In today’s world, one does not have to look far to find examples of the social disparities and danger faced by our young people, both inside and outside of our classrooms, cafeterias, schoolyards, and playgrounds. The Nest Program for Healthy Relationships was developed to reflect these realities, and build on the innate talents of young people, to promote safety and health among high school students across the United States. Created in collaboration with researchers from the New York University Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, the program takes an evidence-informed, strengths-based approach to PREVENTION and INTERVENTION.
Emphasizing consent and the critical consumption of content, the Nest Program for the Right to Healthy Relationships equips students with knowledge, skills, and opportunities to engage with the societal problems that impact students, schools, and communities across the country, including discrimination, violence, human trafficking, and child sexual abuse.
Rooted in research literature from psychology, education, and related disciplines, the Nest Program for the Right to Healthy Relationships is informed by evidence-based best practices as well as feedback from teachers and students. By leveraging a university-community partnership with New York University, Nest is able to provide participating schools with data documenting outcomes including program fidelity, student social engagement, and classroom climate. Additionally, by providing feedback by completing assessments, students and teachers inform current and future iterations of the Program, and other programs like it.
The Nest Program for the Right to Healthy Relationships can be implemented in the context of health, leadership, advisory, seminar, ELA, social science classes and more. Evaluations serve as a cornerstone of the program and equip Nest and partner schools with critical feedback on impact, implementation, and needs.
• Knowledge and skills to promote healthy relationships
• Tactics to provide safe, effective bystander interventions
• Safety plans for what to do if they or someone they know is in a potentially dangerous situation.
• The opportunity to enhance their critical thinking and expand their vocabularies to better analyze and address systemic societal problems.
• Training on trauma-informed practices, mandatory reporting best practices, program implementation, and self-care.
• Easy-to-use lesson plans that align with provided Powerpoints, worksheets, and handouts.
• A nine-session unit developed to align with the National Health Education Standards and Indicators, and address healthy relationships and societal problems.
• Ready-made activities that promote classroom cohesion and engagement.
• A curriculum specifically designed to promote student's respectful, healthy interactions with each other and their teacher(s).
• An evidence-informed, strengths-based, intervention that addresses topics such as sexual misconduct, bullying, healthy relationships, and child abuse, to promote safety and wellbeing.
• An opportunity to hold Student Forums and Family Nights, highlighting student work and promoting parental and community engagement.
• The opportunity to actively engage in conversations about societal problems and solutions.
• Increased awareness of the strengths of young people, as well as the risks they face.
The Nest Program for the Right to Healthy Relationships Classroom Curriculum incorporates evidence-informed approaches to facilitate student skill development across two key domains:
SAFETY & HEALTHY RELATIONSHIPS
CRITICAL CONSUMPTION AND SOCIOPOLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
Additionally, evidence-informed activities at the beginning and end of each lesson facilitate students in developing mindfulness and distress tolerance skillsand provide transitions into and out of class.
In the first lesson, students begin a mural that is posted in the classroom by noting their accomplishments, skills, and talents as a way to share with each other and visualize their capacity to contribute to the world. This will be the foundation of a collective Solutions Mural.
During each subsequent lesson, you will take the students through activities. We encourage you to be on the lookout for responses and ideas that sound like solutions and add these to the Solutions Mural throughout the unit. We've found that it can be helpful to ask students to include solutions that can be undertaken on an Individual level and on a Community/Social level.
For a number of student activities, handouts are provided. As appropriate, each lesson details the steps for the teacher to follow in explaining the student procedure.
Additionally, evidence-informed activities at the beginning and end of each lesson facilitate students in developing mindfulness and distress tolerance skills and provide transitions into and out of class.
This unit sample checkout exercises that we encourage you to go through and/or adapt for your students. These exercises are intended to help the students decompress and should be used to close the class session. Please ensure there is enough time to go through these exercises at the end of each class period.
Links to articles and other publications you might wish to read are also included throughout this site. You may also wish to share these resources with your students.
The Nest Program for Positive Relationships draws on evidence-based practice and literatures across education (e.g., Freire, 1968), clinical psychology (e.g., Dialectical Behavior Therapy; Linehan, 1993), counseling psychology (Ali & Sichel, 2014), and community psychology (e.g., Watts, Williams & Jagers, 2003; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999).
In doing so, the Program provides opportunities for teachers and students to engage in didactic activities that:
• Build community.
• Foster critical thinking.
• Support students in cultivating healthy relationships.
• Promote safety by helping students effectively recognize and respond to risky contexts.
• Support social action and pro-social behavior.
Researchers in psychology, sociology, and related disciplines have demonstrated the effectiveness of using sociopolitical awareness to promote social engagement and well-being in populations including urban adolescents and survivors of domestic abuse (Chronister & McWhirter, 2006; Watts, Griffith, & Abdul-Adil, 1999).
Evidence suggests that promoting students’ sociopolitical development can protect them from the negative mental health outcomes such as psychological symptoms (e.g., anxiety and depression) and low self-esteem (Zimmerman, Ramirez-Valles, & Maton, 1999).
Additionally, recent research has shown that engaging young people in discussions about oppression, privilege, and pop culture through a structured intervention increased students’ propensity for prosocial behavior and resilience (Sichel, Javdani, Ueberall, & Leggitt, 2017).