The importance of supporting students’ wellbeing for enhancing learning and social and emotional development is well established. Nurturing students’ wellbeing in safe, supportive and inclusive school and home environments assists children and young people to be resilient, confident and lifelong learners.
Resilient and confident students not only perform better academically but are more likely to develop and maintain healthy, positive relationships and make responsible lifestyle choices.
Educators, parents, and children and young people themselves all have a role to play as part of a whole school approach to supporting the wellbeing and mental health of all Queensland state school students.
Click on the links below to access specific information about how to support students’ wellbeing and mental health.
- Information for parents, including:
- strategies for supporting your child’s wellbeing and mental health
- getting support for your child’s wellbeing and mental health
- responding to traumatic events.
- Information for students, including:
- supporting your wellbeing and staying safe
- looking out for your mental health
- where to get support for your wellbeing and mental health.
- Information for school staff, including:
- departmental resources
- providing support
- external support agencies.
Rochedale's Student Wellbeing and Wellbeing Framework.pdf
Social and Emotional Learning - Switch 4 Schools
We continue to engage in a whole school implementation of Switch 4 Schools, a social and emotional learning program to support student learning and wellbeing.
The key objectives of the program are to help you to help the students develop the skills and confidence to be able to regulate their own emotions effectively, all while helping you to use psychology to better manage the classroom learning environment.
There are two key components to the program:
- Check Ins – A short survey completed by the students (and you if you choose to) to encourage identifying and labelling emotions. We recommend doing check ins daily, habit stacked on an existing practice such as taking the roll, but you can choose to facilitate this process as often as you like. This data will give you an insight into the student’s normal emotional rhythms, and what the energy in the room currently is.
- Switches – These short interventions or strategies are built on best practice psychological principles to actively manage emotional reactivity. These can be done either individually or in groups depending on how you want to integrate these practices into your routines. Supporting lesson plans have been provided to assist with introducing the concepts and demonstrate why and how the switches work to manage emotions. You’ll even find additional articles and reading to deepen your understanding we hope you find of interest.
What does the program do?
It is a program facilitated by teachers to support their students to build social and emotional skills in a practical and fun way. Students are asked to “check in” to self-report on how they are feeling, and can access “switches” to learn some strategies for managing their emotions more effectively.
How do teachers use the Switch4Schools program?
Students are asked to self-report their emotional state and energy level via a periodic “check-in” survey, which is aggregated for the teacher to determine if the class is in an emotional state that are ready to learn.
The students are also encouraged to explore and practice switching techniques either individually or as a class, addressing both class behaviour management strategies and the national curriculum expectations related to delivering social and emotional learning (SEL). There are around 100 switches and activities that can be used at the class or individual level to improve social and emotional capabilities (these can be accessed by the general public by selecting “login” on the website, and the “browse without login” option).
In addition, the longitudinal data compares individual students self-reported emotional data with level of tiredness to look for trends and opportunities to help.