Visible Wellbeing

Student wellbeing is everyone's responsibility.
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Mazenod College employs a multilayered approach to wellbeing that is designed to improve and sustain both staff and student’s mental fitness. Visible Wellbeing is a whole school approach that encourages all areas of the College to build wellbeing capacity in each classroom and activity utilising the SEARCH framework. Personal and Social Learning is the explicit teaching of wellbeing that is taught during the Pastoral Group time. Personal Development Days and seminars are scheduled at each year level addressing age and stage wellbeing issues and education.

Visible Wellbeing

Personal and Social Learning

Personal Development Activities

What is Visible Wellbeing?

Visible Wellbeing combines the science of wellbeing with the science of learning to achieve the three key goals of:

helping students and staff to see more clearly their own and others’ wellbeing using visible wellbeing practices
helping students and staff systematically build wellbeing using the SEARCH framework
facilitating learning through the visible wellbeing classroom process.

Visible Wellbeing is not a set curriculum, it is a flexible approach which can be applied across any subject matter or area of the College.

Personal and Social Learning

The explicit teaching of wellbeing occurs during the regular Homeroom Pastoral period on Fridays. Year 7 have an additional timetabled weekly period of PSL. To compliment the Visible Wellbeing approach, The Resilience Project student curriculum, teacher resources and digital content are used at Year 7 to 9. Research suggests, the more positive emotion you experience, the more resilient you will be. Gratitude, Empathy and Mindfulness, with Emotional Literacy are the foundational skills taught to practise these strategies. At Year 10 to 12 further topics such as Consent, E-safety, and Respectful Relationships along with other age and stage wellbeing content are taught.

Personal Development Activities

Personal Development days allow the wellbeing team to engage with expert organisations to deliver presentations, workshops, and seminars to address age and stage appropriate wellbeing issues. This flexibility allows programs to adapt each year as the nature and impact of wellbeing trends change overtime. The College engages with outside agencies to address issues such as addiction, cyber safety, respectful relationships, pornography, consent, driver safety to name just a few.

SEARCH Framework

The SEARCH framework is delivered to bring wellbeing to life in practical and accessible ways in all classes and across co-curricula. The VWB techniques help teachers to use the learning process itself as a delivery mechanism to build student wellbeing.

Strengths

Emotional Management

Attention and Awareness

Relationships

Coping

Habits & Goals

Strengths

Strengths can be thought of as personal characteristics — including personality traits, physical and psychological abilities, and moral qualities — that feel natural and enjoyable, and allows them to perform at their best. They are capacities, characteristics, and processes that are energising and authentic to use.

Emotional Management

Our feelings can also impact on how our body functions. They are influenced by our circumstances, thoughts and physiology. Being present with one’s emotions and being able to identify, understand and manage one’s emotions (i.e., reduce their negative emotions and increase their positive emotions), is a key aspect of positive functioning.

Attention and Awareness

Attention is our ability to focus, either on inner aspects of self, such as emotions and physical sensations, or on external stimuli (e.g., the teacher’s lesson in a classroom). Awareness refers to the ability to pay attention to a stimulus as it occurs. Wellbeing is improved when individuals are aware of, and can consciously direct, their attention.

Relationships

A student’s social skills play an important role in allowing him/her to develop nourishing relationships with others. This domain involves helping students to understand, express and manage the social aspects of their learning.

Coping

Having the resilience to cope with adversity is an essential life skill. Coping can be thought of being able to balance the demands of life with the resources we have to manage those demands, and being able to bounce back when we get thrown off balance.

Habits & Goals

Habits are those automatic processes that we do without even thinking about them — they can be both beneficial and detrimental to our wellbeing. Knowing how to break the bad, and create the good habits can help us progress towards our goals. When we set goals it can provide us with a sense of purpose, mastery and direction in life.

One of the overall aims of positive psychology is to allow people’s strengths and capacities to shine through their weaknesses or vulnerabilities (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi 2000).

In the school setting, this can be achieved when the following elements are incorporated:

a safe, stable and secure physical environment
a psychologically safe space
supportive relationships and a tight-knit community
a sense of belonging and identification
positive social norms
opportunities for skill-building, decision-making, and planning
social and cultural integration of the family and the community

Once combined, these elements provide an ideal context for children to thrive in the learning process — and in their social and psychological inner lives (Bernard, 2004).

SchoolTV

Because parenting doesn’t come with instructions, SchoolTV is a wellbeing resource that can support you in the challenges relating to modern-day parenting.

This award-winning resource helps build relationships, foster connections, enable understanding and break down barriers to navigate a pathway towards better mental health and wellbeing for young people. It can assist in starting conversations on topics that are sometimes awkward or difficult to tackle.

Visit SchoolTV Website

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Visible Wellbeing

Visible Wellbeing

What is Visible Wellbeing?

Personal and Social Learning

Personal Development Activities

SEARCH Framework

Strengths

Emotional Management

Attention and Awareness

Relationships

Coping

Habits & Goals

SchoolTV

Enter to Learn. Leave to Serve.