School workshop: Confident Me - five sessions
Our Confident Me body-confidence teaching materials explore influences on young people’s body image and self-esteem.
The self-esteem workshops address key topics, including the impact of society, professional and social media on appearance ideals, and give you strategies to boost confidence with students.
Over five 45-60 minute sessions, through class discussions, small-group activities, engaging videos and activity worksheets, the workshop covers:
• Unrealistic appearance ideals
• The impact of social media, celebrity culture and advertising
• How to reduce appearance-focused conversations and comparisons
• Body activism and positive behaviour change
Research shows that students who attend the five session workshops have improved body image, higher self-esteem and feel more confident participating in social and academic activities.
If you don’t have time to run five sessions, we have session teaching resources that cover the topics in less depth. However, we strongly recommend you deliver the five sessions where possible, as the deeper student engagement has a greater and longer-lasting impact on building positive confidence and self-esteem.
Stimulus Videos playlist
When prompted, share these short videos with your class to spark further debate on building body confidence and self-esteem.
Download our five session teaching resources
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Session 1: Appearance ideals
Students explore and challenge the concept of appearance ideals. Where do they come from? What pressure do they put on us? How have they changed? What qualities should we celebrate instead?
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Session 2: Media messages
Students learn to become savvy, critical media consumers (and producers) by investigating body image and the media and how images of people in professional media (e.g. advertising) and social media (e.g. Instagram) are manipulated and often drastically altered to reflect appearance ideals.
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Session 3: Confront comparisons
Students see how focusing on appearance often leads to unhelpful comparisons. Instead of judging other people's physical features to be 'better' than their own, what more positive ways of making comparisons could they adopt?
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Session 4: Banish body-talk
Examining the problems body talk can cause, including how it can damage self-esteem, students develop techniques to redirect or reframe such conversations for a more positive impact on body confidence.
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Session 5: Be the change
The final workshop brings together everything students have explored and learned so far with the chance to review and reflect. Students will prepare to lead by example as they take the body confident message out into their school life.
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Steven Universe: Media and celebritiesEpisode 3 talks about how media and celebrity culture can affect self-esteem.