Student learning related to the Living Skills expectations takes place in the context of learning related to the Active Living, Movement Competence, and Healthy Living strands, and should be assessed and evaluated within these contexts.
The Be There for Others Unit Plan is designed to help you bring Be There’s foundational mental health education into your classroom. The unit is based on a professionally-developed curriculum and focuses on providing students with the knowledge, skills, and confidence to support someone struggling with their mental health, while also looking out for their own mental health.
This unit will help your students understand:
Signs of mental health struggle
How to be there for others using Be There’s 5 Golden Rules
How to be there for yourself through self-care and self-awareness
The interactive learning opportunities provided in the unit plan are designed to facilitate meaningful group discussions, conversations, and student involvement. Recognizing that nobody knows your students like you do, we encourage you to freely pick and choose the activities you think will best suit your group.
This unit is designed to be completed in 6 class periods of 60–75 minutes in length. We recommend that you set aside an additional 2 hours for students to complete the optional summative assessment, the online Be There Certificate, at the end of the unit.
Before using these resources with your students, it is important first to consider the following.
Talking about mental health can sometimes be difficult for young people — especially those who are struggling or have experienced a difficult situation. There are some considerations we recommend you work through to make sure your lessons support a safe and positive experience for everyone.
Please consider the following questions:
Have I considered the cultural, religious, and social backgrounds of my student population to shape a relevant and appropriate lesson?
Have I made arrangements to ensure support is available for any particularly vulnerable youth?
Are mental health supports available in the school should students need/want professional help during or after a classroom activity, lesson, or unit? If so, am I aware of how to connect students with these supports? If not, are there mental health supports outside of the school I can connect them with?
Am I able to notify families and other community members that a mental health unit is occurring and equip them with resources to talk about mental health at home?
If you answered no to any of these questions, this may be cause for concern. Please speak with your colleagues (e.g. Mental Health Lead, Adolescent Care Worker, curriculum lead, administrators, Student Success/Guidance Departments, school board support) to ensure both you and your students have the necessary support in place.
Strand: Healthy Living (Personal Safety and Injury Prevention: Making Connections for Healthy Living); Living Skills (Interpersonal and Personal Skills; Critical and Creative Thinking)*
*Student learning related to the Living Skills expectations takes place in the context of learning related to the Active Living, Movement Competence, and Healthy Living strands, and should be assessed and evaluated within these contexts.
Overall Expectations:
Living Skills
1. demonstrate personal and interpersonal skills and the use of critical and creative thinking processes as they acquire knowledge and skills in connection with the expectations in the Active Living, Movement Competence, and Healthy Living strands for this grade.
Healthy Living
C3. demonstrate the ability to make connections that relate to health and well-being – how their choices and behaviours affect both themselves and others, and how factors in the world around them affect their own and others’ health and well-being.
Specific Expectations:
Personal Skills
PS 1.1 use self-awareness and self-monitoring skills to help them understand their strengths and needs, recognize sources of stress, take responsibility for their actions, and monitor their own progress as they participate in physical activities, develop movement competence, and acquire knowledge and skills related to healthy living (e.g. Healthy Living: describe the importance of understanding their personal strengths and values and using this understanding to guide them in making thoughtful decisions about their health)
PS 1.2 use adaptive, management, and coping skills to help them respond to the various challenges they encounter as they participate in physical activities, develop movement competence, and acquire knowledge and skills related to healthy living (e.g. Healthy Living: identify supports that are available to help individuals cope with the psychological, social, and physical challenges and related stresses that may come with questioning their gender identity, their sexual orientation, or the way they express their gender by how they choose to act, dress, behave, and interact with others)
Interpersonal Skills
IS 1.3 communicate effectively, using verbal or non-verbal means, as appropriate, and interpret information accurately as they participate in physical activities, develop movement competence, and acquire knowledge and skills related to healthy living (e.g. Healthy Living: demonstrate, through role play, the ability to reach out with compassion to a friend who seems to be struggling emotionally or the ability to use assertiveness skills to respond to situations or comments that might trigger conflict)
Healthy Living
C3.2 identify warning signs and symptoms that could be related to mental health concerns (e.g., inability to cope with stress; feelings of sadness, anxiety, hopelessness, or worthlessness; negative thoughts about oneself, others, and the future; thoughts of suicide), and describe a variety of strategies for coping with or responding to mental health concerns affecting oneself or others (e.g., stress and mood management techniques, identifying ways to seek help for oneself or a friend/ classmate, supporting others who are struggling with their emotional well-being) [PS, IS]*
This unit includes opportunities for Assessment as LearningandAssessment for Learning as well as a summative assessment (Assessment of Learning). In each lesson, you will find tools to help you obtain assessment information and support learning strategies such as discussions, self-assessments, self-reflections, tasks done in groups, and handouts that can be included in a student portfolio.
The Be There Certificate is a fun and interactive online course to learn how to safely support someone who is struggling with their mental health. This activity will serve as both a review of the content in this unit as well as an assessment of your students’ learning.
The certificate takes about two hours in total, but your students can take a break as needed and pick up where they left off when they are ready. They will get badges along the way, and when they are done they will get a certificate of completion.
The interactive activities built into the course assess students’ knowledge of the content and allow students to apply their knowledge in a variety of scenarios. Your students can download a PDF of their certificate after completing all six modules of the free Be There Certificate course and submit this to you as evidence of completion.
About
The Be There Certificate is offered by Jack.org, a Canadian youth mental health charity, in partnership with Born This Way Foundation.
The Be There Certificate is a free, digital, self-paced learning experience designed to increase mental health literacy and provide youth with the knowledge, skills, and confidence they need to safely support anyone who may be struggling with their mental health. It will provide a deep understanding of Be There’s 5 Golden Rules — a simple but actionable framework teaching people how to recognize when someone might be struggling with their mental health, their role in supporting that person, and how to connect them to the help they need.
The Be There Certificate is available in English, French and Spanish, offering universal best practices while diving deeper into the intersections of culture, identity, and social determinants of mental wellness. You and your students can complete the Be There Certificate in one or more languages, but you cannot switch between languages midway through.
The Be There Certificate is based on the content on BeThere.org, a resource created by Jack.org in response to a needs assessment of over 1,200 youth. We compiled the top 73 most common questions we heard from young people and scoured dozens of websites, blogs, articles and other resources to find the answers. It wasn’t easy; existing resources are fragmented, hard to find and full of impersonal clinical jargon. But the answers are out there (we didn’t make this stuff up!) we just had to find it and translate it into accessible language. References can be found here.
This is not a site for personal disclosure of mental health distress, suicidal thoughts or behaviours. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please call a helpline, 9-1-1 or emergency services, or go to your nearest emergency department.
If someone’s thoughts or behaviours threaten the safety of themselves or others, then this is what’s called a mental health crisis. Call a helpline, 9-1-1 or emergency services. If someone has recently hurt themselves, but is no longer in danger, follow Be There’s Golden Rules and connect them to resources in their area.
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