American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance - AAHPERD

 Issue: March 2005

The Integrated Curriculum of “Planned Approach to Healthier Schools”
Monica Lounsbery, Julie Gast, & Nicole Smith

Abstract:
Planned Approach to Healthier Schools (PATHS) is a multicomponent secondary school program that aims to create and sustain a school-wide social norm that supports physical activity and healthy nutrition. Data from the pilot implementation of PATHS suggest that this program may have a variety of implications for adolescent children, particularly in changing their physical activity and nutrition behavior. The PATHS integrated curriculum component is an essential part of the PATHS program and is designed to mobilize and empower students not only to make positive changes in their own physical activity and nutrition behaviors, but also to encourage other students in their school to do so as well. It is the authors’ belief that much of the integrated curriculum component of the PATHS program may be replicated with little or no funding whatsoever. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to describe the integrated curriculum of PATHS in terms of how it is structured and what a typical PATHS session entails. In doing so, the authors share ideas with physical educators, in hopes of assisting in the development of similar curriculum integration efforts.

Article category: Curriculum