New hands-on course teaches lifelong healthy living and learning

Sheryl Stevenson, Lecturer and Graduate Student Support Coordinator helped create new U of T course, Personal Health and Optimal Learning (CTLA10).
Lecturer and Graduate Student Support Coordinator Sheryl Stevenson helped create new course, Personal Health and Optimal Learning (CTLA10). (Photo by Ken Jones)

Alexa Battler

University of Toronto Scarborough students can now learn lifelong skills about health and wellness in one of the best athletic facilities in Canada – and receive a credit for it.

A new course, Personal Health and Optimal Learning (CTLA10), explores health topics by teaching fundamental academic skills - including critical thinking, research, and writing - and offering hands-on, deeper learning through personal experiences at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre.

“Students may know about the services at U of T Scarborough, but we think they need to be able to learn how to concentrate more on their health,” says Lecturer and Graduate Student Support Coordinator Sheryl Stevenson, who helped create and will be instructing the course.

CTLA10 was inspired by Professor Bruce Kidd, Vice-President, U of T and Principal, U of T Scarborough, a former Olympic athlete and longstanding advocate of healthy campuses. As Dean of Kinesiology and Physical Education at U of T St. George Campus, Kidd introduced a course called Healthy Active Living, which taught students about the science of physical activity, and practical ways of managing health and well-being.

A new course, Personal Health and Optimal Learning (CTLA10), explores health topics by teaching fundamental academic skills - including critical thinking, research, and writing - and offering hands-on, deeper learning through personal experiences at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre.

“I’m pleased to say Sheryl Stevenson and her colleagues picked that course up and improved upon it,” says Kidd. “They have restructured and enlarged it to include a lot of material on effective learning and productive work.”

Students will attend weekly two-hour lectures and one-hour practicals (experiential learning activities) - most of which will be held at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre. Stevenson says a focus of the course is to teach students to “learn about learning,” a core goal of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at U of T Scarborough.

Students running on track in Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre.

“Every week I’m going to be trying to get them to make connections with what they’re learning about their own learning, and what works for them,” she says.” They’ll be connecting their own experience in the practicals to the concepts in the readings, and then testing a concept or research study to see how it relates to themselves.”

The course, which is aimed at first-year students and is writing-intensive, explores learning about topics like sleep, the influence of nature on health, changing bad habits, drugs and mindfulness. Tutorials at the Toronto Pan Am Sports Centre will take students through lessons about cardio and strength training, accessibility sports, yoga, meditation and aquatic sports. Other tutorials include nature walks in The Valley and lessons on creating meal plans and critically reading nutrition labels.

“There’s a crisis of physical inactivity, and this course is directed against that,” says Kidd. “But it’s also linked to effective learning so that the students in this course will be able to use the strategies that they learn to be more effective in their academic work.”

Stevenson says that, because students often enter U of T with very high GPAs, first-year students can be surprised if they receive lower marks than they are used to. She says one of her primary goals in the course is not only to teach the critical thinking and learning skills that will help students achieve good grades, but to teach them the value of learning as something worth much more than grades.

“One of the recurring themes of the course is how to build enduring motivation that can carry you through failure,” she says. “It’s an intrinsic motivation, versus the extrinsic motivation of the grade, and a way to approach and handle setbacks and failures, so you view them as a chance to learn.”

All 52 spots for the fall and winter semesters are full, and Stevenson says there is already a waiting list.

“Students will have the opportunity to learn mindsets as well as skill sets that they can apply throughout their academic courses and the rest of their lives,” she says. “It should be, I hope, really applicable to the rest of their academic career.”