Nutrition Program Design: Broadneck Baseball & Softball Club’s Healthy Athlete’s Program

 

Course Goals

(As provided by American University course HLTH 640 Nutrition Program Design)

  • Prepare students to creatively design nutrition programs for health improvement of individuals and groups.

  • Provide opportunities for students to apply and synthesize lessons learned from a variety of courses throughout the program of study.

  • Provide opportunities for collaboration and investigation in an online environment.

 

Program Components

Click each item for details.

Please note the following reference for the Tedx Video on the homepage:

Davidson, R.J. (2019, December 12). How mindfulness changes the emotional life of our brains [Video file]. YouTube. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/7CBfCW67xT8

 

Reflection

These are the questions provided for the course reflection: 1. As you reflect on the course content, what did you find most challenging?, 2.  What was most surprising? 3. How might you use the information from this course personally and/or professionally moving forward?

“Begin with the end in mind” is great advice from Professor Trietiak when going through the process of creating a nutrition program.  Taking that stance allowed me to make better sense of when to complete assessments, the types of measurements to use and how that data supported the outcomes that were written within the logic model.  This data was also used to determine the needs of the particular audience and designate the appropriate theory and constructs to produce the best outcomes possible and reach behavior change success.

For me personally I found blending the mission statement, goals and objectives to be a bit challenging.  After looking back to that assignment and reviewing what Professor Treitiak had written for suggestions,  there was a need to be sure that the goals were more program focused than activity specific.  This is  a trait that I feel carried over from my middle school teaching experiences. We write objectives for daily lessons far more frequently than goals, and our goals are usually more kid friendly and framed as “Questions for the Quarter”.  I also found the process of creating process evaluation questions to match the metrics of the program to be challenging as it took a lot more time than I expected, thinking about every aspect of the program that would need to be evaluated and how that should be done.

The most surprising thing to me was how a podcast can fun to create but also a very long and intensive process, especially if you have never produced one before.  I felt that my story arc needed to be stronger and would have been if I had more time, knew more about the technology to create the podcast and really thought about what specifically I could fit into a 10 to 12-minute time frame (I way overestimate what I would need).  There was an abundance of information and it was both challenging and surprising as to how hard it was to narrow down to the content to what I thought would be the most beneficial and engaging for my audience.

Moving forward, I intend on producing more podcasts.  It could be a hobby with a small intimate audience to keep me up to date with the ever-changing world of nutrition or maybe something more.  You only live once, try it…right?! As far as program design, I’m not sure that I would ever choose to be a nutrition program director/administrator but who knows, I may come across an opportunity that I cannot pass up!  I am definitely keeping my options open.

The skills learned from this course about assessments, data and behavior theory will assist in any aspect of nutrition education.  All of what has been learned supports what we are set out to do, educate others about being healthy and how that impacts our current health as well as our health into the future.  We are able to accomplish through the processes of increasing knowledge and awareness while breaking down barriers through behavior change no matter the stage, ethnic, cultural or socioeconomic group our clients may be in.