Just Keep Swimming, Swimming, Swimming!

One of my favourite units to teach is the resilience unit in Year 12 Health. The purpose of the unit is for the students to become more aware of some of the risk and protective factors that are present in our lives (things that make it more difficult and things that help you to be resilient when you are faced with a difficult change respectively), and to learn different strategies to implement to increase one's resilience. Two years ago, while I was teaching this unit for the first time, I was needing to be quite resilient myself. I wrote this post exploring some resources I read/watched related to resiliency. I also was a guest blogger for #slowchathealth last year, emphasising that mental health is not equal to mental illness... 

Last year for the first time, I had an outside speaker come into my Year 12 class, Zac Franich, to share his story. The students responded incredibly well to this. They were attentive and respectful, and I think many developed greater empathy - which is a major goal for the unit. I want the students to develop a greater understanding of what people may be facing day to day, when they may have no knowledge that they are facing that. I want them to have more sympathy for others when they are sharing their stories - even if to them that story does not seem like a big deal, as for some it may be a massive deal. To actually feel empathetic, even if they are a stranger. 

As a result of the great response to having a guest speaker, I decided to develop most of the learning around risk and protective factors through several speakers this year. We have had 7 people visit us and share their stories when they've needed to manage changes in their lives (5 in school and 2 from outside). Their stories have varied from more low level  scenario such as being left in a flat on their own with no money to pay the rent, to an extreme of a family member murdered. Because the speakers used up a lot of class time I asked the students for their thoughts on having this many. Every student valued having a range of guest speakers, to hear about the things they have been challenged by, and many commented on enjoying such a variety of stories - so we will definitely be repeating that in the future!

Some of the strategies we have practiced as a class (whilst having access to no devices) has been socialising through games (such as Jenga and Last Card), mindfulness/visualisation scripts, colouring in/drawing, creating stressful day to do lists to come back to and sleeping. Yes, I give my students time to have a nap in class! In addition I have shared further places students can learn more or access further support, such as The Lowdown and Reach Out. As a class, we also brainstormed some other strategies we can use to help ourselves or others when feeling down or stressed or facing a big change in our lives.

For the assessment, many schools ask students to interview someone and then describe their risk and protective factors and explain the strategies they used. Instead of this, at Orewa the students develop their own characters through a series of diary entries. I really enjoy reading these entries, because most of the students are quite creative and craft some amazing stories. Slightly less than a quarter of the students said they would have preferred to interview someone instead of creating their own character because that would be 'more real life', so possibly in the future the students could have a choice. Especially because there were ample opportunities to chat with the speakers in class. 

The students write and submit their internal this week, so it'll be interesting to see what their results are like, after such positive feedback and high engagement in class. I'm particularly interested to compare this year's results to last year's, as this is the target unit for 2020 to increase achievement. For the mean time, check out some of the students' comments below! I'm especially proud of comments related to feeling comfortable and supported in the class. And as Dory sings, "just keep swimming!"