Overview
Educator Longevity Programs: Reward your top talent and/or your new hires for participating in this groundbreaking program to improve longevity and propagate psychological fortitude.
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.
Two Options
Option #1 (Trailblazers): Each school identifies faculty with the greatest potential for success. These faculty members are led through a six month program to develop skills to help them become more successful. These faculty members will resonate success, inspiring others to greatness. In the second year, Resilience Advocates (RA's) will learn how to bring this work into their classrooms to promote student success.
Option #2 (New Hires): 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 work of growing our resilience, or Prosilience, can be achieved through the following objectives:
- Identifying, understanding, expressing and negotiating our needs. Differentiating needs from wants, fears, impulses or drives, so we can discern acting from reacting.
- 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.
- Building a meaningful support system with relationships that energize us.
- Learning how to adapt so we can rebound from adversity, problem solve and preserve energy.
- Minimize chronic/acute stress so we can dedicate our resources to meeting our needs. Stress inoculation or building our tolerance for discomfort is key.
- Improve our wellness activities so we are efficiently growing our physical health.
- Gaining skills/ proficiencies in getting our needs met (or SEL).
- Developing tools for organizing, motivating, disciplining and engaging with students for a rewarding teaching/learning environment.
- Prioritizing values to guide us during times of duress.
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.
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.
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.
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. 
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.
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. 
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. 
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.
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.