Lessons Learned

Instructional Technology - International Education - Wellness

Tag: personal wellness plan

How About Periodic Wellness Checkups?!

It is the norm for many to have periodic doctor, dental, and even financial checkups. It seems that scheduling wellness checkups from time to time are also warranted. One can design the process of reviewing and measuring one’s wellness using PERMAH andย the character strengths being engaged within each pillar. This can be a reflective process done by oneself or a friend, or a counselor/life coach can assist in the review.

I previously provided links to How Is My PERMAH Today? and the Personal Wellness Plan, which, once constructed, could be used in the review process. The How Is My PERMAH Today document can support the checkup process, while the Personal Wellness Plan can provide an avenue to set goals to take steps to improve one’s well-being.

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Home Learning Support Plan and More

One thing is to meet with parents to provide a list of home support strategies. It is another to provide a method to help them apply the strategies. The image to the left is a screenshot of one parent’s effort to work with her child to complete a home support plan template I provided her.

The support strategies list provides strategies for building routines and health (i.e., diet and sleep), the physical learning environment (essential for virtual learning), organization skills, and self-control while supporting independence. One can, of course, come up with other categories.

I work with the students to design their personal wellness plans they then take home to share with their parents. The wellness plan is student-centered and managed with some parental coaching. The home learning plan is parent managed with input from the child. The older the child, the more he/she takes ownership of applying the strategies.

And then there is, of course, the Personal Learning System (PLS) and plan that I work with students to complete and implement to have agency over their learning. ๐Ÿ™‚

Virtual School Wellness Plan

Note: My international school is just starting virtual school for the current school year, so we are now just experiencing what many schools have been doing for most of the year.

I have written a few times about designing and implementing wellness plans based on Positive Psychology. In reality, it seems that not many schools are using the language of PERMAH and Character Strengths in their guidance programs.

With this in mind, here is an approach for teachers to work with students to develop wellness categories such as fitness, diet, etc., to list them in your personal wellness plan template. An inquiry and self-directed approach could have the students draw on their current understanding of each category to research more about each topic. The next step would be to set goals and implement action steps to reach the goals. Students could then pair up to have virtual wellness buddies to support each other, which connects to the R in PERMAH of having a buddy during virtual school.

Here is a draft of a non-Positive Psychology elementary student personal wellness plan to get you started. Here is the Positive Psychology personal wellness plan for comparison.

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

Student Wellness Plans

I have been doing my best to “walk the talk” this year regarding bringing Positive Psychology into my counseling. I have shared several ideas to bring strength-based counseling into schools via this blog, my school wellness blog, and my Wellness@ES resource site. My primary tool for taking ideas to action is through WOOP goal-setting and personal wellness plan creation. I also use the pictured whiteboard from my office with students, which lists the PERMAH pillars and the Character Lab strengths.

The process is a mixture of teaching, designing, and creating. When the student completes writing his/her wellness plan, he/she takes it home along with an educational write-up to give the parents background on Positive Psychology and the wellness plan. The student reviews the plan with the parents seeking their input and ways to support it.

My vision for a wellness program would have each student have a wellness plan to be designed and constructed at the start of the school year. The students would use the wellness section of their portfolio to list their plan, along with a posting of artifacts throughout the year showing their efforts and following through on their goals within each PERMAH pillar.

Family Wellness Progress Reports

A portion of my work as a counselor is doing some form of intervention in family systems. The continuum from parents needing just a few strategies to the extreme of working with families to get into therapy makes individualization for each family very important. But there are some givens that parenting experts agree upon that work for all families, whether it be in setting up routines, opening up communication, disengaging from technology, etc.

As a counselor, I know that offering strategies while guiding parents to read parenting books and websites is only the first step in supporting students and their family systems. Following up after parent meetings is essential to check in and continue the dialogue. It is also essential to provide and coach parents in using structures to help improve family dynamics and from a wellness angle to help families thrive.

One of the main structures that I offer families is to have regular family meetings and work together to put plans together. I wrote about this in the spring with the post An Opportunity for Making Plans!. I outlined steps to follow to construct family wellness, tech & media (digital wellness) use, and mission statements. And, of course, individual family members can create their own personal versions of the plans.

I tried to build practical action steps for the plans to make them tangible and a part of family cultures. One additional strategy is to have families design wellness progress reports to support each plan’s implementation and ongoing follow-through. Schools use the term progress report to mean different things. Still, in this instance, I offered it as a formative assessment to support reflection, communication, learning, and other goal-setting while celebrating progress.

When you add the character strength of proactivity by making family meeting appointments in the family calendar, families have a real opportunity to further live their mission, wellness, and digital wellness plans.

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Digital Wellness PERMAH Plan Follow-Up

I recently wrote a post in a scattered fashion connecting family mission statements, RUPs, and digital wellness. I have struggled for a long time to separate our lives into analog and digital. We obviously live in both concurrently, moving back and forth between them. They overlap as we engage our character strength of proactivity to make plans to be better. This is why I have written so often that we should teach citizenship in school as it applies to analog and digital to not include the term “digital.”

Looking at wellness, I think the same argument can be made, yet I can see using “digital” to help us focus on how we interact with technology. I guess the digital citizenship folks would say the same thing.

So what is my solution? As you can see from the image, I added a section to my Personal Wellness Plan to think about adding digital wellness goals to improve one’s well-being. ๐Ÿ™‚

Workplace Wellness – The Big Picture

I have written about teacher and team wellness for the start of this school year, covering the need to change the amount of the workload (VS – Coming Out the Other Side) and the ergonomic and physical health needs of working at a computer all day (Wellness: Workspace Wellness). I spoke to my divisional administrators before the start of the school year, pointing out that supporting individual and team wellness involved a few approaches.

To me, the most significant administration area of influence is the lessening of the workload, especially by limiting priorities and initiatives for the coming year. This is the case whether one’s school has gone through virtual school and is entering a year with many unknowns or just the start of a regular school year. In speaking to a fellow counselor at another school,, he used the term “occupational” wellness to describe this workload approach which involves designing the structures and systems to support a healthy work environment. Good communication involving gathering input and buy-in to provide transparent communication is a part of this occupational wellness.

I synthesize these approaches to workplace wellness in schools by organizing them into the following. I am sure folks with MBAs and degrees in education administration can provide a much longer list. ๐Ÿ™‚

  • the workload
  • the effective functioning of the individual, team, division, and whole school
  • the personal and professional wellness of the individual. I use the term functioning, which connects to occupational wellness in that we want our staff members to be as efficient and productive as possible working individually and on teams. This “team wellness” covers the dynamics of how well teams use their time and resources. It also gets at the emotional and social dynamics of teams.

As mentioned, administration can affect workplace wellness functioning and workload aspects. Admin can offer PD on wellness, effective teaming practices, and professional goal-setting that includes wellness and fitness opportunities (i.e., on-campus Tai Chi, yoga instruction, mindfulness sessions, life coaching opportunities, community gatherings, and happy hours, etc.).

In the end, it is really up to the individual to take advantage of the opportunities that could also include developing a personal wellness plan.

 

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Wellness Modules for Learning and Planning for Living It

Our staff has helped our students transition back to school while ramping up the possibility of virtual school v2. It is essential to acknowledge that you, as staff members, also have gone through the back-to-school transition after a less-than-normal summer experience. With wellness being one of our prime initiatives for the year, let’s look at a couple of options to further support your efforts to learn and live wellness.

The Canadian HeretoHelp consortium of mental health supporting agencies provides a helpful series of learning modules on the topics of:

With personal well-being reserves probably starting at a lower level than average this school year, it makes a lot of sense to take some time to put a personal wellness plan together. Of course, an excellent framework to work with is the PERMAH and Character Strengths approach! You can design your own personal wellness plan template or start with this one that helps you set goals around PERMAH while engaging your character strengths.

Cross-posted at my school’s wellness blog.

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