Every Art Opening Minds Class you see on the platform went through a loving and deliberate process to get there. Want to know what that process looks like? We thought so! Here ya go… the entire inside scoop.
Every class begins with a reason. A lot of the times it’s a topic that keeps coming up in conversations with our partners — anxiety, identity, grief — and we realize we need a class to support some specific aspect of that topic. Sometimes someone on the team has an idea that's worth following up. And each year once our new batch of ten films premiere, we add classes to incorporate those films .
The first step is a conversation about what we want participants to walk away with. How the class should flow. What kinds of prompts will open the right conversations without pushing too hard. What guardrails need to be in place.
This part is a lengthy conversation and it takes as long as it takes. This is where we put together the skeleton of the class: the prompt flow, specific language we want to use and avoid, initial ideas around the types of mental health resources we would want to include for the sake of the instructor and participants alike. We write it down, let it sit, come back to it and re-evaluate.
Some classes come easy and we can map out initial prompts in one single session. Other times it takes several sessions to get where we’re trying to go. The trick with this step is that we’re aiming for a flow and prompts where a) no one can get the “wrong” answer; b) no one feels put on the spot in an unfair or unsafe way; and c) everyone comes out with hope on the other end.
Mental health classes are all well and good but if you walk away feeling helpless then it probably didn’t enhance your wellness all that much. Hope can look like, “other people have gotten through this hard thing I’m experiencing” all the way to “I am going to try this specific new strategy to support myself and I can’t wait!” and many variations in between.
Once the skeleton has all its parts, we map the class to the frameworks we use to help you select the right class for your use case: AOM Nutrients, Wellness Wheel dimensions, CASEL social-emotional learning competencies, and monthly awareness themes. Then we develop learning objectives that align with those frameworks that connect directly with the types of conversations we expect the prompts to elicit. This is critical for the next phase, clinical review, because our mental health advisors need to be able to evaluate if a class is having the impact we’re looking for, or doing something else altogether.
Every class goes through three rounds of review by mental health professionals. These clinical advisors specialize in the topics we're covering, are passionate about mental health and young people, and volunteer their time to ensure that our classes are doing what they’re meant to do.
Advisors can approve a class as-is, approve it with notes, or flag it for substantial edits. When that happens, we go back to the drawing board. We re-meet as a team, rethink the approach, and rebuild until we're confident that the class does justice to the topic and includes the right mental health guardrails, resources, and support language.
We don't rush this step. We’ve had classes sit in the review process for months as we figured out the right way to approach the topic and prompts. It’s like a fine wine, though. Waiting for the maturity to happen naturally means that several people have sat with what could come up for folks with this topic and how best to support people in those moments.
You should also know that we just completely cancel some ideas at this step. If the team thought something would work but our mental health advisors tell us it’s too risky for a public discussion we are happy move on. There are so many important ways to use film to spark conversation that there’s no need to take unnecessary risks on the emotional wellbeing of future participants.
With the content locked, we build the full facilitation script — every prompt, every transition, as well as suggested response to sensitive moments. The script is designed so that you don't need a background in mental health to lead the conversation well. It’s also sometimes useful just to see how another person would talk through these prompts, even if you end up using different language in the moment.
The presentation is built to match: slides, film integration, timing cues, and support materials all come together into the final Class package.
Before a Class goes live, a different team member, someone who wasn't involved in building it, reviews everything: content, tone, grammar, accuracy, and completeness. This part is also not a formality. It's a genuine second opinion and - again - (you see the theme here, right?) if our team member flags something that they think means this class might not accomplish our goals or might accidentally bring up a whole other topic, we move the class back to the prompts review stage and it goes through again.
Once everything checks out, a class is published to our online platform. Also, even then, it doesn’t just stay there forever and ever amen. We continue to pay attention to feedback from participant and instructor evaluation data. We also periodically review the library as a whole to think about whether existing classes need updating, revising, replacing, etc.
The whole process, from idea to platform, typically takes a three to six months. Sometimes longer. We're okay with that. The topics we cover deserve that kind of care, and so do you and all the people in your classroom.
