Teacher Resources

Confident Me Workshop

The Dove Confident Me curriculum supports teachers in offering a a single session or a five session workshops to encourage body confidence and health information literacy. This curriculum addresses how body myths, peer pressure and media influence can affect your self-esteem, and encourages facilitated conversations to help debunk these myths.

In addition to including free teaching materials such as presentations, activities, worksheets, short videos to help spur conversations, training videos for teachers are also provided.

This video provides an overview of body confidence, giving you the background needed to deliver a Confident Me self-esteem workshop at your school. We’ll show you the impact that low body confidence can have on young people, introduce body image myths and also give you an overview of the Dove Self-Esteem Project and its approach to increasing self-esteem amongst young people.

Effectiveness of a brief school-based body image intervention ‘Dove Confident Me: Single Session’ when delivered by teachers and researchers: Results from a cluster randomised controlled trial
This study evaluated a 90-min single session school-based body image intervention (Dove Confident Me: Single Session), and investigated if delivery could be task-shifted to teachers. The intervention had short-term benefits for girls' body image and dietary restraint, and for eating disorder symptoms and some psychosocial outcomes among girls and boys. A multi-session version of the intervention is likely to be necessary for sustained improvements. Teachers can deliver this intervention effectively with minimal training, indicating broader scale dissemination is feasible.

Media and Digital Literacy Connections

Tied to the Ontario Health and Physical Education curriculum and the Digital Media Literacy Outcomes, the Ontario Health Curriculum K-8: Media and Digital Literacy Connections includes selected lessons that are related to media and health literacy. Some topics include:

Healthy Food Web Students go on a tour of popular sites aimed at children, where they identify and classify the advertising encountered there and look at how the food products being advertised fit – or don’t fit – in the food groups found in the Canada Food Guide.
Girls and Boys on Television Students discuss television programming aimed at children and how girls and boys are portrayed in it.
Behaving Ethically Online: Ethics and Empathy Students are introduced to the idea that “hot” emotional states such as anger or excitement make it hard for them to control how they act and learn about the ways in which digital communication can make it harder to feel empathy for others.
Cyberbullying and Civic Participation Students explore the concepts of rules, values and ethics and learn how they influence our decision-making. Students are then invited to consider how they can contribute to create positive online cultures.

Additional Resources

Websites and Resources

Body Project
The Body Project is a dissonance-based body-acceptance intervention designed to help high school and college-age women resist sociocultural pressures to conform to the thin-ideal and reduce their pursuit of thinness.

Includes full scripts for facilitating conversations, exercises, and evaluation tools such as pre and post surveys, data entry spreadsheets, etc.
Talking to kids about media and body image
Children are exposed to many unrealistic images of both men’s and women’s bodies through media. TV shows, music videos, ads, movies, video games, and even social networks can communicate ideas about what their bodies “should” look like. Techniques for manipulating images – from old-fashioned techniques like airbrushing to modern technologies like Photoshop – even make it possible for media images to go beyond what’s possible in reality. As a parent, it can be hard to know what to do about these images. This tip sheet provides some advice on how to manage your children’s exposure to them and how to talk to them about what they see.
The Emily Program
The Emily Program approach is based on the belief that individuals are unique and that they intuitively seek meaning, value, and creativity in life. Effective treatment requires an awareness of the genetic, biological, psychological, social, and cultural impacts on each person.
Outpatient and day treatment is available locally in Spokane for adolescents and adults.
What to Say: Resources for Teachers
Information for teachers on how to talk about food, diet and bodies with kids.
Media Literacy as an Effective and Promising Form of Eating Disorders Prevention

Books

Healthy Bodies Curriculum for Teachers
"This curriculum should be in the hands of every elementary school teacher. The revised edition has the potential to transform classrooms, and is the resource for any school that wants students to develop positive body esteem, resist unhealthy messages regarding weight, shape, appearance, fitness, and food, and be equipped with the building blocks to a healthy lifestyle.”" -- Margo Maine, PhD, Author of The Body Myth: The Pressure on Adult Women to Be Perfect and several other books
Your Body is Awesome: Body Respect for Children
"The colorful illustrations in this unique picture book will encourage children to love their bodies from an early age. By learning about all the wonderful things bodies can do, and how each body is different and unique, children will be inspired to take good care of their bodies throughout their lives. Promoting respect for body diversity among children will also encourage kindness and help prevent bullying."
All Bodies are Good Bodies: A Children's Book About Body Positivity
"All bodies are good bodies. Even as children, we see TV, we hear our peers, and we listen to our parents. Sometimes we hear people speaking negatively about their bodies. We start to learn at a very young age that we have to look a certain way. However, that doesn't need to be the case. This book allows parents to explore body positivity with their children!"