The Science of Wellbeing

Transcript

DR BEN PALMER: We're now live. 

PARTICIPANT: Oh, there's Danielle. 

KATE MORRIS: Good afternoon, everyone, and fantastic to be joining you today.  I'm Kate Morris, joining you from Bastow in our Leading School Wellbeing series.  A great opportunity for you and your teams to work together.  Today we're going to be focusing on the science of wellbeing, and as we wait for people to join, I encourage you to drop into the chat where you're joining us from, which school and who you're joining us with and the roles of the people in the team.  That would be fantastic.  Ben, have you got any quick thoughts before we get going today? 

DR BEN PALMER: I'd just like to welcome everyone and say a big thank you to Matt Kerby and his team from Coburg Primary and David Rogers and his team from Forrest Hill.  It's great to have you with us today to help contextualise this material for everyone and help inspire us with perhaps some more school examples of what to do with material. And I'd like to do a shout-out to anyone from Yallambie Primary or St Helena Secondary College, where I went to school in the great State of Victoria. 

KATE MORRIS: Thanks, Ben, and fantastic to be working with you again.  Your support and the way you motivated us, the way you assisted us and considered how we could best support our staff and school communities across 2020 was just fantastic, so thank you for that. And I'd like to honour the work of Maria Oddo, who's the Manager of Principal Programs at Bastow.  Thanks, Maria, for again working closely with Ben and this time with Jane Hancock, who's our Principal in Residence at Bastow, and cheekily or positively she's got her team with us today: Matt Kerby, who's Acting Principal at Coburg, while Jane is at Bastow.  So fantastic to have you with us too, Jane, helping to assist shape these workshops. 

DR BEN PALMER: I can see a lot of you are responding in the chat box, letting us know where you're from, which is great to see.  Some of you are only punching those messages out to us as panellists.  So whenever we're in the chat box, if you can, select "All Panellists and Attendees" because that way not only me and Jane and Kate and everyone who are panellists on the webinar will be able to see the sorts of things that you're typing.  So whenever you're putting stuff into the chat box, we know that people love learning from the content, but more than anything, people like learning from each other and we really want to lean into that participant-led learning today.  It's fantastic to see people from all over the great State of Victoria joining us here today, Kate, isn't it? 

KATE MORRIS: Fantastic.  Thank you, Ben.  And in order to spend the most time possible today focusing on the science of wellbeing, can I begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the many lands we're meeting on today.  I'm joining you from Bastow and I'd like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation and Aboriginal colleagues with us today and incredibly important that we're joining around an opportunity to essentially become train the trainers in how we can support our staff and young people and communities around wellbeing.  So I'm going to hand over to you now, Ben, and really encourage you to sort of lift us off and take us into new ways of working and new ways of being in our schools or to confirm what we're doing is going pretty well.  Thanks, Ben. 

DR BEN PALMER:  Thanks very much, Kate.  Thank you, everyone who's joined us today.  If you look at the definition of ‘wellbeing’ and what it means to have wellbeing, you'll see that we're said to have good levels of wellbeing when we feel confident and capable in who we are, when we have positive relationships and a sense of social satisfaction, when we have physical vitality, and when we have a sense of accomplishment and personal fulfilment.  When you look at that definition of what it means to have wellbeing, it's easy to see how wellbeing helps facilitate learning and helps students reach their potential.  In this way, wellbeing is very much correlated with education.  We also know that our education helps facilitate student wellbeing.  In this way, the two variables are very intercorrelated, if not co-dependent, on each other. And, Jane, I'd like to bring you in here for comment.  Has this been your experience in teaching and leading schools? 

JANE HANCOCK: Oh, absolutely, Ben.  The children have to be ready to learn emotionally.  You know, sometimes you've got to give them breakfast or make sure they've got their right materials to learn.  It's so important that teachers build positive relationships, say ‘hello’ to them as they're coming in, and just making sure that they're coming to school and they know that they're ready to learn and that they can learn in a safe environment. 

DR BEN PALMER: Awesome.  Thank you.  And thank you for being a part of this important initiative.  All people who are a part of the school community play an important role in helping to facilitate student wellbeing and we can all benefit from proactively engaging in this kind of material.  So thank you for being an important part of this initiative. 

If you look into the science of wellbeing, you'll see that wellbeing is devised as an interconnected set of variables, if you like, that include our mental, physical, social and environmental wellbeing, and this webinar series has been designed indeed around these four areas.  Today we're going to do the foundational webinar on the science of wellbeing.  Then we're going to deep-dive into thinking strategies that can help boost mental wellbeing, physical and environmental strategies that can improve our physical and our environmental wellbeing, and we're going to dive into social strategies that can help with our social wellbeing. 

So we'd really love you to come with us along the full journey.  If you like this session, this is the foundation and there are many sessions - or there are three as a part of our series - and it would be great to have you back with us for some of our other webinars, particularly if you want to go a little bit deeper in each of the areas. 

These sessions are designed to be led by you and, to that end, we've given you a facilitation guide and we've given you a participant workbook and it would be great to have both of these resources and to be taking notes in both as we go through.  Today we're also going to give you some time, around 10 minutes, as a team to think about what you'd like to do with the material.  If this sort of stuff is quite new and you haven't done wellbeing stuff before or to any great extent, I'd really encourage you to maybe just think about implementing the material as is, putting on a session for all your staff and more or less facilitating it as per the guide and your experience today.  If you're very familiar with this kind of stuff, you might like to add/edit, take some material out, put some in, change around some of the slides.  We've given you the slides in PowerPoint form.  We're going to give you the workbook in Word form too so that you can do those add/edits if you want to.  And then, finally, if you feel like this is an area you're really experienced in, you might even have some wellbeing experts at your school, take it up a level by all means and come along to the other parts of the series because that's where we're going to go just even that little bit deeper into the material. 

You would have seen on page 20 of the facilitator guide that there is these four questions.  These are the four questions that I'm going to give you some time to answer for yourself at the end and I wanted to show them to you now before we get going just as a way of giving you a bit of a heads-up of the sorts of things to be thinking about as we go through the session.  At the end of the session, after you've done your work, I'm going to bring Matt Kerby and his team in to give us a sense of what they're going to do with the material at their school and I'm going to bring in David Rogers and his team from Forrest Hill College.  Matt, if I can just say a quick shoutout to you and your team, how are you going? Are you ready to go? 

MATT KERBY: Ready to go, Ben.  Throw to us later and we're ready to go. 

DR BEN PALMER: Excellent.  Thanks very much.  And what about you and your team, David?  Don't forget to take yourself off mute.  G’day.

DAVID ROGERS: Hey, Ben, how are you?  We're ready to go. 

DR BEN PALMER: Ready to go?  Fantastic.  All right.  We can hear you loud and clear, which is great as well.  So that's all the backdrop.  Now, let me get into facilitator mode and just start the webinar as I would if I was on my feet in front of an audience at your school.  If you look into this area, you'll see that our wellbeing helps facilitate student learning and helps students reach their potential and we also know from the research on education that it's something that in and of itself facilitates wellbeing.  So thank you for coming along today and being a part of this important initiative.  And you can see in the facilitator guide, if I just step out of it for a minute, that the objective of this slide is really to set the scene, if you like, that why are we doing this?  We're really doing this for our own wellbeing and to help facilitate student learning and potential. 

Okay. This next slide again is used - the objective of it is really to overview the session.  Let me hop back into presenter mode to give you a sense of how I present it.  If you look into the science of wellbeing, you'll see that wellbeing is best defined as a diverse and interconnected set of variables that include our mental, physical, social and environmental wellbeing.  Today in our webinar we're going to analyse what an improvement in our wellbeing might actually mean to us.  We're going to assess what we're already doing in each of these areas.  From that, I'm going to ask you to really start sharing with each other some of the techniques that we've found useful.  The science of wellbeing has shown us that we all have it and that we can all improve it within ourselves if we engage in these techniques.  And from the discussion that I hope you have around the material, you're able to identify something new you could do to enhance your wellbeing.  Indeed, the goal of today is to use the knowledge that exists within our group around things we're already doing in each of these areas to enhance our wellbeing. 

So without any further ado, let's analyse what an improvement in this area might mean to us.  In a moment I'm going to play a song.  It goes for three minutes.  I'd like to invite you to turn to page number 4 in the workbook, the participant workbook.  Even though you're in here as a facilitator with me, I'd really like to encourage you to do this exercise individually today as we go through it because this exercise and your answers to it will give you the richness to add to the conversation when you're on your feet like me, facilitating it to your group.  So I'm going to ask you to think about a time when you've taken some deliberate steps to improve your wellbeing.  What did you do? What happened as a result? How did it feel?  Did it have any impact on other areas of your life?  And once you've all done that, the last question on the bottom of page 4, what might it mean to you and those around you to improve your wellbeing by 2, 3, 4%? The song I'm going to play goes for about three minutes.  Once it's finished, I'm going to bring in Jane and ask her for her response to these questions to kind of illustrate to you how you might do this if you had an audience in front of you. 

(Instrumental version of ‘Moondance’ plays)

Okay. That was just on three minutes, everyone.  If you're looking in the facilitator guide on page 6, just before I bring Jane in for her responses, there's some notes there: "Whilst the music is playing, get people to do the activity".  Now, if you've got a group where you think music might be a little bit distracting, you don't need to have music, but it fills that sort of silence, and obviously music that's just instrumental like that one, ‘Moondance’, there can be good. And as it says in the workbook, if you've got a large group of four people, then instead of just going straight to a few participants like I'm about to do with Jane, you could, of course, get people into small groups to discuss their own answers to this - you know, groups of three or four - and then do a facilitated debrief of it where you ask a few people.  I’ve found if you've got a large group where people don't know each other well, of course doing that small group exercise first and then calling people out makes people feel more comfortable about voicing up.  But, Jane, I know you've done a little bit of prep here, so you're going to be comfortable to come in and share your example with us.  Thanks, Jane. 

JANE HANCOCK: Thanks, Ben.  So one of the things that I really tried to work on is my sleep.  I found that I wasn't able to get to sleep, and then when I did get to sleep, I was waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about things that were going to happen at school the next day or worrying about an email that I got before I went to sleep.  So a few things that I've put in place: I now listen to a meditation tape before I go to sleep and I've probably been doing that for about six months and I can work it out myself now.  I've got some strategies on getting to sleep, setting up my routines.  And I guess the impact of that has been that I'm not so grumpy (laughs) and I'm less stressed and I'm sure my staff would attest to that, that there was some improvement in my grumpiness. And I've realised, and doing some research myself, how important sleep is to your health and wellbeing in general.  So I've really paid attention to that. 

DR BEN PALMER: Excellent.  Thank you for that response, Jane, and in that we hear how improving something like how we sleep can really have a demonstrable benefit in some other areas of our life, particularly perhaps our relationships.  With Jane being a little bit less grumpy, I can imagine what that is like for people at home, Jane, and the people that you work with.  And, indeed, that's exactly all this slide and this objective - the objective of this is to do. It’s just to get people thinking about: oh, yeah, when you work on this, it really does have beneficial impacts. 

So with this next slide. you can see the objective of it in the facilitator guide on page number 7.  This slide is kind of designed to help people identify with where they might be at with this topic.  So I like to say, if I just hop back into facilitator mode, that's a big question, isn't it: what might it mean to improve your wellbeing by 2, 3, 4, 5%.  Indeed, sometimes the answer to that question is easy.  If we've been in a difficult, challenging time, we are all pretty aware of what a 2 or 3% improvement in our wellbeing might mean, but that's not everyone's experience, is it?  Sometimes the answer isn't easy.  In fact, a lot of people like to think of themselves as doing pretty well: do I really need this stuff? 

One of the things we know about stress and unhealthy habits is it's easy to lose perspective on them.  I don't know if you've ever had that kind of experience, maybe on day 2 or 3 of the holiday, when you finally unwind enough to actually experience the stress that you've had. And sometimes we just don't have perspective on what a 2 or 3% improvement might actually feel like.  So it's a big question and not one that we should dismiss quickly today.  What we'd like to do is inspire you today to make an effort towards this 2 or 3% improvement, regardless of what your starting place might actually be. 

Now, I just want to note in the chat box we've had a few people wondering about where the participant workbook and materials are.  We're sorry if you haven't been able to get them.  Just grab a pen, a piece of paper.  The session is being recorded. We're going to deliver the recording to you as well at the end, so you'll be able to really come back to it and I think really connect the dots with the recording. 

So, without any further ado, let's keep going.  So if you want to enhance our wellbeing, we know that we need to sort of start doing something above and beyond what we're already doing, and I make this point simply because all of us are already doing things to maintain our equilibrium and to have some sense of wellbeing.  It's just human nature.  But if you want to get that 2 or 3% uplift, we've got to identify something new that we could start or perhaps some unhealthy habits that we have that we could stop.  And so to that end, what I'm going to do next with us all is a quiz, and the quiz is designed to help us think about what we're already doing and also to start us thinking about perhaps some areas of our wellbeing, whether it be physical or relationship, mental or environmental, that we're not working on so much so that we perhaps can start those new things to get that lift. 

So, without any further ado, I want to invite you to turn to page number 5 in the participant workbook.  There's some instructions on how to complete the quiz, and then once you've finished the 16 questions, I'm going to ask you to flip over and score it up and capture some responses to the reflective questions.  Before you start, let me just be very explicit about how to do it.  So there's a bunch of questions and you stop and you think to yourself: is this something I do or not? And you simply answer the questions ‘true’ or ‘false’ by putting a tick in the ‘true’ column if it is something you do and leaving it blank if it's not something you do.  Once you've answered the 16 questions accordingly, you flip over to page number 6 to the scoring, and if you answered question number 1 ‘true’, you'd put a tick there.  If you didn't answer question number 5 ‘true’, you would leave it blank.  If you answered number 9 ‘true’, you'd put another tick.  What you should have at the end of the day is a score out of 4 for each of the different areas of wellbeing.  Once you've finished that, I'd like you to use your responses to help you start thinking about the strategies that you're using the most and perhaps some areas of the model where you could actually perhaps do something new - what might the benefits of that be for you, just as we heard from Jane before.  Okay?  So I'm going to play another song.  I'm going to ask you to do this as if you were participants because, again, you doing this now gives you some of the responses that you might be able to use to sharpen up the discussion, contribute to the discussion that you'd have if you had a full group of people with you.  So I'm going to play a piece of music.  It goes again for about three or four minutes.  During this time, try to complete the quiz and answer the questions that are there with you.  Thanks, everyone. 

(Instrumental version of ‘Walk of Life’ plays). 

Okay. I hope that gave everyone a chance to do the quiz.  What happens next in our workshop is people now should have identified some of the things that they're using to enhance their wellbeing, and a lot of knowledge obviously now exists within your group, particularly if you've got a group of eight or more people, and I try to encourage you to run this workshop with a group of eight through to, you know, 50 or 100 if you want to.  Obviously some thinking would have to go into that. 

But the next part of the workshop is to then go into this activity where you get people in small groups to discuss and share with each other their responses to the reflective questions.  In other words, what they should be saying is, "Matt and David and Jane, here are some of the things that I'm doing in the physical area.  The quiz got me noticing and thinking about the things that I'm doing in the relationship area" and to list some of those off.  The purpose, of course, is to help other people in your group start thinking about and identifying the things that they're not doing that they might be able to start doing.  So if you're facilitating this, the next part of the activity is to do a course for 10 minutes and give people 10 minutes to discuss their areas. and I know a lot of you have joined today, like Matt and like David, as teams of people and so we are going to run this exercise for the next 10 minutes.  I'm going to play some music. It will more or less go for the 10 minutes, and I'm going to encourage you if you've joined as your leadership team to use this time just to discuss your answers and to have an experience of what might happen should you have a group of participants when you're running this activity. 

When we come back, we're going to go through each of the various areas. We're going to look at our mental, our physical, our relationship strategies and I'm going to ask Matt and his team and David and his team to come in and give us some examples of what came out of this discussion as you were going through it.  As always, if you've got a question, let us know in the chat box.  I know some of you have joined us as individuals, so this activity is going to fall a little bit flat potentially with you, but stick with us because we'll get to the end and you're going to hear some great things, I'm sure, from Matt and David and their teams as we go through. Okay?  Thanks, everyone.  For the next 10 minutes I'm just going to play the music while you talk about it amongst yourselves as a leadership group.  Thank you. 

(Music plays). 

Okay, everyone. I hope that's given you a bit of time to begin that discussion as a team.  Of course, if you've got a large group, you'd probably allow a bit more time than what I have today, but because we're under a little bit of time pressure, I'm cutting things just a little bit short.  I think I saw a couple of air guitars and saxophones going during that track.  Jane, I could see you bopping along, that's for sure. 

Okay.  So, Matt, I'm going to bring your team in here, and again just to go back into sort of learning train the trainer mode, each of these slides are now designed to help you debrief the exercise at a larger group level, if you like.  So let me just kind of illustrate what I would do here. 

In a moment I'm going to bring in Matt and his team and ask them whether anyone in your group was able to identify something new you could start doing or stop doing to enhance this area of wellbeing.  Of course, we can use our mind and a lot of different thinking strategies like these up on screen to improve our wellbeing.  Matt, over to you. 

MATT KERBY: Okay. Well, the team has been very helpful for me.  As we said earlier, I'm a new principal.  So in term 1, I was very fixated on work and my work/life balance was a little bit out. And my partner actually gave me feedback that I was coming home but I wasn't really present once I was home.  I was on my laptop a lot and on my phone.  So I needed to - I brought in the ‘do not disturb’ button on my phone when I went to sleep because again, like Jane said, if I woke up in the middle of night, then I was thinking school all night until I could get back to sleep, so I brought that in, and also dedicating time on weekends to give myself permission to not think about school where I possibly could, but then also have times where I was doing school work.  So rather than thinking about school work all day, pencilling in time where I could do that work and not.  And the team was actually telling me I need to bring in maybe some meditation and some reflection time too.  So I'll trial that. I'll see how that goes. 
 

DR BEN PALMER: Thanks, Matt.  What we hear in Matt's great example is a well-honed thinking strategy, which is really sort of doing that little bit of planning, stopping and reflecting on things that are perhaps working well and some unhealthy habits that might not be working so well and kind of setting some boundaries around that, if you like, with the phone in the aeroplane, diarising some ‘think and reflection’ time.  These are great examples of the sorts of things that fall into this thinking strategies bucket.  So thank you for coming and saying that with us, Matt. 

And that's exactly what you'd be doing here, drawing on a few more examples.  We've only got time to hear one.  We're going to go through each of the four areas.  But, of course, you wouldn't just stop there if you were facilitating this. You would call on a number of people, maybe three or four examples, until you felt like there was a good number of different sort of thinking strategies that were coming out, if you like.  And again, a little plug for our wellbeing webinar that's coming up on 6 May, same time, same place, where we'll be doing a little bit more of a deeper dive in these areas, looking at emotional agility, looking at how we're doing perspective taking, doing some boundary setting activities. 

Okay, I'd like to bring David into the conversation next, David and his group, but before I do, our physical area - a big connection between our physical health and our emotional health; a big connection between our physical health and our social and our environmental health as well.  So in a moment, David, I'd like to ask you to come in or someone from your team.  Was there anyone there who was able to identify something new you could start doing or something you could stop doing in this important area of wellbeing?  Thank you, David. 

DAVID ROGERS:  Yeah, look, I'll start off.  We're a school that's got a positive education embedded into everything we do here, so we've got some - most of us have got some pretty good wellbeing strategies that we use.  Certainly in this space I'm not so good at the caffeine consumption.  I could definitely – and they're laughing next to me.  I could definitely reduce my caffeine consumption.  What about you guys? 

PARTICIPANT: I think one of the things that we could do as a school is using a breathing and mindfulness meditation through our breathing.  We don't do that.  We could do that, have breathing time. 

DAVID ROGERS: Yes. 

PARTICIPANT: And also I think we could encourage some group exercise, so get a group out walking and, you know, enjoying the fresh air and the environment at lunchtimes would be really good too. 

DR BEN PALMER: Excellent.  Thank you.  It's great to hear a number of different little examples of the sorts of things that you can be doing, and a great one: no caffeine after 2pm, by way of example, is a great way of getting a better night's sleep, and there's a big correlation between things like the quality of our sleep and the quality of our wellbeing.  Thank you for sharing.  Indeed, in our second or third webinar in our series we'll do a deeper dive on these physical and environmental strategies.  We'll talk about the various apps that are out there. We'll look at some of the things we can do to help us sleep better. We'll do some mindfulness breath exercises and so on.  So if you have time to come along and join us for that particular webinar, it would be great to see you back with us for that one. 

Okay. So the next area - I'm going to go back to Matt's team in a moment; it would be great to hear from you again - is our social wellbeing.  Did you know that feeling lonely is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day?  A very strong correlation between the quality of our interactions and our relationships and our wellbeing. And one of the good things about the profession that we're all in in education is that we are getting lots and lots of social connection.  It's a very social job, isn't it?  But, nonetheless, it doesn't hurt to think about and lean into this area of wellbeing.  Matt, was there anyone in your group who was able to identify something that they might be able to do in this area to enhance social wellbeing? 

MATT KERBY: I'd like to throw to Jolie, our year 2 leader. 

JOLIE: Hi.  So we were speaking about it earlier and we were talking about - a lot of us have good, solid friendships that we can use so that we can debrief like either at the end of the day or when we go home or on the weekends.  One thing that I found for myself is that I really don't like confrontational - confrontations, so having those discussions with some of the people in my team, that makes me very anxious.  So those are the things that I know that I need to focus on for my social. 

DR BEN PALMER:  Awesome. Yeah,  I think it's a real art being able to lean in to conflict and facilitate difficult conversations and there are a really great number of books out there to help us with that and colleagues that we can practise it with.  Thank you for sharing.  And it's great to see some of you sharing in the chat box.  Thank you, Simon, for that contribution that you've made there.  Keep them coming.  It's really great to hear those.  Our Wellbeing webinar around social strategies will be on 27 May.  So if you have time to join us, we'll be doing a deep dive into some relationship improvement activities.  We're going to look at that area of leaning into conflict, facilitating difficult conversations, and so on down. 

For our final area, I'm going to bring David's group back in. It's the environmental area.  A big correlation between our environment and the way we feel.  Big department stores know this.  That's why when you go into a Myer or a David Jones, they're set up certain ways.  There's certain smells. There's certain music that's going on.  Lots of elite sportspeople, you see them at the tennis and at the golf engaging in little rituals and routines that help build their confidence around what they're going to do.  Music - there's such a rich wealth of information on the relationship between music and wellbeing and, of course, the use of scents and things like that.  David, if I can go to your group, was there anyone in your group that was able to identify something new in this area that you might be able to do? 

DAVID ROGERS:  I think we all mentioned quarantining time to have lunch with others and not getting stuck in that busy eating at your desk was really important. 

PARTICIPANT: Another thing that we've noted is that our staff - more of our staff are putting diffusers in their classrooms than we've ever seen before, and that's an interesting change for us as a school. 

DR BEN PALMER: Awesome. Yeah, you can do things like peppermint to increase concentration and attention, things like lavender to make it feel a little bit more relaxed and calm.  A big connection between our olfactory system and our mood and emotions and so on.  Thank you for sharing and, again, if you can join us on Thursday, the 20th, we'll be deep-diving into this physical and environmental area.  We're going to combine those two.  So we'll look at things like the sorts of rituals and routines we can engage in and engaging in things that we love doing, things that move us emotionally.  So if you'd like to come along to this one, it would be great to have you with us. 

Okay. So, of course, if you were facilitating this, you might allow more time, draw more people out, look at the examples in the workbook, start to talk about them and so on, and if you wanted to take it up a notch or too, you could indeed deep-dive on to any one of those words there, your Google search terms.  There's a wealth of information around all of them, whether it's creating boundaries, sleeping better, exercising.  There's just heaps and heaps of information that you could bring to this and that's what the rest of our series is designed to do. 

The last thing that you would do with your group, or what I would do if you were running the design as it is now, is that now you've given everybody in your group a chance to hear each other as you're going through the four strategies is you'd stop and run a little personal action plan time and give people three minutes to kind of pull it all together for themselves.  We're not going to do that today, but I'm just going to ask Jane to perhaps give us a couple of reflections on a couple of things that have stood out for her in listening to what Matt and David's team have had to say today.  Thanks, Jane. 

JANE HANCOCK:  I think what's really stood out for me, and particularly with COVID last year as well and coming into this job, the importance of taking some time during the day to stop.  I know that teachers and school leaders are so busy that you barely get a lunch break, recess break, and I know with my Assistant Principal and the team back at Coburg, I'd say, "Have you had your lunch, have you had a drink, have you been to the toilet?" - to really sort of treasure those moments to make sure that you do have time just to stop and to clear your brain or to go for a walking meeting or just to get outside in the fresh air, to walk around with the kids, to go and visit a prep class.  They're the most amazing things to keep you grounded. And I think now in this job, now I've reflected on the things that I should have done better and encouraged my staff to do in terms of taking those breaks.  I was always pretty strict about Fridays, with getting out early. Everyone’s got to be out by 4 o'clock. But then things sort of creep in and you start eating at your desk, you start working later.  So you really have to make sure that you're true to what you want to do and stick to it.

DR BEN PALMER: Excellent.  Thank you, Jane.  If you want to change the way you feel, change what you're doing.  It's part of it, isn't it?  Thanks for sharing that.  And, of course, on page number 9 in the workbook, there's an opportunity if you're using that for people to reflect on what they've taken out of the session.  So all I do here is summarise the session and wrap up, talk about what we've done and thank people for coming. 

What I'd like to do now is to step back out of that.  As we said, this was a session that was designed to be led by you and you've been given the facilitation guide, participant workbook and some time to think about it.  I notice Maria has put the links into the chat box for us to the slides and to the facilitation guide and we'll also be getting these out to you in Word form so that you can add/edit if you want to do that. 

What I'd like to do to finish off is encourage all of you who've joined to jump into the chat box.  What sorts of questions have come up?  Is there anything that you'd like to know more of?  Are there any questions you might have about how we've gone through today?  And for those of you who've joined us as a team, we'd like to pause now and give you just a few moments to discuss as a group your responses to those important questions on page number 20 of the facilitator guide, and if you haven't got that, they're up on screen here.  So now I'd like you to use the next four or five minutes just to discuss with each other who might you do this for, this sort of session, what might you include, add or edit, who might you do it for and when?  We'll come back in just at about five to the hour and I'll ask Matt and his team and I'll ask David and his team to give us the sense of what they're planning to do with the material.  So I'm going to give you five minutes to think about it with each other as a team.  If you've joined as an individual, give us a question or a thought or a perspective in the chat box; otherwise, hold tight and hang in there.  At five to the hour we'll come back in and draw on Matt and David for their thoughts on how they're going to contextualise this material for their schools.  Thanks, everyone. 

(Music plays). 

Alright.  That was our cruise music.  We'll have something a bit lively to finish if you want to stick around and get up on your feet and have a little dance with me.  Matt, let's go to your team first.  What are you thinking about in terms of implementation? 

MATT KERBY:  Thanks, Ben.  I'm going to hand over to Tamara and Alexei. 

DR BEN PALMER:  Awesome, Tamara and Alexei. 

TAMARA:  Hi.  Thanks, Ben.  We think this type of program will be great for all of our staff to be involved in, but we're thinking initially it would be good to introduce it or run sessions with our ES staff initially.  It's because they work exclusively with children with challenging behaviours and might feel the effects a bit more of all of the different timetable changes or effects on their day-to-day roles, I guess, that doing this kind of thinking about their wellbeing might help them and support them in their roles and help them perform better. 

ALEXEI:  Yeah, and we're also thinking of using it for our 5/6 cohort, so sort of adapting the quiz for our needs.  We just think the 5/6 cohort, it's a priority for their wellbeing.  They're going through lots of changes, transitioning into secondary school, and they're at heightened emotional needs, so we think that doing something like this will allow them to sort of reflect and set goals, and even what David's group was talking about in having different activities or group exercises that we could all do together. 

DR BEN PALMER:  Fantastic to hear.  My eldest son, who's in year 6, has autism and that's sort of mixed at the moment with a bit of testosterone and a few other things.  So I really resonate with what you're talking about there and thank you for that lovely contribution.  And it's great to hear you're thinking about how to adapt material for not only staff, and particularly ES staff, but also for students.  So thank you to you both.  David, over to your group. 

DAVID ROGERS:  Yeah, thanks, Ben.  We think that the material is really good as part of an induction for all new staff coming into the school.  We're working to try and assist our staff take autonomy for their wellbeing, their wellness, and then have some strategies around them when their wellness isn't sort of in the positive and they're not flourishing.  This would be a really good entry into the induction phase around our positive education culture. And what we're probably looking for around the edit would be a suite of strategies that we could have links, apps, ideas for each of the wellbeing areas so that staff, once they identify that they'd like to do some work in a certain area, can readily access them as strategies they can put into their lives. 

DR BEN PALMER:  Excellent.  That really resonates with a comment that I saw Penny make in the chat box, that we really need to role-model it as staff.  Wellbeing starts with us.  If we’re going to lead school wellbeing, of course we need to be engaging in it with ourselves.  So that's really great.  Thank you, David, for that contribution.  Jane, would you like to add anything else before I hand over to Kate to do our wrap-up? 

JANE HANCOCK:  No, I've been - I've just loved some of the comments that are coming through - who they would do this with back in their schools, like ES and staff, and someone said, “Isn't that great that we're all being inclusive?”.  Yeah, I agree, I think it's for anyone in a school setting, particularly with wellbeing at the moment being a high priority. 

DR BEN PALMER: Excellent. 

JANE HANCOCK: So thank you for all those comments.  They've been fantastic. 

DR BEN PALMER: Yeah, absolutely.  And Jessica says: "Any thoughts on the wellbeing quiz with year 6 students?". Yeah, it's an interesting one.  I certainly have run it with high school students.  I've done a lot with year 10 and 9.  Yeah, I think that's a great question for you guys as experts to answer and maybe reach out to Matt's team, Jessica, because I think that's one of the things that they're indeed planning to do. 

Thank you, everyone, for coming today.  I hope you've enjoyed the session.  I want to hand over to Kate now and just leave this up here. Again are our dates and the times to join our other sessions.  Thanks, Kate. 

KATE MORRIS:  Hi, Ben.  Thanks, everyone.  Fantastic session today and what I heard was just the incredible sort of capacity to reflect, to learn together, and I really saw it as a bit of an opportunity for us at Bastow to sort of checklist how we're going, what do we need to do more of, what do we need to do less of.  So looking forward to lining up for Improving Wellbeing with Thinking Strategies next week, Ben. And thanks to Maria and Jane Hancock for really setting us up for success today. A great example of our schools.  David and your team from Forrest Hill and Matt and your team from Coburg, being here, talking about your work, that incredible sort of reflective face you're putting forward out to colleagues is brilliant and I love the inclusive nature of who this could touch, and that being from kids through to families through to all staff in the school.  So I really think you're setting yourself up for success and, with Ben's guidance, we're in great hands.  So thanks, everyone, and thanks for investing in yourselves and your school community and I look forward to seeing you next time. 

DR BEN PALMER: Absolutely.  So I'm going to play our last song.  Feel free to leave whenever you like or get up on your feet and have a little dance with us.  Thanks, everyone, for being here.  See you at the next session if you're going to be there. Thank you.

(Music plays).