Wellbeing

Building Resilience in a School

Resilience refers to the ability to successfully adapt to stressors, maintaining psychological wellbeing in the face of adversity. It’s the ability to bounce back from difficult experiences. Schools have the capacity to promote the resilience of children and young people.

Within our school we strive to use Positive Education Practises. These are a set of 5 ‘foundations of wellbeing’, developed by Noble & McGrath (2008). They are:

Building social & emotional competencies of our students
Promoting and fostering positive emotions
Encouraging and facilitating positive relationships
Engaging students through strength-based learning
Promoting and providing meaning and purpose to all students

These 5 pillars, provide key ideas for wellbeing promotion and learning in schools, as they shift the thinking from a reactive model of wellbeing, to a proactive model.

There are many strategies that schools can use to enhance resilience. These include whole-school approaches to creating and maintain a safe and supportive learning environment.

There are many features of a whole-school approach to supporting student and community wellbeing. Some of these include:

Use of an explicit Social and Emotional Learning Curriculum
Promotion of positive teacher-student relationships
Promotion of positive peer relationships
Promotion of positive parent-school engagement
Promotion of school-agency relationships

At Vermont we are working towards achieving all of these features. We are doing this on a whole school, class and individual level. Our work with Friendology and the Respectful Relationships program explicitly teaches lessons around social skills, communication, emotional literacy, fairness & equality and many others topics related to student and community wellbeing. We run small group interventions where students may be seeking additional support in areas of academics as well as wellbeing and mental health. These sessions can be tailored to the individual needs of the group members.

We also offer an individualised wellbeing program that is tailored to students who require additional support in a specific area, as well as our chaplaincy program. The individualised wellbeing program offers support in a wide range of areas including separation anxiety, communication with peers, navigating big emotions, working through tricky friendships and exploring the social norms of behaviour and conversation. Through our wellbeing program, we can also assist students and families to find additional allied health services that may be required.

As families at home, there are many things that you can do to support the work that we do at school and foster a positive mental health climate. Parental involvement in learning is a key way to foster student achievement and support positive wellbeing. Goodall (2013) highlights that it is not who the parents are but what they do that matters.

Some parental engagement supports that are outlined in Goodall’s research are:

A structured parenting style – this refers to a level of routine and structure appropriate to the child’s level of development.
Learning in the home – this could be reading aloud, conversation, explorative and independent play, etc.
Beginning engagement with learning early – showing an interest in your child’s learning promotes a positive mind set around education.
Staying engaged throughout school – engagement in times of transition such as starting primary and secondary school, has been identified as especially important.
Holding and passing on high expectations – valuing and encouraging education helps children develop persistence and encourages continuation in education.
Active interest in learning and education – a strong home-school relationship is a great way to model to children that both the school and the family are invested and genuinely care about both their academic development as well as their mental health and wellbeing.

If you would like to read more from the Resilience in Schools article, developed by the Education Department, I am happy to provide it via email.

As always, please feel free to reach out for more information about anything related to Friendology, student wellbeing or individual concerns you may have. I am contactable via compass, through the office or via email – louise.jarvis@education.vic.gov.au

Have a lovely weekend,

Louise Jarvis

Wellbeing Specialist Teacher

References:

Goodall, J. (2013). Parental engagement to support children’s learning: a six point model. School Leadership & Management, 33(2), 133-150.

Nobel, T., & McGrath, H. (2008). The positive education practices framework: A tool for facilitating the work of education psychologists in promoting pupil wellbeing. Education and child psychology, 25(2), 119-134.