Positive Futures News

What is the EDSC Positive Futures program?

Positive Education brings together the science of positive psychology with best-practice teaching.

The school’s journey with Positive Education began in 2012 with Positive Education focuses and values implemented across each year level and over time has evolved into the whole school approach launched in 2020.

Our Positive Futures program has some very clear goals:

We want to improve student quality of life and their engagement with others, including with their teachers.
We seek to develop students in a more holistic way, with a stronger focus on wellbeing.

There are six tenets of Positive Psychology that are embedded into our model:

Positive Health – Positive Self

Developing knowledge, understanding and skills to promote health and well – being.

Positive Relationships

Nurturing positive relationships based on respect.

Accomplishment

Generating hope and optimism through the accomplishment of personal and community goals.

Positive Emotion

Building and experiencing positive emotion.

Meaning

Believing in serving something greater than ourselves.

Positive Engagement

Developing critical thinkers by promoting challenge, curiosity and creativity.

All students and staff in the College engage in a 48 minute session every Tuesday with a tenet of Positive Psychology explored in conjunction with other activities such as mindfulness, gratitude etc. to support student wellbeing, engagement and connectedness. We also have members of Manningham youth services that will be visiting and working with all Positive Futures groups throughout the year.

We have had two sessions so far this year – Our first was a getting to know you again lesson welcoming our 2021 Year 7 students and any new students to the College, and House Meetings in preparation for our House Swimming Sports that took place in Week 2.

Our Week 3 session focussed on the importance of being organised and how this can influence our mental health and wellbeing.

Over the next few weeks our sessions are centred on Accomplishment - Goal Setting and exploring our character strengths.

Each newsletter we will be sharing videos, books, articles or activities for members of our school community that may want to learn more about Positive Psychology.

Mindfulness

There are many apps available for those who would like to explore Mindfulness. A couple of the more popular ones are Smiling Mind and Calm:

Here are some other links to some mindfulness activities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inpok4MKVLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbnygiPBNSE&feature=youtu.be

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZrPyvK2irg&feature=youtu.be

More resources can be found on our Wellbeing, Engagement and Positive Futures page of the East Doncaster Secondary College website

https://www.eastdonsc.vic.edu.au/wellbeing-engagement-positive-futures

Rebecca James

Student Engagement and Connection Learning Specialist