Teach Well: The Relation of Teacher Wellness to Elementary Student Health and Behavior Outcomes: Baseline Subgroup Comparisons

Abstract

A teacher wellness program was hypothesized to improve school health education provided by elementary school classroom teachers through increasing their health knowledge, motivating and enhancing their skills to promote student behavior change, and improving their health role modeling. This project tests whether a wellness program (Teach Well) offered to teachers has an impact on both teacher and student cardiovascular health (CVH), especially diet. Teach Well employs the modular programming of Johnson & Johnson's Live for Life® program, demonstrated to be effective in worksite settings. Thirty-two participating schools were matched and randomly assigned within pairs to treatment (Teach Well) or control (no wellness program) conditions. Because of clustered data and administrative factors, schools are the unit of assignment and of analysis. Outcome evaluation measures included physiologic (resting heart rate, blood pressures), behavioral (diet), and organizational (school climate, organizational health) indicators for teachers, and a subset of these for students. Mediating cognitive (behavioral capability, self-efficacy, outcome expectations, stages of change, teacher job satisfaction) and program (extent of participation in Teach Well, fidelity of implementation) variables were measured. Baseline data presented in this paper reveal few significant differences between experimental and control groups but substantial ethnic and gender group differences. The results will be of value to those interested in improving the wellness of teachers and to those providing health education to school children.