Well-Being

Find Your Balance

You know your destination and have your GPS navigation route determined. Your vehicle has the brakes and steering in alignment and has a full tank of gas. With you in the vehicle are the passengers who matter to you. Now what? There will be days you hit a pothole that jilts the vehicle and days there's a lot of traffic that makes you feel a little stuck. There are times you'll want to take an exit and just explore, or moments you spend at a rest stop seeing if you need to alter your route or your destination. The key is finding your balance. How fast do you want to drive? How many stops do you want to make? How much conversation do you want with your people?

How does it work?

Engaged & Empowered

As we intentionally ensure our tasks and our people are in alignment with our priorities and values, our days will feel more meaningful. Engagement leads to empowerment and agency. We can now perceive and believe that aspirations can become reality.

Experiences with a Buddy

Human capacity for close relationships has a lower threshold than mainstream media makes us believe, and those people closest to us can fluctuate depending on the reason or season of what is happening in our lives. Some will remain with us for a lifetime. All humans biologically need people, but the number of relationships isn't important as long as we have one or two who really mean something to us, alongside us.

Healthy Co-Regulation

Resilience and hope are two components of well-being. Road blocks will frustrate us, and accidents we pass will stop us in our tracks. Well-being is not ignoring our emotions- being able to label our emotions is one form of well-being. Pause, feel, and then stand up. And when you can't do it alone, have the person next to you who will sit with you and then support you to stand. Biologically, we feed off the energy and emotions of those around us. It's why negativity is contagious. But hope and innovation are contagious too. It is just a matter of which lane you want to drive in.

"Recruit yourself to your goals" -Charlotte Burgess-Auburn

What does it look like?

Students

Students promoting their accomplishments on social media channels because the classes are scheduled based on their interests and desired post-secondary goals.
Students experience balance between all aspects of their lives, including academics and extracurriculars.

Families

Families speak highly of the school in community conversations, both in-person and on social media.
Families contact the school with concerns, prior to reaching out to division-level leadership or venting on social media.

Staff

Teachers highlighting instructional practices occurring in classrooms.
Teachers collaborating, co-teaching, and co-planning with other teachers through cross pollination of content and departments.

Schools

Schools have innovative instructional practices, leading creative and new ideas to open opportunities and experiences for students, teachers, and families.

What are the potential benefits?

Students

Increase in postsecondary plans & managable steps to achieve them
Increase in resiliency, hope, & coping skills
Increase in time management skills, lower levels of stress with everyday tasks

Families

High levels of stakeholders satisfaction of surveys
Feelings of partnership and collaboration with the school

Staff

Strong work relationships, decrease in burnout, increase in resilience
Increased participation in school-wide faculty events, club sponsorships, & after school supports for students

Schools

High levels of stakeholders satisfaction of surveys
Feelings of positive school climate and culture

Hacks

Use Meistertask to balance your tasks & to-dos
Meistertask allows visual prioritization of tasks and to-dos, placed into categories. Try timebound categories, like emergency, this week, and next week, or try columns aligned to your dashboard to ensure balanced alignment.

Digital check-in with a colleague or student
Using a digital platform, like Microsoft Teams, check-in with colleagues or students, individually or in small group, to reflect on their dashboard and decisions about processes or tasks that are currently on their plate.

Schedule time to dream (with a buddy)
With all the items on our to-do list, finding time to dream can get thrown to the wayside. Schedule it into your week by placing it on your calendar and following through.
Pro-tip: Schedule it with a buddy- partly for accountability, but mainly because two creative brains are better than one.

Highlight instructional practices among staff
Teachers highlight instructional practices through a digital platform, like Padlet, or on a workroom bulletin board to share meaningful recognition and promote cross-pollination of courses and subject areas.

Express gratitude
In a group, ask the participants to reflect on a specific moment or person they want to shout out. Encourage specificity and remind people that this is a moment to recognize those whose efforts/work may often be overlooked.

Encourage & model a growth mindset
Verbally and written on walls, have a flexible mindset toward growth that does not tie outcome attributes to individual people

Templates & Links

Meistertask

Examples

Classroom

HPE 10

Collaborative lessons in health classes to discuss impacts of social media personas on a person's physical, emotional, and mental health, and students will demonstrate self-awareness and self-advocacy by defining a personal value system answering who they are in their community and society and experiential goals for themselves to try out.

Examples

Stress Management
Healthy Relationships

Student-led SEL Conversations

Students listen to and confide in each other, before adults. To make systemic changes that benefit students, we can capitalize on this knowledge. Adapting the free Active Minds Peer Powered Mental Health Curriculum is one way to start the conversation of normalizing mental health concerns. Using an approach of asking students to share information, engage students in an activity, and then end with deeper reflection, teachers and counselors can model the approach with one topic, and then ask students to facilitate additional topics with each other. Students can then take their lesson to other classes or events within the school and division.

Examples

SEL Mental Health Example Lesson

Use Wall Space for SEL

Use classroom wall decorations or hallway signage to share potential self-talk to students. Examples can include phrases of growth mindset that are tied to that content curriculum or school mascot/traditions as well as prompts for when a student is stuck or reminders when engaging in debates or socratic seminars.