HLTH 6110 Week 4 Artifact Narrative Paper Example

From a Finished 45-Minute Session Plan Back to the Ability That Produced It: "Finding the Sodium" on a Nutrition Facts Label for a Senior Center Blood Pressure Workshop, Read Feature by Feature

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 6110: Health and Wellness Education Competency Based Practice

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

From a Finished 45-Minute Session Plan Back to the Ability That Produced It: "Finding the Sodium" on a Nutrition Facts Label for a Senior Center Blood Pressure Workshop, Read Feature by Feature

The Artifact

The artifact is a four-page session plan titled "Finding the Sodium," written in February 2025 for the third session of the six-session blood pressure workshop that Harlan County Public Health runs at senior centers. It is a working document, not a handout: the facilitator holds it, and participants never see it. It has been used with four cohorts, 51 participants in all, at three centers. Its four pages contain a one-paragraph purpose statement, three learning objectives, a timed outline of five activities over 45 minutes, a materials list that includes eight empty food packages with labels intact and a one-page check for understanding.

Feature One: Objectives Written as Things a Participant Does

The three objectives read: "By the end of the session, each participant will (1) point to the sodium line and its percent Daily Value on a Nutrition Facts label; (2) say whether a food is low or high in sodium using the 5 and 20 percent guide; and (3) choose the lower-sodium item from a pair of similar packaged foods." Each verb names an action the facilitator can watch: point, say, choose. None uses "understand" or "learn about."

The objectives were not written that way in the first draft. The earlier version read "participants will understand how to read a food label for sodium." I rewrote it after the first cohort, when I could not tell at the end of the session whether anyone had met the objective. That revision is the first sign of an ability: writing objectives that can be observed, so that the session can be judged against them.

Feature Two: One Rule, Taken From the Source

The second objective rests on a single rule. The plan teaches that a serving with 5 percent Daily Value or less of a nutrient is low and one with 20 percent or more is high, the general guide the Food and Drug Administration gives for reading the label, and that sodium's Daily Value is set at 2,300 milligrams (U.S. Food and Drug Administration [FDA], 2024). The plan cites the FDA page in a footnote and tells the facilitator not to teach milligram targets beyond that, because participants' clinicians may have given them individual limits.

Choosing one rule, and choosing it from the agency that writes the label, shows a second ability: selecting content that is accurate, sourced and within the educator's scope. Personal sodium targets belong to a clinician, and the plan's footnote says so.

Feature Three: The Timed Outline and Its One Deliberate Gap

The outline allots 5 minutes to a warm-up question, 10 to a demonstration on an enlarged label, 15 to pairs comparing real packages, 10 to a check for understanding and 5 to closing. Fifteen minutes of practice with real packages is the longest block, and the largest share of the session goes to participants doing rather than watching.

The outline also contains a gap: a two-minute pause after the demonstration marked "questions before packages." It was added after the second cohort, when several participants were still unsure where the sodium line sat on the label and pair work stalled. Planning a pause in response to what happened in a previous delivery shows a third ability, revising a plan from observation of its use.

Feature Four: A Check That Does Not Depend on Asking "Any Questions?"

The plan's last page is a check for understanding. Each participant receives two packages, a canned soup and a lower-sodium version of the same soup, and is asked to point to the sodium line, say whether each is low or high and hand the facilitator the one they would choose. The facilitator marks a simple tally. The design follows the idea behind asking patients to explain or show what they have learned rather than asking whether they understood; when researchers audiotaped primary care visits with low-literacy diabetes patients, clinicians checked recall or comprehension for only 12% of new concepts, and the patients whose clinicians did check tended toward better glycemic control (Schillinger et al., 2003).

Building a check that produces a record, a tally per participant per objective, is the fourth ability the artifact shows. It is also the bridge to the workshop's evaluation, since the tallies are the only data the session produces.

Feature Five: What the Plan Leaves to the Facilitator

The plan is also notable for what it does not script. It gives the facilitator no lecture text, only the points each activity must reach and the questions to ask. The warm-up question, "What did you eat yesterday that came in a package?", is printed, but the facilitator is told to use participants' answers rather than a prepared list. The materials list names the eight packages by type, such as canned soup, frozen dinner, crackers and deli meat, so that a facilitator at another center can buy local equivalents. During the fourth cohort, a peer facilitator delivered the session from this plan at a second center on the same day I delivered it at the first, and her tally sheet shows results similar to mine. Writing a plan another person can deliver is a fifth ability, and her tally sheet is the evidence for it.

The Claim the Artifact Supports

Read backward, the plan supports a specific claim: I can write a session plan with observable objectives, select accurate content from the authoritative source within my scope, structure time so participants practice and build a check that records whether objectives were met, and I can revise each of these from what happened in delivery. In the 2025 practice analysis, those abilities fall mainly within Planning and Implementation, two of the nine validated areas (Gardner et al., 2026).

The plan does not support a claim that participants reduced their sodium intake or their blood pressure. It records what happened in the session, not after it.

Limits

The plan is one artifact from one workshop. The revisions described were made by me, but the session was observed by a peer facilitator, whose notes prompted the second revision; credit for noticing the stall is shared.

References

Gardner, A. J., Chaney, B. H., Hembry, I. F., Henderson, J., Houston, M., Datema, W., Sherry, C., Dixon, S., & Opp, M. (2026). The Health Education Specialist Practice Analysis III 2025 (HESPA III 2025): Process and outcomes. Health Education & Behavior. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/10901981261479329

Schillinger, D., Piette, J., Grumbach, K., Wang, F., Wilson, C., Daher, C., Leong-Grotz, K., Castro, C., & Bindman, A. B. (2003). Closing the loop: Physician communication with diabetic patients who have low health literacy. Archives of Internal Medicine, 163(1), 83-90. https://doi.org/10.1001/archinte.163.1.83

U.S. Food and Drug Administration. (2024). How to understand and use the Nutrition Facts label. https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-facts-label/how-understand-and-use-nutrition-facts-label