Overview

Resilience Advocate (RA’s) are the liaison between the school and TeacherCoach, serving as motivational ambassadors for well-being. RA’s are well respected members of the school community embarking on this leadership role to improve agency for individual and organizational health, reducing the burden on administration. RA’s will be trained and supported to help with accountability, engagement, and program sustainability.

Training

RA’s will participate in a nine- month training program during their first year. The training will be fun and interactive, benefiting the RA personally and professionally. RA’s are asked to attend seven sessions virtually, from 2:30-3:30pm (shifted up or down by 30 minutes) the second Tuesday of each month. RA’s will also have in-person, email and phone contact with the TC staff. The schedule is in your virtual calendar.

The first part of each training is a practical discussion around the use of TC technology including the Dynamic Assessment Tool Analytics (DATA) and messaging system. Best practices are developed to facilitate their peers. Faculty rewards for each school be planned and implemented based on realistic expectations and successive approximation (a form of shaping). The second part of each training is a clinical discussion, exploring the nine factors of resilience, the art of facilitation, resistance, and motivation.

Selecting Your RA

Each school will have one main representative and one alternate. The investment of these individuals will have a direct correlation with the engagement of the entire faculty in personal growth work. The process can be self-selection, nomination, or faculty voting. If the district has a wellness committee, that may make the selection process easier. This person will need to be mindful of confidentiality and be sensitive with informational trends for the organization as a whole. Reliability is key.

Responsibilities and Benefits

RA’s are the heath ambassadors to the school, promoting TC services, mentoring, coaching, training, rewarding, and holding faculty accountable. In this inaugural year of the program, RA’s will be interviewed for the portal vlog, available to all districts. They may also participate in the creation of a new engagement series on resilience which will be gifted to your district. RA’s may be included in research articles and a book. will be the first to pilot this program, likely involving future research and public speaking opportunities. RA’s chief benefits are advanced learning, respect from colleagues and networking with other educators. Small stipends, gifts, and a year- end celebration will also be offered.

Resilience

  1. Needs
  2. Protective Mechanisms
  3. Support/ Relationships
  4. Adaptability
  5. Stress
  6. Wellness
  7. Skills (PSEL)
  8. School Climate
  9. Values

Our bandwidth for distress is comprised of these 9 related factors and similar to the RAM of a computer, higher levels allow for  accomplishing more in less time, with quicker recovery. As we become more efficient and effective at work or home, the more likely we are to achieve our goals. Higher stability, quicker recovery from adversity, and an overall sense of well-being are all rewards from this complex work of growing more resilient, which we call Prosilience.

The aim of our work at TC is improving awareness, both for the individual and system to realize the obstacles to success. With greater appreciation for the etiology of our dis-ease we may become more intentional about how our energy is directed toward acceptance and change (and the the type of change).

As your entire faculty explore these nine areas of resilience, we are simultaneously training the RA's with more in-depth learning to become effective peer advocates.The curriculum will include definitions of these nine facets, exercises to heighten our awareness and facilitation skills including motivating, dealing with resistance, promoting, and comforting.

Prosilience Curriculum

2023-2024

Sept

Agenda

  • Welcome and Introductions
  • Resilience Overview
  • Confidentiality
  • Tech Overview (Portal/ Dynamic Assessment Tool)
  • External Rewards & Scoring
  • Homework (RA Admin & Ethics)
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

  • 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?
  • Who is the most resilient person you know? What makes them so?
  • Why do students seem less resilient of late?
  • What 5 steps would you need to take to grow your resilience?

Google Drive

A link for our google shared folder with resources, homework activities, and other valuable information.

Oct

Agenda

  • Tech (Dynamic Assessment Tool Analytics or DATA)
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Basic Needs
  • Weekly Prosilience Email
  • Incentives & Rewards
  • Engagement Update
  • Homework (Incentives & Ethics)
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.

 

 

Activity #1

Complete the attached needs activity form. Our goal is to raise self-awareness around the role our needs play.

Activity #2

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

Nov

Agenda

  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Protective Mechanisms (PM)
  • Role Play
  • Small Group Work (What PM do I employ?)
  • Web Events (Communications Tool)
  • DATA: Trends & Top Earners
  • Ethics HW Review
  • Prosilience Email
  • Homework (Recommendations)
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:

Identify your most instinctive protective mechanisms, how you learned it, and a recent what it showed up in one of your personal/professional relationships.What are the benefits and limitations?

Dec

Agenda

  • Clinical Topic: Resilience, Support & Relationships
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Share your RQ profile
  • Homework
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.

 

2:45-2:55          Considerations

  • What are the worst types of support you can offer a person who is struggling?
  • What type of supports matters most for you?
  • How does support affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • How does support influence your overall resilience?
  • How do you reflexively support others and how impactful is it?
  • What would a more valuable support system look like?

2:55-3:10          Activity

Pair up into groups of three. For fifteen minutes, each person will take 5 minutes in each of the three roles.

Role #1: Share frustration around trying to stimulate morale through community building activities.

Role #2: Identify the want, need, or protective mechanism creating frustration. Offer your feedback in a manner that stimulates awareness of this while reducing resistance.

Role #3: Observe the process and provide feedback to both people about how you experience the impact of the support.

3:10-3:15          Debrief in large group.

3:15-3:20          Recommendations (Takeaways)

  1. Experiment with how you offer support with at least one time this week with a co-worker, friend or family member.
  2. When venting/sharing with another person about your own duress, consider if the feedback you received was meaningful or what could have been different.

3:20-3:25          DATA (RQ)

  • One volunteer to share their screen to show how their resilience is progressing.
  • One volunteer to share their screen to show how their district’s aggregate resilience is progressing.
  • Rewards & Incentives

3:25-3:30          Upcoming Web Events

 

Jan

Agenda

  • DATA
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience, Adaptability & Stress
  • Homework
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

  • DATA
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Stress
  • Mental Health Deep Dive
  • Homework
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

  • DATA
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Wellness
  • Homework
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

  • DATA
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & PSEL
  • Homework
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

  • Write your definition of SEL?
  • How does SEL affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • How does SEL influence your overall resilience?
  • How do you improve your SEL skills?
  • Which SEL skills would you see as weakest and strongest for you?

May

Agenda

  • DATA
  • Facilitation Skills: Managing Resistance
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & School Climate
  • Homework
Climate: Climate is one of three dimensions of school culture, influencing organizational health, representing the intangible feeling we get in a classroom or school. Trust, morale, communication, decision making, safety, effort, creativity, fun and other human factors creating a tone in our work environment. Climate includes how curious we are to embrace diversity within our environment, celebrating new ideas to promote innovation.

 

Activity

  • Write your definition of climate? How does it differ from culture?
  • How does a school’s climate affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • How does climate influence your overall resilience?
  • What do you do to improve your class climate? School climate
  • What would it take improve your class and school climate?

Jun

Agenda

  • DATA
  • Restoration, Wrap-up & Planning
  • Clinical Topic: Resilience & Values
Values: The principles we hold as important for how we live, influencing how we make decisions and interact with others. Being generous for instance is a value determined by our beliefs (that giving is important), priorities (to be selfless), and wants/needs (to develop intimacy). Different from a moral or life lesson , values are not imperatives for how we believe others ‘should’ live (think morality) nor are they judgments about how people act, but a reflection of our own enduring measure of self-accountability. There are universal similarities for values such as courage, that we all may agree upon but where they fall on our list or how well we operationalize them is unique to us as individuals.

 

Warm Up

  • Write your definition of values? (Differences from morals and ethics?)
  • What make values important?
  • How do values influence your overall resilience?
  • How do your values affect your ability to get your needs met?
  • What do you do to remain aware of your values?
  • What would it take periodically review and update your values?

 

Activity

  • Which of your values has helped bolster your resilience and how?
  • If you were to elevate a newish value, what would it be and why?
  • How will you attend to values and the role in RQ moving forward?
  • Click on this link to open up the final activity.
  • If there is time, since values are a part of RQ, which we want for students, what is the role of the school in promoting values?

Questions? We'd love to hear from you!

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