CREATE Insight – May 2019
May 14, 2019
WELLBEING AND SCHOOL – THE POWER OF POSITIVE ENVIRONMENTS
Did you know?
School support programs can promote student wellbeing and have long-term benefits
What is wellbeing?
We often use the term wellbeing to describe the quality of our lives. Our sense of wellbeing can change in response to our experiences, environment, and the people around us. Children’s wellbeing is linked to the opportunities they have to develop social and emotional skills that can help them to manage their behaviours and feelings and to get along with others. Wellbeing is also enhanced when children have the chance to be engaged in positive learning environments and activities that contribute to their sense of purpose, optimism, confidence, competence, and compassion.
Check out this interesting video on the topic! https://www.realwell.org.au/
Schools that support wellbeing
It’s clear that the work schools do to build wellbeing is immensely valuable. It’s hard to learn if you feel stressed, or anxious, or like you don’t belong. A great example of the way one school in the Logan Communities for Children area is working to build a strong and supportive school climate was featured in the CREATE newsletter for March.
Kingston State School have embraced collaboration and are working with their community to provide a wide array of student support programs. These include daily breakfast, before school reading, Adopt-a-Cop, Indigenous garden, playgroups, parenting and lifestyle workshops, school camps, and more.
Use the Comments section below to share the good news about what schools in your area are doing to promote student wellbeing.
School climate and academic support link to children’s brain structure
Providing a positive school climate and student support can enhance mental, physical and academic wellbeing. But incredibly, it may also help shape children’s developing brain structure. Imagine that!
New research, reported in the journal of Developmental Science by Piccolo and colleagues, used MRI scans and other tests to show that school climate and academic support was positively associated with cortical thickness and higher performance on tasks that rely on executive function.
This is significant. It means that school support can have a profound and lasting effect by reinforcing the neurological underpinnings of cognitive functions like working memory, mental flexibility, and impulse control.
These executive skills are important to learning and almost everything we do. They help us stay on task, prioritise and juggle the multiple demands of daily life; they help us get organised, stay motivated and plan ahead; they help us keep our emotions on an even keel; they help us learn from our experiences, think before we act and make considered decisions; they help us cope with change without melting down, and much more. In all these ways, they go hand in hand with wellbeing.
Thanks again to all the schools who work so hard to cultivate a climate that nurtures children’s academic, social, and emotional wellbeing.
Category: Child Wellbeing, CREATE Insight, Executive Function
Posted by Creating Pathways Support