Ways to Use PANDA’s Mental Health Brochure for Adult Learners

The pandemic has shone a light on the need for mental health care, education and services in all sectors, including adult education. PANDA (Physical and Non-Apparent Disability Assistance) is the state’s disability resource for adult basic education, and they have created a new mental health brochure for learners to help meet this need. The brochure is short, written in simple language and includes ten tips for readers to improve their mental health, such as set boundaries, take a break and quiet your mind. Here are a few ideas for how you might use the brochure with learners:

• Begin with a general discussion of how mental health is defined in American culture. Be prepared for some learners to treat the topic as taboo, and give them permission to not discuss it, if they choose not to. They can still take something away from the lesson by listening.
• Share your own experience with mental health and your use of some of the tips in the brochure.
• Read the brochure and talk about which ones might be more or less comfortable for learners to do and why.
• Read one tip per week. Discuss how to put the tip into action, ask learners to try it and to report back.
• Couple reading the brochure with a grammar lesson on giving advice. Assign learners homework to recommend one strategy in the brochure to someone they know. 

You could try one of these ideas, a few or all, or you could adapt one to fit your particular context. See the complete brochure here. 

For questions or comments regarding this tip, please contact Tutor Training Coordinator, Meghan Boyle at mboyle@literacymn.org.

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