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.