Wellbeing program
About Wellbeing:
is a holistic term that encompasses all aspects of a student’s life, including their physical, social, mental and emotional state. Wellbeing means they have the capacity, skills and resources to cope with various positive and negative emotions in a way that is positive and constructive for their development. Educators now understand that wellbeing is a fundamental component of the school experience and is just as important as academic learning.
Audience
The program is designed to target all school stakeholders, nevertheless, as stakeholders are of different ages needs requirements they are categorized as bellow:
- Students
To be divided to 3 age groups:
- Foundation (KG- 6 grade)
- Middle school
- High school
- Caregivers
Both categories can be grouped together as a same age and interest group.
- Teachers & school staff
- Parents
The audience is categorized in age groups to better provide tailored program to their needs. However, addressing some areas of development, some activities include all age groups together. This provides a unique chance to unprecedent experience for both the student and the caregiver, which allows to better identify and comprehend the emotions on both sides of the relations which in turn enriches it.
Program goals:
Wellbeing, as previously explained is a wide term that encompasses several areas in a person’s life: physical, emotional, mental, social and societal. In our program proposed to your school, we address the above aspects by working on the development in three areas; resilience, social and emotional learning and growth, as explained below:
- Resilience
Resilience targets the person’s ability to cope with life’s different experiences. Resilience is both an individual and a community capacity. Therefore, in some of the activities, audience are grouped across different ages.
Skills & Personal traits
- Gratitude
- Feeling connected
- Forgiveness
- Self-compassion
- Self-recognition
- Identifying and recognizing support group
- Mindfulness
Outcomes
Developing resilience skills nurture a health supportive community which leads
to the following outcomes:
- Enhancing individual and community capacity to cope with adversity
- Empowering students to take care of their own mental health and wellbeing
- Giving students the confidence to cope with adversity
- Nurturing a supportive and emotionally responsive environment
- Helping students to thrive into the future
- Developing the ability to understand social cues
- Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)
Today, social and emotional learning (SEL) is recognized as a key component of every student’s education. It, generally, addresses students’ self-awareness, self-recognition, self-management, social awareness and relationship building. SEL skills include noticing and interpreting their own emotions and having empathy for the emotions of others, managing difficult emotions when they arise, so they can make responsible decisions, solve problems and interact respectfully with others.
Skills & Personal traits
Self-awareness Skills:
- Identifying and analyzing one’s emotions, and how they affect others
- Understanding the relationship between one’s emotions, thoughts, values, and
- behaviors
- Integrating personal and social identities
- Identifying personal, cultural, and linguistic assets
- Demonstrating honesty and integrity
- Examining prejudices and biases
- Experiencing self-efficacy
Self-management Skills
- Regulating and expressing one’s emotions thoughtfully
- Demonstrating perseverance and resilience to overcome obstacles
- Sustaining healthy boundaries
- Identifying and using stress management strategies
- Setting personal and collective goals
- Using planning and organizational skills
- Showing the courage to take initiative
- Demonstrating personal and collective agency
- Maintaining attention
- Using feedback constructively
- Practicing self-compassion
- Social-awareness
- Identifying social cues (verbal, physical) to determine how others feel
- Taking others’ perspectives
- Demonstrating empathy and compassion
- Showing concern for the feelings of others
- Understanding and expressing gratitude
- Recognizing strengths in others
- Identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones
- Recognizing situational demands and opportunities
- Caring about and being motivated to contribute to the well-being of one’s
- family, friends, school, community, the environment, and the greater good
Relationship Skills
- Initiating contact with others and cultivating friendship
- Sharing one’s thoughts and feelings (appropriately)
- Communicating effectively
- Developing positive relationships
- Demonstrating cultural humility
- Practicing teamwork and collaborative problem-solving
- Resolving conflicts constructively
- Approaching relationships with positive presuppositions
- Resisting negative social pressure
- Resisting stereotypes
- Standing up for the rights of others
- Showing leadership in groups
- Seeking or offering support and help when needed
Outcomes
Developing SEL skills helps students in dealing mainly with their emotions as
well as others’ emotions, which eventually leads to:
- Developing students’ ability to make friends
- Enhancing their ability to create positive relations
- Enabling them to get along with peers
- Helping them stay focused on their work
- Making them feel more engaged and connected with their learning
- Resolving conflicts with peers
- Promoting and carry out prosocial (kind, helpful) actions and behaviors
- Growth Mental Status
To have a growth mindset is to believe that a particular personal quality, ability or attribute is malleable, and it can change and develop through effort and practice.
Skills & Personal Traits:
- Purpose
- Belief
- Recognizing and developing Desires
- Setting goals
- Shifting perspectives about challenges
- Decision making
- Focus
- Persistence
- Imagination
- Planning
Outcomes
- Developing the ability to control impulses
- Keeping track of changing information over short periods of time
- Sustaining attention and ignoring distractions
- Switching attention between tasks when needed
- Ability of better decision making
- Enhancing the imagination faculty
- Identifying strength
- Setting a goal
- Identifying purpose
Approach
As the program addresses various skills and personal traits to achieve development in 3 areas; resilience, social and emotional learning and growth mental status, a matrix of various techniques is to be used. The techniques are carefully selected to better meet the development of the required skills and traits as well as to maintain quality of results and delivery. Techniques are based on world recognized studies and resources for example as in Harvard University’s Ecological Approaches to Social Emotional Learning (EASEL) Laboratory research.
Tools & Techniques
- Meditation
- Mindfulness exercises
- Breathing exercises
- Visualization
- Games
- Story-telling
- Role playing
- Presentation
- Public speaking
- Drawing
- Writing
- Journaling
- Physical activities like walking
- Discussions
Implementation
In considering wellbeing it is important to note, that the overall objective is to make an effective positive shift in the attendee’s personality for a life time. Thus, developing wellbeing skills and attributes needs to create a change in the lifestyle. Therefore, we highly recommend that the program runs for a long period of time along with school days.
Delivery & Time-Frame
Impact training center will provide training at school, either during or after school hours as to be decided later. The program will divide audience according to the above-mentioned categorization in for groups. Each group will be addressed once a week and all together will be addressed in a collective group once a week too, over a period of six months.
Assessment & Reports
For a learning to maintain highest level of effectiveness, learning and development needs to be acknowledged by the learner. Thus, our program implements pre-assessment to skills in all 3 areas addressed and points out a development plan accordingly then implements a post-assessment to measure the positive skill.
A collective group progress report is created to highlight the development achieved and the objective met. The progress report is created towards the end of the program for each group and one for all groups together.