Trauma Informed Positive Education
Campbell House School strives to be a centre for excellence having embedded trauma informed positive education practices into all areas of the school. We weave several programs throughout our classes as an overarching umbrella across teaching and learning. These include:
Character Strengths
Character strengths are positive traits/capacities of personality that impact how you think, feel, and behave. Character strengths are different than your other personal strengths such as your unique skills, talents, interests, and resources because they reflect the ‘real’ you – who you are at your core. Everyone possesses all 24-character strengths in different degrees. At Campbell House we use the VIA Character Strengths survey to determine students’ strengths and utilise language aligned to the strengths to showcase when students are observed using the range of strengths. This includes using the language through reports, awards, behaviour interventions and throughout teaching and learning programs.
PERMA(H)
Martin Seligmen suggests that wellbeing is cultivated by the presence in our lives of positive emotion (P), engagement (E), relationships (R), meaning (M), accomplishment (A), and Health (h).
Positive emotion: The right balance of heartfelt positivity to boost our resilience.
Engagement: The regular development of our strengths, being in FLOW (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).
Relationships: The creation of authentic, energising connections.
Meaning: A sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves.
Accomplishment: The belief and ability to do the things that matter most to us.
Health: Eating well, moving regularly, sleeping deeply.
At Campbell House School staff have engaged in professional learning to understand the PERMA(H) domains and build strategies and interventions to bring these domains to life to support students to reach a state of flourishing and growth.
GEM
At Campbell House we deliver educaonal lessons through the Resilience Projects Gratude Empathy and Mindfulness (GEM) program.
Gratude involves paying atenon to the things we have right now and not worrying about what we do not have. We pracce gratude by nocing the posives around us.
Empathy involves pung ourselves in the shoes of others so we can feel what they are feeling. We pracce empathy by being kind and compassionate towards other people.
Mindfulness involves our ability to be calm and in the present moment. We pracse mindfulness by slowing down and concentrang on one thing at a me.
Emoonal literacy involves our ability to label our emoons, which helps us to soen negave emoons and find posive emoons. We pracce emoonal literacy by labelling our emoons as we experience them.
Restorative Practice
Restorative Practice is a whole school teaching and learning approach that encourages behaviour that is supportive and respectful. Individuals are held accountable for their behaviours and are guided through a process to repair any harm caused to others as a result of their actions. The restorative practice approach algins directly to our school motor of building, maintaining, and restoring positive relationships particularly during interpersonal conflict. At Campbell House we implement restorative practice through informal means, circles, social-emotional learning, conflict resolution, and peer mediation.
More information can be found here:
https://education.nsw.gov.au/student-wellbeing/attendance-behaviour-and-engagement/behaviour-support-toolkit/support-for-teachers/restorative-practices/restorative-practices
Berry Street Educational Model
The Berry St Education Model (BSEM) equips schools with practical classroom-based strategies to increase engagement of all students, including those with complex, unmet learning needs. At Campbell House all school staff have been trained in and often have completed refresher or masterclass courses in the 5 BSEM domains.
Body – How to help your students to regulate their stress response, de-escalate in school and classroom contexts and provide strategies for increased focus.
Relationship – Positive relational classroom management strategies that promote on-task learning.
Stamina – How to create a culture of academic persistence in your classroom by nurturing student resilience, emotional intelligence, and a growth mindset.
Engagement – How to motivate students with strategies that increase their willingness to learn.
Character – How to harness our values and character strengths approach for effective learning and for future pathways.
The five domains correspond with child-development capacities that each student must grow in order to be ‘ready to learn’. When considering how to best meet the needs of students, we focus on building self-regulatory ability and relational capacity, and then nurture wellbeing and willingness to engage in learning. At Campbell House School we embed the practical strategies and implement evidence based research into teaching and learning to provide opportunities for students to access and flourish in a learning environment.
RRR +
Campbell House School has created based of evidence based positive education practices a program called Triple R+. This program is an intensive individual support program for targeted at risk and high need students using trauma informed positive education (TIPE).
Regulate: Utilise individualised strategies to de-escalate to an appropriate level, ready for communication. Can be done independently or with support.
Reflect: Supported or independent reflection around incidents focusing on; perspectives, actions and impacts on others.
Restore: Utilising a trauma informed, positive education and therapeutic mental health approach, the RRR+ team use the students character strengths and restorative practice to unpack, address and understand their behaviours and bodies responses. Work is then done to repair relationships with staff and students as required.
Return: Intensive support is provided to formulate targeted strategies to enable them to successfully re-engage with their learning, using enhance self-regulatory skills and repairing relationships where appropriate.
Students engage in individual, whole class and as-needed lessons to develop awareness of emotions, feelings, and how the brain responds in different circumstances. In this space students are provided with strategies to regulate themselves and taught skills to restore and strengthen relationships that may have been damaged due to inappropriate behaviours. Students engage in lessons based on healthy relationships, personal care, drug and alcohol awareness, anger management and other holistic wellbeing practices.
