Healthy Schools Monitoring Tool
Healthy Schools Certification Connection - Step 4: Develop an Action Plan
Healthy Schools Certification Connection - Step 5: Take Action and Monitor Progress
How do I use this tool?
Your school team might be wondering how to best monitor your progress (towards achieving your ultimate
goals) and evaluate your actions throughout this Healthy Schools Certification. If so, this is the guide/tool for
you! You can use tool throughout the entire 6-Step Healthy Schools Process, but you’ll find it’s most helpful for
Steps 4 and 5 to guide your activity planning and to monitor your progress. Monitoring and evaluation can help
you see: what am I planning? What actually happened? Did it work?
Ophea’s 6-Step Healthy Schools Process
Step 1:
Step 2:
Step 3:
Step 4:
Step 5:
Step 6:
Establish Your School Team
Assess Your School Community Needs and Assets
Identify Your Priority Health Topic
Develop an Action Plan
Take Action and Monitor Progress
Celebrate and Reflect
1. Monitor: collect information that will help your school team know what’s happening with your activities
and strategies (e.g., resources, activities that have taken place, number of participants) as they are
happening, allowing your school team to make any changes or adjustments if you see things are not
going as planned.
2. Evaluate: use your school team’s monitoring information to clarify what happened with the action team
you develop in Step 4 – this will allow you to make changes and improvements and to determine if your
initiative was a success.
Developing the action plan (Step 4) and taking action and monitoring progress (Step 5) are both assigned the
highest potential points value. You should use this as incentive to keep record of all of your activities and what
they might accomplish! Monitoring should be captured as part of your action plan.
Where to Begin?
In Step 4, before your school team starts action planning, determine what it is you want to achieve this year.
One of the simplest ways to do this is to collect all of your school team’s thoughts in a logic model. This will
require some planning and teamwork:
- Start with goals
- End with results – what can we measure?
- What can you show for your Healthy Schools process?
This can all be done with a logic model. You’ve kept track of everything up until this point, so putting together
this logic model should be a simple process!
What is a logic model?
Logic models depict the relationship between what the activity is supposed to do, with whom, and why. Logic
models provide a diagrammatic representation of the intended outcomes of your action plan and the factors
that contribute to it. The results your school team hopes to achieve should come from reviewing the results of
1
Activities/
Strategies
Resources
Tasks and
outputs: what
we do and
who we reach
Immediate
outcomes:
what changes
as a result of
the activities
Long-term
outcomes
(impact/over
all goal):
what changes
as a result of
reaching
medium-term
outcomes
Medium-term
outcomes:
what changes
as a result of
achieving
immediate
outcomes
Overall goal that you are hoping to achieve
Steps 1 – 3 and should be based on the priority health topic identified in Step 3.
What is included in a logic model?
Your logic model should include some of all the following components (see Monitoring Tool/Logic Model –
Sample for examples):
Goal: a broader statement that provides overall direction for your action plan over the course of the school
year. Your school team may have goals that span multiple school years that you can include if you wish. It
explains the purpose of carrying out the action plan. This should be determined first, and should provide the
specific direction that you plan to take.
Activities/Strategies: this includes a set of closely related activities or strategies related to the goal(s) of your
school team. They should be based on the priority health topic identified in Step 3 and should draw upon the
assets and needs identified in Step 2. Activities/strategies should relate wherever possible to the Ministry of
Education’s Foundations for a Healthy School resource
(http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/healthyschools/foundations.html).
Resources/Inputs: these include the human, financial, or material resources that will be used for your
initiative. This can include the staff, students, or other personnel that will be working on your program, the
money that will be used or allocated to the program, the space that will be used, materials, and other
resources that will be provided for your initiative. Your resources must be sufficient to allow you to carry out
your activities. This also helps you identify if you have enough resources (including things like staff time) to
commit to doing a particular activity or strategy. You may have already identified some of these in Step 2:
Assess your school community needs and assets.
Tasks: What your school team will actually do to achieve your goal; this should include the specific tasks that
will lead to your desired changes. Here, your school team should explain what roles will be done, when, and by
whom to achieve your desired objective. Based on your review of school needs and assets, and your
identification of a health priority topic, select your strategies/activities, remembering what resources you have
available to you. The point of this stage is to identify the action that your school will take that will contribute
to your goals and outcome objectives (i.e., addressing the problem that you identified). Your team should be
confident that all activities planned will somehow lead to the identified short and medium-term outcomes.
Some tips:
- Be as specific as you can! This will help you carry out all of your planned activities.
- Make sure to include by when you want to accomplish your specific activities
- It might be helpful to include how much change and by when you hope to achieve and complete the
activity and/or strategy
2
Outputs/Indicators/Deliverables: these include the results of your action plan. The intention here is to
determine if your objectives were met, and if so, to what extent. Outputs are measures of how your
activities/strategies are progressing towards achieving the desired objective. They indicate how your activity
or strategy went towards
* As a school team, develop a list of criteria for success, those that you will be able to track in order to assess
the extent to which your objectives are being met. Be realistic. While you can measure how many students and
staff attend lunch yoga and mindfulness, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to assess the overall increase in positive
mental health in your school (that would take a lot of evaluation). An output/indicator is a way to measure
your activities/tasks.
- What is your intended result?
o Can this be divided into separate components?
o Can they be measured?
Outcomes: these include the resulting effect(s) of your outputs, some of the changes that occur in your
students/the school /the school community that are involved with or associated with your action plan or that
are exposed to the changes that you make. These can include short term, intermediate term, and long term
during your planning process. Some examples include changes in knowledge, awareness, skills, attitudes,
opinions, behaviours, policies, or social action. Outcomes can be both intended or unintended, and positive or
negative. The long-term outcome/impact is the ultimate effect that you are hoping for (your ultimate goal).
Using a logic model, you can identify how your activities and/or strategies will achieve its desired results and
achieve your overall goal. Logic models provide your whole school team with a shared understanding of the
different action plan components, and form the foundation monitoring and evaluating the process.
Why evaluate and/or monitor?
 to measure the effectiveness or contribution (to show what you’re doing makes a difference)
 to demonstrate the value of your planned activities or initiatives in reaching your intended goals
 to provide information on what you’ve done
 to improve upon your actions/activities
Logic models often appear scary and intimidating. Remember, you don’t need to create the entire logic model
at once, and in fact, the majority of the work for your logic model has been done in your previous steps! Not
only that, but the information you provide for the logic model will really help your school team develop your
action plan in Step 4. It will be useful to create your model and update it as you continue to develop your
school action plan, and that you involve the different members of the team in its development.
Just a few extra tips!
 Make sure your logic model is detailed but not too overwhelming, and that it has all of the crucial
elements that will be included in your program
 While you are developing your program, or when components are added or changed, your logic model
may change. It is important that you revisit and update your logic model periodically so it provides an
accurate representation of the initiative you’re carrying out and should evaluate upon completion.
 It should show the relationship among your inputs, outputs, and outcomes
 It should be easy to understand and read by external reviewers/outsiders
3
Outcomes
Activity/
Strategy
Foundations
for a Healthy
School Area
Resources
Tasks
Outputs
(Deliverables)
Immediate
outcomes
(what
changed
as a result
of the
activities?
Mediumterm
outcomes
(what
changes as a
result of
achieving
immediate
outcomes?)
Student
Engagement
Curriculum
Teaching &
Learning
Home,
School &
Community
Partnerships
School &
Classroom
Leadership
Social &
Physical
Environments
Student
Engagement
Curriculum
Teaching &
Learning
Home,
School &
Community
Partnerships
School &
Classroom
Leadership
Social &
Physical
Environments
Student
Engagement
Curriculum
Teaching &
Learning
Home,
School &
Community
Partnerships
School &
Classroom
Leadership
4
Long-term
outcomes
(what
changes as a
result of
achieving
mediumterm
outcomes?)
Social &
Physical
Environments
DEBRIEF:
feedback
about the
process –
which tasks
you fully
carried out,
your outputs,
and if you
achieved
your desired
outcomes
Notes:
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