CEOM Student Wellbeing Conference Plenary
Helen Thomas (Team Leader, CEOM Student Wellbeing)
The conference organisers called this plenary session 'Student Wellbeing and the challenge ahead for educators: managing change in a complex organisation". In delivering this plenary I have spent the last day visiting the workshops and reflecting on the keynote address by Dr Toni Noble at the conference dinner last night. The title of Toni Noble's address was Hooray, It's Monday. Toni talked about the tipping point and posed the question of what is it that creates the momentum, the trigger for us as educators to identify student wellbeing as central to schooling and to learning.
Over the course of the day I visited a range of workshops beginning this morning with Developing Environments in Which Students Thrive. What came out of this workshop was that essentially environments do matter and multiple meanings of environment we defined; the type, the way we create the environment, the culture we create and the ambience of the school. Environment was referred to as a holistic experience which includes the emotional, cognitive, social and spiritual. It was stated that the evidence is mounting that positive environments are those that meet basic human needs as defined by power, freedom, fun, survival, love and belonging. A human needs framework was described which consisted of 3 key areas; personalised learning, participation and primacy of people and relationships. One school describes a process of structural change while another school described relationships, wellbeing and learning as an emphasis in a Year 8 literature class through teaching a particular novel.
The second workshop I visited was Keeping Kids Keen - Planning for Improved Student Engagement. The context for school change was described as including policies, programs and structures. We are trying to change as educators and we are trying to create better practices and cultures. Our challenge as educators remains this; making sense of this complexity and finding ways to build a culture and practise that promote wellbeing.
Dr Tim Moore from the Centre for Community Child Health challenged us as teachers to be true to students and to have emotional integrity in the context that we learn by watching other people. Students read us and receive messages from us and all of this reinforces the notion that emotional processing is important and that relationships are central to a students' capacity to be receptive to learning.
The workshops focused on partnerships; diverse cross-sectoral partnerships, partnerships with parents and school-community partnerships. Diverse cross-sectoral partnerships were contextualised as reflecting a diverse range of issues that face young people. That reasons for developing partnerships across a broad range of sectors is located with this idea. Young people have lots of things going on at once; they are technologically savvy, they need to define and constantly reinvent themselves and require flexibility which is very important to them. School-community partnerships and their contribution to student wellbeing address the benefits of linking community agencies to schools. Desma Strong from the University of Melbourne quoted evidence-based research from UK and USA which shows that students reported a sense of connectedness to school, self direction and a rise in educational aspiration in a context where school-community partnerships were promoted. Linked to this, the KidsMatter workshop explored resources developed specifically to support parenting education.
Roger Holdsworth in his workshop Youth Empowerment : Authentic Student Participation quotes students who had moved from "we just want to have a say" to "we really want to see some action." He quoted UK researcher Michael Fielding who, in addressing issues around student participation, asks "who speaks about what, who's listening and what are they hearing?" Authentic participation was described as much more than being consulted, for example shared school governance through SRCs and Junior School Councils, student media productions, oral histories and students as researchers in the school and the community. Ultimately the true test of authentic student participation is a three-way test of the value of participation as experienced by the participants themselves, the community and academics.
Michael Fullan in Managing change in a complex organisations (2007) provides us with four key strategies; have a purpose, have increased positive interactions, increase flow of quality information and look for and reinforce promising patterns. Finally we come back to relationships - student to student, teachers to teachers and teachers to student, in particular teachers who care. The environment is defined not just as the physical environment but includes the ambience and the climate created; a safe and supported environment that attends to the emotional, social, cognitive and spiritual dimensions of all who are in it. Engagement is defined as student engagement in learning, family engagement with school and school engagement with the broader community. This leads us to the health promoting school framework and the three spheres of school environments; ethos and culture, curriculum teaching and learning and community partnerships.
In conclusion the conference has traversed wide terrain and a variety of landscapes in an attempt to address the challenges of student wellbeing. The Student Wellbeing unit is here to support and guide you on this journey. The links between student wellbeing and learning outcomes is well acknowledged. Your work in schools to promote these links and implement a strategic approach to student wellbeing is to be celebrated and greatly appreciated as we go on this journey together.
