23
Aug
2022
Wellbeing at the Heart of RCHK
In an effort to make our big school feel small, we take a wellbeing-centred approach. Our wellbeing approach is embedded in everything we do at RCHK; it features in our lessons, in our staff training and in the way that we approach our relationships with our community. Our students believe that wellbeing is part of our community and that all different aspects of wellbeing and linked together in our strong relationships. We want to help our community to flourish by building on all these linked parts and wellbeing, keeping it always at “the Heart of RCHK”.
Wellbeing itself is a term that can be hard to define; at RCHK we consider wellbeing to be the physical, social and psychological state needed to meet life’s challenges. What we are aiming for in our wellbeing approach is to support everyone to develop a toolkit of resources to respond to these challenges and to flourish throughout life.
Roots of Wellbeing
As part of our RCHK wellbeing framework, we have identified five roots of wellbeing – the things that we value to help us nurture a thriving community:
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- Health. Health is about caring for our mental and physical wellbeing. We want to make sure we are fit in our minds and our bodies.
- Environment. We think a lot about our environment or the spaces we are in; whether they are real life or online. We aimed to create and maintain a loving, safe and secure space for learning in which we can thrive.
- Accomplishment. We know it is important to acknowledge and celebrate the progress we made towards our own personal goals, so a sense of accomplishment is one of our values.
- Relationships. Relationships are the foundation of everything else we do. We want to nurture a thriving community built on mutual trust, support, open communication, empathy and respect.
- Appreciation. We encourage our community to recognise opportunities and find ways to show their gratitude.
5 Aspects of Wellbeing
We work on our wellbeing in many different ways throughout the year but we have identified 5 particular aspects that we focus on to build wellbeing. These are our roots to wellbeing or paths to well-being:
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- We follow a strength-based approach. From the earliest years, we learn about our character strengths; the positive parts of our personalities that are the keys to be our best-selves.
- We find ways to use our strength to help us in our lives. One of the tools that we learned is mindfulness. Mindfulness is bringing attention and awareness to your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations and surrounding environment in the present moment. We practised lots of different mindfulness techniques so that we can draw on them if we want or need to.
- We learn about positive emotions, which are markers of wellbeing and happiness; these enhance future growth and success and we learn about how to elevate these, how to recognise when we or others are not feeling positive emotions, and that this is also part of life. We learn how to manage in those times as well.
- Resilience is an important skill for us as we find ways to help each other to bounce back and persist through challenging times. We are always looking for ways to build our community to enhance resilience.
- Lastly, we learn about mindset, particularly growth mindset and the elasticity of the brain. We want to give ourselves the chance and strategies to be the best that we can be.
Posted: 23 August 2022, 15:20
