Purpose of this Guide
The purpose of this guide is to provide educators with capacity enhancing tools to support students in developing the knowledge and skills to build healthy, respectful relationships, including an understanding of consent, which is key to an individual’s health and well-being.
Helping students develop an understanding that healthy relationships are based on respect, mutual care, and trust—and do not include or condone harassment or other abusive, controlling, violent behaviours—promotes a culture of respect, empowers students to stand up for themselves, and enhances their personal safety.
This guide is meant to be used as a prerequisite to the video “Let’s Talk About Healthy Relationships”. Through guided instruction and “real-life” examples, students examine the characteristics of a trusted adult and healthy, respectful relationship, making connections to consent (what it looks like, feels like, and sounds like) as a foundation for healthy relationships. Students explore caring behaviours and behaviours that can be harmful, the importance of standing up for themselves, setting boundaries and respecting others’ boundaries, and ways of communicating consent in their interactions with others.
Curriculum Connections
The topics students explore while engaging with the video and through facilitated conversations, align with the identified curriculum expectations in the Healthy Living strand in Grades 1–6 in the Ontario Curriculum: Healthy and Physical Education (2019).
Learning as part of the Personal Safety and Injury Prevention and Human Development and Sexual Health topics include:
- identifying practices to ensure and enhance their own safety
- recognizing caring and exploitive behaviours, associated feelings and ways of responding
- identifying trusted people that can assist with dealing with non-consensual behaviours
- ways of being inclusive, respectful, and accepting that benefit everyone and promoting positive interactions
- understanding the importance of consent, standing up for self and others, relating positively to others
- characteristics of a healthy relationship, ways of responding to non-consensual behaviour, and communicating consent
It is recommended that educators review the associated Healthy Living curriculum expectations for their grade to contextualize students' learning and preview the video. Consult this guide before engaging students in learning.
Getting Started
Building a Supportive Classroom Community
- “Physical and emotional safety is a precondition for effective learning in health and physical education.” (Ontario Ministry of Education. Health and Physical Education, 2019) Providing a learning environment that recognizes and respects the diversity of students and perspectives creates a culture of respect and an emotionally safer, inclusive space to engage students in thoughtful and meaningful discussions about healthy relationships, and respect and consent— topics that are directly related to their lives.
Reflecting on Sensitivities and Biases
- It is important to acknowledge that all individuals have assumptions and biases, a set of beliefs and attitudes that inform their behaviours and actions. When educators take time to reflect on their own sensitivities and biases that may influence their instruction, they can better create a culture in which students can explore their thoughts and values while respecting those of others without judgment.
- Before engaging students in learning about healthy relationships and consent, consider reviewing reflective and guiding questions from Ophea’s Culturally Responsive and Relevant Pedagogy in Health and Physical Education resource to examine personal beliefs and potential biases that may inform approaches to consent education.
Know Your Students to Facilitate Respectful Discussions
- When educators know their students and the diverse identities they hold that may be different than their own, they can better understand their students’ reactions and are better able to facilitate conversations with differing opinions and respond to questions.
- Co-creating classroom community agreements with students at the start of learning helps create a welcoming space for every student and establishes an environment in which all students can feel comfortable learning and sharing their perspectives.
- Establishing a Safe Space Activity: The Four Pillars may be used as a starting point in establishing classroom community agreements. Students reflect on what each of the four pillars—respect, listen, understand, and communicate—looks like, sounds like, and feels like for themselves and for classmates, thereby adopting a shared responsibility to help create a safe discussion space for each other.
- Tips for Constructive Classroom Conversations can assist educators in facilitating respectful and inclusive discussions with differing opinions to focus on promoting a culture of respect and enhancing students’ understanding of consent.
Preparing for Teaching and Learning
Consider the following when preparing to engage students in learning about healthy relationships and consent education:
- Inform parent(s)/guardian(s) about what their child will be learning and its relevance to healthy living education and student health and well-being. Sharing this information with parent(s)/guardian(s) enables them to work in partnership with the school to promote follow-up discussions at home and build stronger connections between home and school to support student learning.
- Inform administrators about what students will be learning and its relevance to healthy living education. This enables administrators to work in partnership with educators and all parent(s)/guardian(s) to provide students with the best possible educational experience and support their health and well-being.
- When students feel safe and accepted in inclusive school environments, they will sometimes share personal information or discuss personal matters with their peers and educators as they become aware of, acknowledge, and reflect on their feelings, emotions, and experiences. Providing students with safe, inclusive spaces to engage in respectful dialogue and reflection supports them in developing their social-emotional living skills and understanding of self and others. Enlist the support of guidance counsellors, social workers, and community health professionals to provide students with additional knowledge and support in discussing personal matters if they feel the need to do so.
How to Use the Video
This video may be used alone or as part of a unit of learning about healthy relationships and consent.
- Before viewing, engage students in a small or large discussion or begin a KWL Chart to have them recall what they know about the following concepts: a trusted adult, healthy relationships, respect, and consent.
- Have students engage with the video to learn more about each concept, and when invited to, pause the video to have students discuss the question prompts that appear on the screen.
- Resume the video for students to discover age-appropriate, relevant examples from peers to assist their understanding of the concept.
- Before moving on to the next concept, consider pausing the video after the peer examples for students to reflect, how the examples are similar to or different from their own, extend their ideas, and make deeper connections to their lives.
- Consider extending learning by having students work in groups to co-create scenarios, and then have other groups respond, applying social-emotional learning skills and demonstrating their understanding of consent.