Youth-led community projects to address youth health: BC Adolescent Health Survey lesson plan

By Melissa Reeves (she/her), teacher and member of the Economic Justice Action Group, Committee for Action on Social Justice, Vernon

The BC Adolescent Health Survey was first mentioned to me by a colleague at the BCTF. I had no idea what it was but after doing a deeper dive on Google, I was incredibly invested. The survey is administered every five years to BC public school students in Grades 7 to 12. The latest survey, from 2023 (mcs.bc.ca/about_bcahs), was administered to 38,500 students.

I love data and think that real-time, or as real-time as it can be, information is one of our most powerful tools. The survey, administered by The McCreary Centre Society, addresses a wide variety of topics that affect youth in BC. They can’t get every student to answer the survey but are able to get a large variety of responses across the province and the results were eye-opening. They tackled a number of topics, including economic well-being, eating behaviours and body image, substance use, and recreational activities, to name a few.

Reading through the data, I was floored by the responses:

• 14% of youth with jobs worked because they needed the money, while 4% worked to supplement family income.

• About 26% of youth were responsible for taking care of a relative (younger siblings or relative with a disability).

• 9% of youth cannot afford to participate in physical activity.

• About 75% of youth expect to continue education after high school (the lowest this number has been in the history of the survey).

• Only 54% of youth feel safe using public transit.

• Youth feel less connected to their community than in previous years.

One thing that stands out to me as someone focused on economic justice is that, based on the Youth Deprivation Index, 24% of youth are lacking at least one item they wished they had (including things like personal hygiene products, a quiet place to sleep, and lunch/money for lunch). So many of the other factors in the study are affected by this measure: when a student is lacking food, their brain cannot be ready to learn; when they lack a safe place to rest, their body simply cannot rest. Post-COVID, youth are struggling at a critical rate, just like adults.

With this in mind, I developed a lesson plan for my Grade 11 Composition class. The lesson focuses on practical uses of English studies, data analysis, understanding how different factors affect each other, and implications of data, all aligning with the English curriculum. It also addresses some of the personal competencies, like communication, critical thinking and reflective thinking, and social awareness and responsibility.

Our school was not one that was selected to participate in the survey, so the students hadn’t been exposed to it, but many of the red flags that popped up were very true in our community. I wanted to use this lesson to draw attention to these factors. It was important that students had an opportunity to name the things they struggle with and feel a sense of camaraderie with their peers around the province.

The lesson went really well, and the best part was that there was the possibility of a real-world result. The McCreary Centre Society offers a number of Youth Engagement opportunities, including Youth Action Grants and the Trevor Coburn Memorial Grants Program. The grants are for youth-led community projects (supported by at least one adult) that address the findings of the survey. The Trevor Coburn Grant does specify that the grant proposal needs to address one of four key areas that Trevor was passionate about: peer mentorship, youth homelessness, youth substance use, and youth in and from government care.

The McCreary Centre Society's survey overview is available mcs.bc.ca/about_bcahs.

My students proposed projects based on the survey data but did not get a chance to submit their grant proposals because of timing (I started this lesson/project far too late in the year). Still, they had some really fantastic ideas about expanding substance use education (specifically around vaping) connecting local businesses to schools in a more direct way to support or sponsor food programs, expanding transit and school bus routes to be more accessible, and getting student groups going again to make connections in the school buildings that have been lost since COVID. I was incredibly moved by their ideas and commitment to improving their community. They spent time with this data, asked me lots of questions about how to read it, and wanted to understand what the implications were, why the survey happened, and what they could do or change. They also identified many areas that they knew were issues locally, things they had noticed with their peers, and also things they didn’t think were issues here, allowing me to get a better sense of where the youth in my community are at.

What this taught me is how in tune young people are with what they and their peers need, but they often don’t think anyone will listen to them. If you give them your ear, they will surprise you with their insight, their realism, and the ideas they have to address problems that you may never have thought of. After the year was over, I returned to this plan and added to it so that I could do it with Grade 10 or 12 students as well, because if more students see an avenue to contribute to their community, the more likely it is that something will get done.

Lesson Plan

BC Adolescent Health Survey for Grade 11 Composition

Content warning: This survey includes content that may be triggering. Ensure mental health supports are available.

Overview: The BC Adolescent Health Survey is administered every five years since its inception in 1992. In its latest year, 2023, it was administered to 38,500 students in BC public schools between Grades 7 and 12.

The purpose of this lesson is to introduce students to research-based data and the conclusions drawn from that information. After looking at the data and the information gathered, students can apply for Youth Action Grants to address findings from the data in a positive way. They must seek to support or improve youth health (The Big Picture, p. 69).

To advance more community-based projects, students will disseminate the data and collaborate to propose projects that could advance the work of the survey.

Time: One or more class periods (depending on student engagement).

Curricular competencies (generalized over multiple grades):

• Apply appropriate strategies in a variety of contexts to comprehend written, oral, visual, and multi-modal texts, to guide inquiry, and to extend thinking.

• Construct meaningful personal connections between self, text, and world

• Understand and appreciate how different forms, formats, structures, and features of texts reflect a variety of purposes, audiences, and messages

• Use writing and design processes to plan, develop, and create engaging and meaningful texts for a variety of purposes and audiences.

Cross-curricular connections:

Social studies: Use social studies inquiry processes and skills to ask questions; gather, interpret, and analyze ideas, and communicate findings and decisions; assess the credibility and justifiability of evidence, data, and interpretations (evidence).

Science: Formulate multiple hypotheses and predict multiple outcomes; analyze cause-and-effect relationships; seek and analyze patterns, trends, and connections in data, including describing relationships between variables (dependent and independent) and identifying inconsistencies; construct, analyze and interpret graphs (including interpolation and extrapolation), models and/or diagrams; contribute to care for self, others, community, and world through individual or collaborative approaches; transfer and apply learning to new situations; generate and introduce new or refined ideas when problem solving; contribute to finding solutions to problems at a local and/or global level through inquiry.

Math: Apply flexible and strategic approaches to solve problems; solve problems and explore research questions with persistence and a positive disposition; connect statistical concepts with each other, other areas, and personal interests; think creatively and with curiosity and wonder when exploring problems; engage in statistical thinking to answer questions connected with place, story, cultural practices, and perspectives relevant to local First Peoples communities, the local community, and other cultures.

Career education: Apply decision-making strategies to a life, work, or community problem and adjust the strategies to adapt to new situations.

ADST: Take creative risks in generating ideas and add to others’ ideas in ways that enhance them; screen ideas against criteria and constraints; critically analyze and prioritize competing factors, including social, ethical, and sustainability considerations, to meet community needs for preferred futures; choose an idea to pursue, keeping other potentially viable ideas open

Interpersonal and Family Relationships 11: Entire curriculum

A number of my students aim to enter a science-related field, and this will support their reading comprehension and make connections between literacy and numeracy.

Core competencies connections:

Social awareness and responsibility

• contributing to community and caring for the environment

• resolving problems

Communication

• focusing on intent and purpose

• acquiring and presenting information

Critical thinking and reflective thinking

• analyzing and critiquing

• questioning and investigating

• designing and developing

• reflecting and assessing.

Resource: The McCreary Centre Society’s 2023 report, The Big Picture: An overview of the 2023 BC Adolescent Health Survey provincial results, is available at mcs.bc.ca/about_bcahs.

Steps

1. Predictions: Introduce the concept and the eleven subcategories of the survey questions. Ask them to predict what types of questions and data resulted from each category. To save time, give each table group (six) two categories to make predictions about and then share out to the group. Record this information on a whiteboard.

2. Descriptions: Choose a handful of pages (p. 7–68) to distribute to table groups. It’s unreasonable to expect students to interact with all the data, so choose maybe two pages of data or one section for each group. Book the laptop cart for students to have laptops to look at the full data but have them analyze one section in depth.

3. Interpretations: Discuss with table groups what this data means and suggests about the experience of youth in BC in 2023. Come up with as many takeaways as possible and identify one aspect that could be addressed with a grant to benefit youth in their community. Write this out on a large piece of chart paper and hang it on the wall for other groups to interact with.

4. Implications: Once all groups have posted their ideas, give each student a stack of sticky notes to write on. Direct them around the room, writing notes, tips, or questions on each sticky before leaving it on the appropriate chart. Then have the groups rework their ideas and develop some alternative strategies as a class.

5. Debrief: As an exit ticket, students will answer the following questions:

• What was the most surprising piece of information you learned today?

• Why do you think this survey was created and continues to be administered?

• Which project idea do you think is the most feasible and why?

• What did you learn from this process?

The lesson may take up to four classes depending on the level of engagement with the material and the drive to apply for an action grant. Make sure students understand that this is supposed to benefit them and their peers as a whole and that the data came from people they might know. This makes it seem more real and relevant in their everyday lives.