What works for Wellbeing???? Part One

Today I was lucky enough to attend the Nga Manu Awhina RTLB Cluster Conference on 'What Works for Wellbeing'.


Lots of interesting speakers that highlighted the importance of Wellbeing for our Tamariki, Whanau and our staff too...

Here are a few takeouts from the day - with the resonating themes being resilience, flourishing, gratitude and of course wellbeing.

Dr Lea Waters from University of Melbourne opened the day sharing her research findings around Positive Psychology and the importance of Wellbeing in our Curriculum.

She made the point that all learning is emotional - 'if you don't have emotional engagement you can’t have cognitive engagement'. This resonates hugely and supports what we know about our tamariki that you have to invest in them emotionally to get the best out of them. Relationships are huge with our kids.

She highlighted that 'Wellbeing is an important end-point of its own - schools have a moral responsibility to take care of and develop our students wellbeing'. My initial reaction is that we are doing this fairly well but would like to do a stocktake of this for both staff and kids.

Dr Waters went on to introduce the 'Positive Detective' a Positive Education and Wellbeing Program. This definitely looks like it's worth investigating further.

Dr Te Kani Kingi Director of Maori at Massey University, then presented his research around the Six Markers of a Flourishing Whanau  a Maori Perspective on the key elements that are essential for a whanau to flourish as opposed to languish.
Whanau Heritage, Whanau Wealth, Whanau Capacities, Whanau Cohesion, Whanau Connectedness, Whanau Resilience.
Food for thought around the aspects of this that we can potentially impact upon and the value that we can add in terms of these areas.

Making meaning in Maths ...

This term I am lucky enough to be back in the classroom working with some seniors in Maths.

My Inquiry is around them having greater agency in their learning and connecting them with the learning progressions to ensure that they clearly know and understand both where they are at and what their next steps are in their learning.

I am also wanting to make very explicit the links between  language and Maths the various names for operations and and various common prefixes that occur frequently in maths and can hopefully help them to better understand concept such as place value.

Currently face to face time seems to be one of the biggest challenges but surely I must be able to use the affordances of the technology to enhance these learning opportunities.