HLTH 5091 Module 5 Completed Capstone and Professional Plan Example

Ready to Answer the Principal's Question: The Completed Capstone and a Five-Year Professional Plan for a County Health Educator

Student Name

American College of Education

HLTH5091: Capstone Experience for Health Education

Module 5 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 5, 2026

Introduction

This capstone began with a question a middle school principal asked me years ago: had my nutrition lessons changed anything in her building? I had no answer, and I did not know how to find one. Over four modules I have set professional goals, aligned seven artifacts with the program's outcomes, reflected in depth on three of them and examined five dispositions. This final paper completes the capstone. It summarizes what the artifacts show, records the revisions I made for the final submission, draws the growth together and sets a five-year professional plan. My test for the plan is simple: at the end of it, I should be able to answer the principal's question for every program I run.

What the Capstone Demonstrates

The seven artifacts together show that I can now do each part of the work the profession describes. The multilevel sleep plan shows design grounded in theory; the tanning analysis shows how culture and norms shape behavior; the walking school bus design shows program design principles applied with judgment; the tai chi analysis shows data used to set priorities; the prediabetes outreach strategy shows communication coordinated across a school and community; the relational leadership paper shows collaboration without authority; and the CPR unit shows strategies that build health literacy. Mapped to the eight Areas of Responsibility (Knowlden et al., 2020), the set speaks directly to six areas, from assessing needs and planning through leading and managing, with advocacy and ethics present within several artifacts rather than as a focus of any one.

Revisions Made for the Final Submission

Three artifacts were revised for the final capstone, and the revisions are part of the evidence. The tanning analysis now includes mothers and boyfriends among the normative beliefs and a stronger limits section, following my instructor's comment on my first draft. The tai chi analysis now presents the outcome findings as encouraging rather than conclusive and explains how the comparison center differed. The walking school bus design now explains, beside each target, how it was calibrated against the trials and discounted for a volunteer-run first year. I also revised the outreach strategy to add a simple measure of whether families acted on messages, not only whether they received them, addressing the weakness I noted in Module 2. Each revision is marked in the portfolio with a short note on what changed and why. I kept the original versions as well, so a reader can compare the two and judge the change for themselves. The revisions were modest in length but not in meaning: in each case the change made a claim more accurate, a target more defensible or a measure more useful to the people who would act on it.

Growth in Skills and Dispositions

The pattern across the capstone is consistent. My skills grew from delivering lessons to planning, analyzing and evaluating programs. My dispositions grew from reaching for materials to reaching for evidence, from treating schools as venues to treating them as partners and from thinking of ethics as confidentiality to asking whom a program or a claim might hurt. The Module 3 reflection found one recurring weakness, early overconfidence, and one recurring remedy, feedback. The most important thing I will take from this program is not a model or a method but the habit of asking someone to question my plan before it is final. The dispositions module named cultural humility as the habit needing the most continued work.

Professional Plan: Year One

In the first year after graduation, I will sit for the Certified Health Education Specialist examination, scheduling it for the spring window and preparing through a study group of three colleagues that meets every other week from January. I will finish an introductory statistics course aimed at program evaluators by June, addressing the gap in quantitative skills that Modules 2 and 3 identified. At work, I will lead the evaluation of one existing program, the middle school nutrition series, using a logic model, a small set of process and outcome indicators and a pre-post comparison, and I will report the results to the school with a limitations paragraph. I will also become active in the evaluation section of our state's professional association for health educators and go to its yearly conference. Success in year one means passing the examination, completing the course and delivering one evaluation report that the school finds useful.

Professional Plan: Years Two and Three

In years two and three, my goal is to move from delivering programs to coordinating the county's school health work with five districts. To prepare, I will ask my supervisor to let me take over the needs assessment and program selection steps for two districts in year two, building a record of planning and partnership that a coordinator application will need. Every program I run in these years will begin with an evaluation plan the school has approved before the first session. The RE-AIM dimensions, reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation and maintenance, give me a practical checklist for these plans, since they push evaluation beyond whether a program worked to whether it reached the right people and lasted (Glasgow et al., 1999). By the end of year three, I aim to hold the coordinator role or a comparable position and to have presented at least one program evaluation at the state conference.

Professional Plan: Years Four and Five

In years four and five, my focus shifts to strengthening the county's capacity rather than my own. I will build a simple library of evidence-based programs that fit our schools, with notes on how each was adapted and evaluated locally, following the principle that evidence-based practice includes disseminating what is learned (Brownson et al., 2009). I will mentor one newer health educator through their first program evaluation. I will also explore the advanced credential for experienced health education specialists once I meet its experience requirement. To keep the CHES credential, I will complete the continuing education hours it requires over each five-year cycle, choosing courses in evaluation and community engagement.

Keeping the Plan Honest

My Module 4 reflection admitted a history of abandoning professional development plans when work gets busy. This plan addresses that in three ways. Every commitment has a date and a person who will know whether I met it: my study group, my supervisor or colleagues in the association. I will review the plan with my supervisor every quarter and revise it in writing when circumstances change, rather than letting it lapse. And I will keep a short log of each program I evaluate, recording what I claimed and what the evidence supported, so that I can see whether the habit of restraint I learned in this program holds under the pressure of real schools and real deadlines.

Continuing Attention to Cultural Humility

Since cultural humility remains my least developed habit, the plan includes two standing practices. At each planning meeting I will ask the group to name what we are taking for granted about the families a program is meant for, and how we could find out whether it is true. No new program will launch until a resident from the group it serves has read it and been paid, from the program budget, for that review. These practices are small, but they build the self-examination and partnership that the disposition requires into routine work rather than leaving them to good intentions.

Conclusion

The capstone documents a change from a health educator who could deliver a lesson to one who can plan, justify and evaluate a program, and who has habits of seeking evidence, working with partners and inviting feedback. The five-year plan turns that change into dated commitments: certification, stronger evaluation skills, a coordinator role and a county program library. If the plan works, the next principal who asks whether a program changed anything in her building will get an answer, with its limits stated plainly.

References

Brownson, R. C., Fielding, J. E., & Maylahn, C. M. (2009). Evidence-based public health: A fundamental concept for public health practice. Annual Review of Public Health, 30, 175-201. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.publhealth.031308.100134

Glasgow, R. E., Vogt, T. M., & Boles, S. M. (1999). Evaluating the public health impact of health promotion interventions: The RE-AIM framework. American Journal of Public Health, 89(9), 1322-1327. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.89.9.1322

Knowlden, A. P., Cottrell, R. R., Henderson, J., Allison, K., Auld, M. E., Kusorgbor-Narh, C. S., Lysoby, L., & McKenzie, J. F. (2020). Health Education Specialist Practice Analysis II 2020: Processes and outcomes. Health Education & Behavior, 47(4), 642-651. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198120926923