Effective wellbeing assessments focus on positive psychology attributes of human flourishing not merely depression screenings, and include the entire school community—parents, teachers, and school leaders.
Action Number 2 – Train teachers in self across the curriculum
To experience self-knowledge is the height of social-emotional capacity and the most direct path to wellbeing. Therefore, educators require a tool bag of approaches to impact the self of their students.
One research-based best practice available to teachers that effectively combines wellbeing into classroom curricula is the Self Across the Curriculum. The Self Across the Curriculum has two goals: to teach self-knowledge through academic content and to use self-knowledge to connect with the content more thoroughly and deeply. This type of teaching and learning requires an internal focus versus an external one; it drives the learner to look inward first, to know one’s self and attain a sense of purpose, dreams, moral center, and personal strengths, so as to literally create or construct one’s self.
Related: Why students’ emotional well-being in school is tied to their success
School-aged children with psychological wellbeing have a lower risk of mental-health disorders and physical health diagnoses such as depression, obesity, cutting, substance abuse, and bullying, among others. As such, wellbeing is an important protective factor to impart in a child’s life. Education leaders have the moral obligation to take action today just in time to meet the needs of today’s children.
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