As many of you uncertainty in the 2020-2021 school year, one thing Montana HOSA is hoping to do is strengthen our connections in sharing resources or ideas that work. You can search for these under the health science curriculum drop down tab on the Montana HOSA resources page. We will continue adding and featuring guest instructors in our posts, so if you have curriculum ideas or tips you’d like to share, please email Katie Meier at montanahosa@katiemeier.co
For this first installment, I want to encourage you to look at the HOSA competitive events to see which ones you might be able to add as a co-curricular option to your health science curriculum, especially if you are scrambling for new ideas or ways to move online this year. It is nice because they are already written and you don’t have to reinvent the wheel (though you might just choose to adapt them in ways that fit your curriculum). In the past, I have had success in using some of the leadership and teamwork events as project based learning assignments within my classroom. Many of these could be done in the classroom or even presented virtually if you are teaching online or in a hybrid format this year. I like that the topics often tie into my health science teaching standards, but put the students a little more in charge of their learning by being the ones doing the presenting while also working on their soft skills of presentation strategies and working in groups. The pre-made rubrics make it easy to even assign students to be responsible for giving feedback to each other.
You might choose to add a little more scaffolding to a few of the assignments to help coach students towards your goals and objectives. For example, I always do medical innovations projects in my Medical Careers class. If I jump right to the HOSA rubric as an assignment, many struggle with creativity to come up with original ideas right off the bat, and their presentation styles could also use some work so I start with letting them research and present on a current medical innovation that they are intrigued by. They work solo on this one, so that they each have to learn to make a slide and present on their own. I like to use a collaborative google slide on this assignment and only allow them one slide each so they break the habit of writing their whole presentation out on slides. I use this as an opportunity to teach about presentation skills. During this first assignment, students see ways they want to improve by watching each other present. Next, I give them the HOSA rubric for medical innovations and let them work in groups if they choose. To make it a little more fun, we do a mini shark tank type deal where they have to answer questions from the crowd and vote on which innovation they would invest their money in. This past spring I had to shift to doing this project online. We were teaching asynchronously so students signed up for times that they would present and times that they would be audience members giving feedback with the rubric. If your district doesn’t allow Zoom or Google Hangouts, maybe this could be done by students pre-recording on YouTube and submitting links on whatever web learning platform you are using. Students could still be assigned to fill out rubrics and give feedback. I know some teachers have also had success using Flipggrid for activities like this and both feedback and presentations could be given in the Flipgrid videos. Another one I’ve heard about that has a lot of fun editing capabilities and is FERPA and COPPA compliant (but does have a subscription cost) is WeVideo
On the national HOSA website (www.hosa.org/CEUsefulTools) you can see some of the current changes to the 2020-2021 events and also see the topics for the events that change from year to year. These topic changes are ones you’ll want to check if you are using these in the classroom and also want your students to use their work to compete at SLC with the same presentations. For example, the research persuasive speaking and writing topic this year is “Technology Use: does it make us more or less connected?”- this might be a great topic for students to share their opinions with you as we work for new ways to engage our students and build connectedness in our chapters during COVID.
Feel free to join us for the monthly advisor chats taking place this year to help share ideas that are working for you or get the curricular and HOSA support you need. We have a lot of veteran advisors with proven strategies, as well as, young and new members with fresh ideas including great new uses of technology. Please reach out to montanahosa@katiemeier.co for more information.
