promote social goals should be embedded
into school curricula, for example, physical education could
provide opportunities for students to build up team works; many
schools nowadays introduce exchange programs into their
campus thus students can develop sense of communities, while
sex education course may require class lectures, and moral
instruction and character education could be done through
various in-class and out-class fun activities, meaningful
community services(Spring, 2018) etc.
References Comment by Evelyn Young: Left justify the
references.
Alvarez, M. G. (2018). Can character solve our problems?
Character qualities and the imagination
age. Creative Education, 9(2), 152-164

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Avgitidou, S. (2001). Peer culture and friendship relationships
as contexts for the development of young children’s pro-social
behavior. International Journal of Early Years
Education, 9(2)145–152. https://doi-
org.lopes.idm.oclc.org/10.1080/09669760120053510
Archer, A. L. & Hughes, C. A. (2011). Explicit instruction:
Effective and efficient teaching. New York, NY: The Guilford
Press.
Dudley, D. A., Cotton, W. G., & Peralta, L. R. (2015). Teaching
approaches and strategies that
promote healthy eating in primary school children: a systematic
review and meta-
analysis. International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and
Physical Activity, 12(1), 28.
Estell, D. B., Jones, M. H., Pearl, R., Acker, R. V., Farmer, T.
W., & Rodkin, P. C. (2008). Peer Groups, Popularity, and
Social Preference: Trajectories of Social Functioning Among
Students With and Without Learning Disabilities. Journal of
Learning Disabilities, 41(1), 5–
14. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022219407310993 Comment by
Evelyn Young: Use lower case. Comment by Evelyn Young:
Use lower case.
Gonsoulin, S., Darwin, M. J., & Read, N. W. (2012). Providing
individually tailored academic and behavioral support services
for youth in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems.
Washington, DC: National Evaluation and Technical Assistance
Center for Children and Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent,
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Lee, B. R. & Barth, R. P. (2009). Residential education: An
emerging resource for improving educational outcomes for
youth in foster care? Children & Youth Services Review, 31,
155–160.
Peterson, T. H. (2017). Student Development and Social Justice:
critical learning, radical Comment by Evelyn Young: Use
lower case. Comment by Evelyn Young: Use lower case.
healing, and community engagement. New York: Springer.
Resnick, M. D.,. (1997). Protecting adolescents from harm.
Findings from the National Longitudinal Study on Adolescent
Health. JAMA, 278(10), 823-832.
Rissanen, I., Kuusisto, E., Hanhimäki, E., & Tirri, K. (2018).
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Ryan, K. & Bohlin, K. E. (1999). Building character in schools:
Practical ways to bring moral instruction to life. San Francisco:
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Sleeter, C. E. (2001). Preparing teachers for culturally diverse
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whiteness. Journal of Teacher Education, 52(2), 94–
106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487101052002002
Sonn, C. C., Bishop, B. J., & Drew, N. M. (1999). Sense of
community: Issues and considerations from a cross-cultural
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