Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to: examine the theoretical perspectives of child development; explain the influences of genes and the environmental factors in development; compare different birthing procedures and the describe the choices that are available to parents; analyze the developmental norms of an infant and child and how to interpret them; summarize how attachment affects an individual’s social competence; investigate the ways that preschool children are educated; describe the ways children grow during the school years and the factors that influence their growth; list the types of relationships and friendships that are typical of middle childhood; and analyze the factors that affect adolescent school performance during school transition times.

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: distinguish how stress affects people physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, and socially; judge the capacity for handling the demands that are part of today's world; practice how to prevent stress; discover how to reduce or cope successfully with unavoidable stress; appraise several different measures to assess personal stress; deduce that the body is designed to respond to acute stress predictably for one outcome-survival; evaluate the skills of “managing self-talk”, “stopping negative thoughts”, and “going with the flow” as mental tools to help prevent the activation of the stress response; assess values clarification to facilitate self-understanding; discover how to spend and save money to bring a lifetime of financial freedom; examine personal spiritual health; incorporate the behaviors of proper exercise, eating right, adequate sleep, and avoiding unhealthy behaviors to form a foundation of stress management; probe complementary and alternative therapies to expand roles in stress management and health promotion; formulate a plan that addresses a specific personality and the situations that determine the most effective tools to deal with stress.

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to: describe how the history of psychology is studied, its philosophical influences, its physiological influences, and the contributions of its founders; explain the theoretical tenets and empirical methods of structuralism, functionalism and applied psychology; investigate the theory and methods used in Behaviorism and Gestalt Psychology; discuss the contributions of psychoanalytic and humanistic theory and method and the contemporary developments in psychology; and evaluate the relative merits of psychology's major schools of thought and key studies in the history of psychology.

Upon completion of this course, students will be able to: discover coaching and the coaching process; analyze listening skills to encourage thinking; examine how questions, paraphrasing and summarizing can provide clarity to the coachee; investigate the conversational framework of the coaching process; practice tools and techniques that are the foundation of the coaching conversation; analyze how body language is used in the coaching conversation; compare different activities related to talking, drawing and playing to increase the effectiveness of the coaching session; determine the elements of the concept a “coaching way of being;” and construct a coaching contract and ethical statement.