During Choate’s second schoolwide Wellness Day, the community took part in a variety of activities, including yoga
A new addition to the Choate curriculum this year, Wellness Day has been a welcome break in the busy lives of many students. Though Wellness Day is the most obvious change for students, it is only part of a revamp of Choate’s wellness program. 14 months ago, Choate underwent a curriculum review, which happens about every 10 years. In this review, faculty members look at Choate’s diploma requirements and the array of courses to determine if the School is offering the best experience for all of its students.
After taking in more advice from students and teachers, there was a consensus that wellness at Choate needed to be reviewed. According to Dr. Katie Jewett, the Director of Curricular Initiatives, “We got another group of faculty members together to make wellness more of a priority in the curriculum.” This group of faculty members introduced the concept of the third form sophomore seminar equivalent as well as Wellness Day activities. The main reason behind creating Wellness Day was that it did not make sense for students only to be educated on wellness in seminars during their first two years at Choate. The committee of faculty decided that wellness should be prioritized all four years. Schoolwide Wellness day now occurs once a term.
Students participate in a Drum Circle, one of the activities offered for this term’s Wellness Day.
Another organizing principle behind these activities was the wellness wheel. Dr. Jewett said, “One of the organizing principles that we have for our wellness is a wellness wheel, and it encompasses different dimensions of wellness such as financial wellness, emotional wellness, and social wellness.” These varied dimensions of wellness are why the activities at Wellness Day are so wide-ranging. Ms. Alex Long, the Assistant Director of the Student Activities, said, “Student feedback was really helpful in determining what activities we wanted to have in the winter, for example, we took out the nutrition seminar as the feedback we got seemed to suggest that it did not fit. Furthermore, at student request we added options such as self-defense, free skate, and pickup basketball.”
Like any new program, Wellness Day was not perfect when it was first introduced in the Fall Term. Some of the major complaints that were voiced about the Fall Term Wellness Day was that it was in the middle of the day. Dr. Jewett provided an example of how this could be a problem: “One student told me through the survey that they were at Yoga, which was meant to be a relaxing activity, however, they couldn’t relax because they had a physics test next block.” To combat this problem, Dr. Jewett and Ms. Long moved the Wellness block to the end of the day in the Winter Term.
This change proved to be popular among the student body, Ahmed Wise ’20 said, “The winter term activities were much better, because they were longer and at the end of the day.” Zaid Ball ’20 echoed these sentiments stating that “I think that the survey and the student feedback were important in making the winter wellness day better than the one in the fall.”
Even with good reviews of the day Dr. Jewett and Ms. Long still see improvements that could be made, specifically in the signup process. Dr. Jewett said, “The signup process this time got a bit clogged with the amount of students trying to sign-in. I was thinking of not announcing a specific time the signups would be released.”
Another problem with the signup process was that while you were browsing the activities you could join, the website did not update if the activity was full or not, so oftentimes students would find themselves not being able to join an activity and having to reload the page. To combat this, Dr. Jewett suggested to place a list of the activities in the email so students can get an idea of what they want to sign up for before logging into the web page. With these continuous improvements, Wellness Day is expected to become a staple in the Choate schedule.
