News . Best Practices Students of Olivar Gran High Schools committed to mental health
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This inspiring practice reports an Open Schooling initiative on “Participatory Research to improve the model of promotion of mental health in schools”, which was developed at the Olivar Gran High School by Ester Casals, Alba Blanco, Anna Ros, Josep M. Pons and Rosa Serra from 12/04/22 to 05/05/22. The activity was supported by the members of the Living Lab for Health from IrsiCaixa, who provided the methodological guidelines. This practice has been previously presented at the Final Congress of Sentinel Schools held on June 6, 2022 at CosmoCaixa in Barcelona.
Care: Students were interested in how they could improve their mental health by doing activities at their high school. In total, 78 students from the first year of Baccalaureate (16-17 years old) participated.
Know: The students improved their knowledge about mental health and explored the problems and opportunities that exist in their promotion. They put into practice skills such as debate, collaborative work, argumentation, voting and consensus and co-creation of recommendations for improvement.
Do: In the end, the students participated in the Final Congress of Sentinel Schools presenting the recommendations for improvement agreed by the educational community and the mental health promotion interventions that they had planned for that academic year. They completed the activities in groups and with the support of families, although not in full.
Findings related to Open Schooling approach: the activity includes concepts and competences included in the curriculum. Although it was a challenging proposal for teachers and students, it has been a very good experience that we recommend to other teachers to work innovatively in solving problems contextualized in their subjects.
Change/innovation supported by:
[x] schoolhead [ ] school association/network [ ] local government [X] Other: Living Lab for Health
Students’ Outcomes: The results were good, the students did a search for information about mental health and from there they detected the problems and opportunities for improvement in each category. In general, knowledge and skills increased.