How to get whole school wellness strategies without the planning?
How to get whole school wellness strategies without the planning
Implementing whole-school wellbeing takes time, dedication, and a clear vision for what you want to achieve. The best performing schools typically take time to plan, implement and measure the effectiveness of their wellbeing framework. Partnering with an expert like The Mushkins can make this process simple and easy.
Start with defining what wellbeing means for your school by discussing with staff, parents, board, students and all stakeholders. Outline why, what and how of your wellbeing change.
Next, identify what wellbeing work is being done now. Identify your school strengths, values, vision for the future, priorities for action, and wellbeing outcomes desired.
Spend time on the why and ask staff, parents, the students, and the community. Establishing the ‘why’ is really vital – we know from psychology that understanding and being personally committed to the ‘why’ increases the likelihood of change being both successful and sustained. Focus on making the case for whole-school wellbeing.
Invest in staff training on the principles and practices of wellbeing education. Failure to educate staff about wellbeing can result in a lack of knowledge and a reluctance to teach wellbeing. Establish wellbeing literacy and a shared language of wellbeing among staff, students and parents/caregivers.
Finally, choose a wellbeing strategy that fits your educational setting. Most wellbeing models include elements of physical, emotion/mental, social/relational and spiritual wellbeing. Using a clearly defined wellbeing model helps develop a shared language of wellbeing within the school, assists in communication with parents, students and the wider school community, provides a framework against which you can track progress, and provides guidelines for prioritising and decision-making to assess activities that fit within the model.
For a lot of schools, wellbeing measurement has not been a priority. Schools are focusing on the work they want to do rather than on the measurement. It’s always useful in schools to ask, ‘What does success look like?’ and ‘How else might wellbeing change be tracked?’ The language and vocabulary of young people around their use of strengths is another indicator of wellbeing change in a school. Partnering with a wellbeing partner like The Mushkins will ensure that wellbeing programs are evaluated and impact is measured with regular reporting and feedback summaries.
