What is our wellbeing kaupapa?
We’ve followed NZIWR’s ‘learn it, live it, teach it, embed it’ mantra as a process to implement and embed a whole-school approach to positive mental health and wellbeing at WHS. This meant that our mahi began with staff in 2018 and then we began to roll it out to students in the second half of 2020. It is an ongoing kaupapa and there is always mahi to be done. Wakatipu High School aims to keep student wellbeing at the forefront of what we do, believing that students cannot learn or achieve their potential without a strong sense of wellbeing. While there are multiple ways to conceptualise and measure wellbeing, we’ve adopted Felicia Huppert’s ‘feeling good and functioning well’ as a succinct and useful definition of wellbeing. It is useful to note that this definition doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re happy all the time and doesn’t mean that we won’t experience tough times. We focus on the concept of positive education by teaching skills that assist staff and students to build up their kete of resources in order to strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, adopt a strengths-based approach, enhance personal resilience, promote a growth mind-set and encourage a healthy lifestyle. In support of this, we partnered with the Wellbeing Student Council to develop our own WHS model of wellbeing which we refer to with staff and students. Our students and staff sourced inspiration for this model from the Mental Health Foundation’s ‘Five Ways to Wellbeing’, Sir Mason Durie’s ‘Te Whare Tapa Whā’ model, and our beautiful whenua here in Tāhuna, Queenstown: |
Some of the successes so far:
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