Overview

Our ELP is comprised of recently hired faculty in their first two years of employment with the district. Our meetings will occur on the last Tuesday of each month (holiday exceptions), from 2:30-3:15, lasting approximately 45 minutes. During this time, an expert facilitator will guide the group through a combination of content and process, helping form an invaluable support network.

The overarching goal of this group is retention. Through stress inoculation, faculty will use our unique Resilience Rubric, to prepare for the challenges of being an educator, causing burnout. Each member will construct a unique Prosilience Plan that helps identify and remediate risk factors, generated in both their personal and professional lives.

The work of growing our resilience, or Prosilience, can be achieved through the following objectives:

  1. Identifying, understanding, expressing and negotiating our needs. Differentiating needs from wants, fears, impulses or drives, so we can discern acting from reacting.
  2. Learning when we operate out of fear, employing our protective mechanisms, diverting our resources away from getting our wants/needs met, so we can be more intentional.
  3. Building a meaningful support system with relationships that energize us.
  4. Learning how to adapt so we can rebound from adversity, problem solve and preserve energy.
  5. Minimize chronic/acute stress so we can dedicate our resources to meeting our needs. Stress inoculation or building our tolerance for discomfort is key.
  6. Improve our wellness activities so we are efficiently growing our physical health.
  7. Gaining skills/ proficiencies in getting our needs met (or SEL).
  8. Developing tools for organizing, motivating, disciplining and engaging with students for a rewarding teaching/learning environment.
  9. Prioritizing values to guide us during times of duress.

ELP Curriculum

2023-2024

Sept

Agenda

  • Welcome and Introductions
  • The best and worst parts of your first week(s)?
  • Resilience Overview
  • Dynamic Assessment Tool Analytics or DATA
First there was IQ, then EQ, and now RQ, a measure of our innate plus learned ability to deal with acute and chronic distress. Resilience can be further used to measure elasticity (e), capacity, endurance (n), flexibility [f), and positivity (P), all of which extend beyond our ability to overcome adversity. Just as physical immunity is to psychological health, or learning is to intellectual health, resilience is the key to psychological health. We will use the 9 elements of resilience to measure RQ.

 

Activity #1 Description (Answer One)

  • How would you define resilience? What elements of your life would you include?
  • When was a time in your life you felt most resilience? Least resilient? Why?
  • Why do students seem less resilient since the pandemic?
  • What is the main barrier to growing your resilience?

Activity #2 Description

Teach Your Children Well is a song by CSN. The lyrics for the song relate to resilience in what way? Focus on the experience of the adult and what lessons we might extract.

 

Homework

Oct

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • Dynamic Assessment Tool Analytics or DATA (Needs Score?)
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Basic Needs
Needs: The 9 building blocks for psychological health, different from wants. The degree to which each need exists and is met, depends upon our early life experience and current situation. The other eight factors of resilience ultimately impact the degree to which our needs are met. This is the foundation upon all other resilience work is built.

 

 

Considerations:

  • Define needs?.
  • What is the difference between needs and wants?
  • How does equity influence needs?
  • What is the relationship between needs and SEL?
  • How do needs influence your overall resilience?
  • What happens if your needs aren’t met?

Activity:

Fill out your own needs assessment and discuss. How does this information shape your understanding of success at home or work?

Nov

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Protective Mechanisms
Protective Mechanisms: The intentional and unintentional methods by which we insulate ourselves from real and perceived threats. Many of our protective mechanisms are formed at an early age, modelled by our parents, operating outside our everyday consciousness. As we grow our awareness for these protective mechanisms, we can be better prepared to limit their use in the service of better meeting our needs. The more we use these protective mechanisms, the less likely we are to put energy into getting our needs met.

 

Considerations

  • What does it mean to 'be defensive'?
  • How does defensiveness differ from protective?
  • What is the difference between a real and perceived threat?
  • What is the relationship between needs and protections?
  • How do protections influence your overall resilience?
  • How might being less protective improve your life?

 

Activity

Protective Mechanisms

 

Dec

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience, Support & Relationships
Support/ Relationships: The (mainly) human connections we make to help us get our needs met or endure unpleasantness. The better we learn how to identify, express and negotiate our wants/needs, the more likely we will feel quality support from those who are close to us. The type of support we offer and receive will improve with greater contact, the process by which we deeply engage with another.

 

Considerations

  • What's the role of support in happiness, love, peace, meaning...?
  • What's the least valuable support you have received this year?
  • What type of support is most valuable to you?
  • How does support influence your resilience?

Activity

Pair up into groups of three. For fifteen minutes, each person will take 5 minutes in each of the three roles. The object is to provide the 'worst support' imaginable.

Role #1: Share something that has minimally stressed you or been unpleasant about working in your school this year.

Role #2: Try to figure out what type of support is least beneficial to the person you are listening to.

Role #3: Observe the process and provide feedback about why the support was so ineffective.

Jan

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience, Adaptability & Stress
Adaptability: Our capacity for distress is the greatest determinant in tolerating unmet needs or overcoming adversity. Flexibility in how our needs can be met, elasticity in creatively meeting these needs and the iterations we make when needs/ resources are scarce, are all part of our ability to adapt. How we rebound from adversity, is influenced by our personality, our attitude, the lens through which we view the world, our schema, and adjustments we make to our expectations. Our ability to adapt is also impacted by our health, stress levels and creativity in problem solving.

 

Activity

  • Write your definition of adaptability?
  • How does adaptation affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • How does adaptation influence your overall resilience?
  • What is an example of your success in adaptation?
  • How can being overly accommodating influence adaptation?
  • What would it take to be more flexible, accepting, or have more bounce back?
  • What is pragmatic persistence?

Feb

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Stress
Stress: The level of arousal from internal and external stimuli generating somatic tension and unpleasant thoughts. Optimal arousal levels motivate us to act, but acute and chronic tension states can trigger psychological and physiological changes to our body that make it harder to get our needs met. Nearly everything impacts our stress, from our PSEL skills to our mindset. Our capacity to tolerate discomfort and the tools we learn for self-regulation (i.e. self-soothing) significantly help reduce unnecessary stress.

 

Activity

  • Write your definition of stress?
  • How is chronic and acute stress affecting your ability to get your needs met?
  • How does stress influence your overall resilience?
  • What are your main stressors and how do you cope with them?
  • What would it take improve your experience of stress?
  • What would it take to reduce your stress?

Mar

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Wellness
Wellness: The tools, skills and strategies we employ to meet our physiological needs (health), improving vitality, preventing injury and promoting immunity. Our energy level from good nutrition, sleep, exercise, and mindfulness can help generate peace, lowering our arousal levels to promote restoration. Our overall sense of well-being is a combination of brain, body, and spirit, inversely proportional for most people with stress levels.

 

Activity

  • Write your definition of wellness?
  • How is your wellness affecting your ability to get your needs met?
  • How does wellness influence your overall resilience?
  • What do you do to improve your wellness?
  • What would it take improve your wellness?

Apr

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & PSEL
Skills (PSEL): The 15 psychosocial emotional tools by which we learn to get our needs met. PSEL is developmental in nature, evolving with experience. Equity is an important element of PSEL because the underlying needs are not all met to the same degree, shaping how we learn to negotiate and adapt. Our skills are taught, modelled, intrinsically motivated, and externally rewarded by our environment.

 

Activity (Download Infographic)

  • What is your definition of SEL?
  • How does SEL affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • Which SEL skills seem to be in greatest decline among students?
  • How does SEL influence your overall resilience?
  • Which SEL skills would you see as weakest and strongest for you?
  • Which skill can you work on this next month to improve upon?

May

Agenda

  • Sharing & Networking
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & School Climate
Climate: Trust, safety, effort, creativity, fun and other factors influencing and creating milieu. One of three dimensions of school culture, influencing organizational health, representing the intangible feeling we get in a classroom or school. Skills such as communication, intimacy and conflict resolution on a larger scale, also impact the class or school climate. We have less control over the larger areas, requiring more advanced skills to impact this factor.

 

Activity (Large Group)

  • What is your definition of climate? How does it differ from culture?
  • How does climate influence your overall resilience?
  • What would it take improve your class and school climate?

Activity (Small Group)

  • Share/ Complete RQ Scores: What do your profiles tell you about how you see climate as an influence in your RQ?
  • Select the statistic that most impacts school climate
  • Infographic (what we can do to improve climate)

Jun

Agenda

  • Wrap Up
  • DATA
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Values
Values: The principles we hold as important for how we live our lives, influencing how we interact with others. Being generous is a value determined by our priorities of wants/needs. Our ideal for which needs are most critical, what wants we hold as rewarding, and what actions we take to make this happen determines our values. Different from a moral or a construct, values are not imperatives for how we believe others ‘should’ live or judgments about how people act, but a measure of self-accountability. Growing both hope and courage are universal constants to consider prioritizing.

 

Activity

  • Write your definition of values?
  • How do your values affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • How do values influence your overall resilience?
  • What do you do to remain aware of your values?
  • What would it take periodically review and update your values?