Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum
The Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum to promotes well-being, confidence, and healthy emotion regulation skills in youth! This curriculum contains activities and instructions that are excellent, evidence-based choices for school counselors, school social workers, teachers, home-schooling parents or caregivers, and anyone else with a passion for empowering youth. Our mission, which is similar to yours, is to teach our youth adaptive skills to help them live healthy, meaningful, and successful lives. This curriculum is valuable for use in school, after school, as part of extracurricular activities, and anywhere else serving students in grades three through eight. This curriculum has many strengths, is based on scientific literature, and was extensively tested over the last ten years across hundreds of youth. We are confident that your experiences with this curriculum will influence positive development in your youth and live up to the Empowered & Poised Purpose Statement.
About the Curriculum
We designed the Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum for students of all genders and backgrounds who are in grade levels three to eight. Students in grade levels before and beyond three through eight may also benefit as the core mechanisms of the activities (e.g., self-esteem) are valuable for all ages. Facilitators can customize the activities to account for individual needs within and between your groups and communities, including students from different races, ethnicities, cultures, religions, socio-economic statuses, genders, sexual orientations, developmental levels, and abilities. Although these demographic differences are important considerations, in the testing of this curriculum over the last ten years we found that most of your students will share somewhat similar experiences with the concepts we discuss.
We purposefully planned the Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum to have an overabundance of activities per lesson to allow for flexibility and to enhance your “toolbelt” of activities. Facilitators will likely not finish all activities within one lesson and that is okay! In fact, taking time to fully deliver the activities tended to result in a more positive experience for students.
Consider the following when planning and choosing activities from each topic: background of the students, developmental levels, abilities, supplies needed for each activity, and personalities of the students (e.g., artsy, active, introverted). Organizing your lesson given these idiosyncratic factors in advance will facilitate a smoother and more beneficial experience for your students. We provide more details throughout the text to take advantage of this adaptive strategy.
User Friendly
We formatted this curriculum to be straightforward. We cut the extraneous details to help facilitators capture the important information much quicker to save more time for the many other important tasks they do throughout their work day. We cross-examined the instructions across individuals of varying professions, educational attainment, and career stages to ensure clarity for anyone interested in delivering these lessons and activities. We presented the information in lists so that you can follow the instructions in chronological order (if you desire) without losing your place from looking away or attending to the students.
Comprehensive
The Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum includes: 1) a pre-program lesson, 2) parent/guardian letter, 3) waivers/forms, 4) fifteen engaging topics in a variety of life-skill/social emotional domains, and 5) a post-program lesson. We provide complementary information to the activities themselves, including tips for the most effective delivery (from previous experiences), handouts, hyperlinks to useful websites, and additional resources. We are confident that the Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum is the single, comprehensive resource you need to secure a fulfilling social emotional learning experience for your students. You no longer have to waste time scouring the internet, books, and other curricula searching for engaging ways to enhance your students' learning experience!
Backed by Evidence
A major strength of the Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum is that the activities are more than just kid-friendly and fun, they are based on empirical research, which is cited throughout the curriculum. Social scientists and clinical researchers have directly validated the effects of numerous activities. All of these activities focus on specific skills that have been proven effective in promoting development, building confidence, facilitating adaptive emotion regulation, and yielding various other benefits. The evidence-based foundation of this curriculum suggests that the activities presented here have more value than their fun and engaging presentations - it means they are more likely to work with your students.
Vetted & Tested
Leah Berdysz, MSSA, LSW started writing and building this curriculum during her undergraduate studies when she was teaching Physical Education and first began facilitating social skills groups in schools, resulting in its testing across hundreds of students. In the process of using this curriculum, she, along with others, have made countless edits and revisions to smooth out the issues and unexpected challenges before delivering the final format for educators of children and youth to use. Moreover, Bryant M. Stone, PhD has extensive experience in scientific literature, intervention development, and positive psychology. As such, individuals interested in using this curriculum can rest assured that it is not only based on evidence and vetted across various experts, but that we have perfected this exact curriculum for over a decade. Many students, families, and professionals have endorsed, helped build, and refined this curriculum, and we are incredibly grateful for all of their contributions. Additionally, the parents/guardians of students from past programs have approved all of the photos from previous programs that we used in this curriculum.
Flexible
We designed the Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum for professionals of all training levels and had it vetted across individuals of different training levels, from those with little experience to expert teachers and scientists who have been empowering youth and conducting research for decades. The Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum has the detail to clearly guide facilitators through the activities, prepare them for challenges they might experience, and allow for the flexibility to offer the best experience for the youth and students. This culturally-responsive curriculum encourages you to tailor it to the population and developmental level of the students you are serving, promoting growth through shared experiences that many youth face during their development.
Engaging
One of the most essential components of the Empowered & Poised Life Skills Curriculum is that the activities meet students at their developmental level to make the lessons both fun and engaging. In our experiences, the lessons are far less impactful if students are disinterested or unengaged. To ensure that students are engaged, we simplified complex concepts and topics into simple explanations, provided plenty of examples for which they can relate, and integrated many common, fun activities individuals in these grades enjoy, such as painting, games (e.g., bingo), listening to music, role playing, journaling, team building, and physical activities. The end result is that this curriculum delivers essential, developmentally-appropriate lessons while helping students with various interests enjoy and learn throughout the process!
