Reddit reviews An Introduction to Community Health

My department assigned a standard textbook. If you don't want to write a whole course from scratch, a standard textbook gives you a course outline, and you can supplement the readings if you want.

We used this: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Community-Health-Seventh-Edition/dp/0763790117 (you can see the table of contents here).

I did a mix of lecture, activities, and guest speakers. It's easy to forget how naive the students are. For example, we did a group activity where I had the students examine and fill out a worksheet on an evidence-based school health curriculum (I know a place where I can borrow the manuals). I had them look for such things as the theoretical basis, the behavior change model, and the intervention methods, EDIT, program evaluation methods, etc. /EDIT. Almost no one in the class had ever even seen a curriculum like this (yet many of them were preparing to become health educators). It was a awesome opportunity to expose them to some standard tools of the trade! After the students had examined the curriculum, I had them report to the class on their findings. We had several different curricula, so we could compare the differences. The students did all the processing (e.g., similarities and differences).

I think it's important to have a good idea of the underlying conceptual content of the course: What theories and main ideas you are interested in. In my school, it seems that UGs have rarely been taught theory (such has theories of health behavior, ecological models), but they are perfectly capable of understanding it if you break it down and make it concrete.

I used a short case (e.g., of a disease outbreak in a town) and had the students brainstorm the causes of the disease. With some prompting (and why did that happen? and why did that happen?) they are capable of assembling and arriving at a cogent, muti-level, multi-domain ecological model of disease/health causation, even if they have never done a reading on it.