Heading 1NDMTSS Conference
Description
Teachers have always needed to know and practice protective strategies in their social emotional first aid kits to manage the daily stressors of working on the front lines of a human-service oriented profession. That need has never been greater given the massive increase in uncertainty and unpredictability in the teaching profession and in one's personal life due to COVID.
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In short, teaching is emotional labor-- the effort required to manage and metabolize strong emotions like anger, shame, guilt, anxiety, and overwhelm, as well as generate and stoke positive emotions like joy, hope, and compassion.
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Stress significantly diminishes a teacher's capacity to regulate their negative emotions and cultivate positive emotions. Ironically, teachers who leave the profession often cite their inability to cope with their own emotional reactions to loss of control, unpredictability, and lack of purpose in their teaching as the primary reason for burnout.
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There are many, many strategies and practices rooted in cognitive and affective neuroscience and social and behavioral sciences that teachers can learn, practice, and integrate into their personal and professional lives as teachers to metabolize stress, manage negative energy, protect themselves from the burnout cycle, and find joy in teaching the whole year through!
Learning Objectives
In this session, teachers will:
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Explore the core elements of the teacher burnout cycle and learn how to protect one's self from the 2 paths to burning out,
Workplace
Well-Being
CARE Plan
Organizational Wellness
Intentional care for organizational well-being based on person-centered care principles is the future of organizational health. Creating systems and contexts of care for our caregivers is paramount if we desire to advance the well-being of our people, organizations, communities, and environment in which we live and serve.
Creating a workplace well-being CARE Plan is "whole-systems healing" in action.
Whole-systems healing is a way of addressing problems and cultivating the health and well-being of individuals, organizations, communities and the environment by living and acting with awareness of the wholeness and the interconnectedness of all living systems.
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It is an approach of shifting the culture within an organization through collaborative relationships that lead to collective action grounded in the shared values of the people who work together to effect positive change. (Kreitzer,2012)
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What is the vision of wellness?
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What are the needs?
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What are the wants?
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What are our collective wellness values?
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What are the limitations?
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How do we want to be responsive to the wellness needs of our employees?
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How do we define wellness?
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What are we wanting to know and learn?
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What do we want to CREATE?
Intake assessment of needs and wants
In this phase, we define the needs and desires for your well-being program. We identify core values that underlie the desired program, while seeking to understand what the mission and desired outcomes of the program are. We also discuss how well-being is currently conceptualized in organizational wellness research. We discuss the fundamental awarenesses and pillars of Whole-Systems Well-Being programs and how to create optimal healing environments. We also discuss the 6 dispositions of Whole-Systems Leadership.
Your organizational leadership teams is led through an interactive exercise to identify the core pillars of your wellness program.
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We then strategize the most appropriate person-centered design research method(s) best used to collect data from employees around their needs/desires for wellbeing-based programs. We will discuss how to integrate both quantitative and qualitative research methods to gather lived experiences that illuminate core needs and wants around personal and collective well-being.
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Where do we focus our ATTENTION?
Strategic person-centered design data review
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What is the current data/stories of our employees telling us-- explictly and implictly?
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What is not being said through the stories?
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What does the current well-being research tell us about the areas of wellness that are critical to the well-being of the individuals in an organizational system?
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What do the core pillars of Whole-Systems Healing look like for our organization?
In this phase of the work, you will learn how to interpret and "read" the employee data to glean insight and information that will inform the next step of what well-being supports they need and desire. In this phase, we explore the collective story that the individual data is illuminating.
We "read" the data from a 500 ft point of perspective (from the individual level) and a 60,000 ft point of perspective (from the collective level). We will also look at what the current well-being research is saying is critical for attending to the wellsprings of mental, emotional, physical, and soul health of caregivers in an organizational setting.
This data collection and interpretation phase allows us to be strategic in creating contexts of care for our caregivers that embodies person-centered care principles and whole-system healing.
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What are we doing that is already RELEVANT?
Identify the plan
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Based on what the primary needs and wants are, what resources currently exist to support our employees?
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What resources do we already have in-house?
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What can we bring in/offer?
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What MIND, BODY, and SOUL practices must be a part of our wellbeing program?
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What are things we can start tomorrow?
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What are things that need more time to line up strategic support?
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What are things that we want to create but know that time and budget are limiting factors?
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How do we launch a well-being program from where we are currently at so to springboard off what we are already doing well?
In this phase, we explore the current wellbeing resources that exist within your organization and community that can be drawn upon to create a multifaceted, integrated experience of wellness for your employees.
Once the core pillars of how your organization defines employee wellness are established, we strategically map resources to each element. We also develop a sustainable plan for creation and implementation of support in each of these pillars.
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What is the EVIDENCE of embodied employee wellness?
Establish how we will measure desired impact
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What are the desired outcomes, impacts, and/or behaviors we hope to see with the implementation of this program?
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What does employee wellness look and feel like in our organization?
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What are the invisible and visible manifestations of employee wellness that demonstrate positive impact of the wellbeing program?
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How will we know that our employees are well and how will we continue to support their sustained wellness?
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How will we routinely check-in and collect data about individual and collective well-being?
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How will we know that our wellbeing program is effective, responsive, and adaptable?
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How will we ensure alignment of the program with the changing wellbeing needs of our employees?
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How can we monitor that the wellness plan is both stable (practical and accessible) and evolving alongside our employee's needs and wants?
In this phase, we discuss data gathering techniques that can be used in the future to monitor employee engagement with the wellness program.
We will identify what embodied employee wellness and person-centered care at an organizational level looks and feels like. We will identify what "counts" as well-being data and discuss what routine organizational health and healing check-in's look like.
Each of the (4) CARE elements is designed to be an interactive 3 hour (in-person) strategic planning session
Total time investment: 12 hours
Investment Costs:
(12 hours) $10,000
(8 hours) $8,000