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According to a newspaper report out of Canberra, schools could leave themselves open to being sued if their students are cyber-bullied inside school grounds. Amy Dwyer and Patricia Easteal, from the University of Canberra published their paper, Cyber Bullying in Australian Schools: The question of negligence and liability, and applied existing laws to cyber [...]
Following last week’s column regarding Random Acts of Kindness, I received a lot of correspondence asking me how we implemented the activity. So I thought I would share exactly how we did the RAK activity at our school. We did the activity with fifty Year 10 students. We secretly assigned each member [...]
“Why should I be nice to people? They aren’t nice to me...” This is a common response from adolescents when I try and engage them in the notion of being “kind.” Researchers will tell us that because of the adolescent brain, the teaching of such concepts need to demonstrate: “What’s in it for me?” [...]
If you can use your strengths in the service of something greater than yourself, many psychologists will tell you that this is a key predictor of wellbeing. They refer to it as having a sense of purpose or meaning. Recently I’ve been working with schools to push their thinking in this regard. What [...]
Never mind that, why do adults tweet? I’m an avid member of the Twitterati… and I tend to roll my eyes when I hear people dismissing it as nothing more than a window into the narcissistic lives of celebrities. A recent piece of research by the Youth Affairs Council of Victoria (YACVic) revealed the [...]
I have a saying that my teaching colleagues will be able to appreciate. Interesting kids have very interesting parents. I spent the past two years resisting invitations from schools to give parent talks. My reasoning was that whilst after 15+ years teaching, I can speak with some authority with regards to working with school students, [...]
Last year, I took twenty Year 11 students on a mountain biking camp. We rode through the Stromlo Forest in Canberra by day, and camped in sub zero temperatures by night. It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve really appreciated some of the analogies I could draw between by experiences mountain biking [...]
Over the past 10 years, the research company Gallup have surveyed over a million US students with regard to their strengths, levels of hope and engagement and their wellbeing. Gallup recently published their Student Success Model in which they described some of the wellbeing factors that impact on success. 1. Strengths identification remains as simple as [...]
I believe that being genuinely engaged does wonders for your wellbeing. One of the determinants of engagement is a level of independence, or autonomy. Schools go to great lengths to give students (and teachers) the impression that they encourage independence. However, in the scheme of things, most of what occurs at school is prescribed for [...]
In the US, at least 9% of schoolchildren are on medication for ADHD. In Australia it is estimated that 11% of children and adolescents fulfill the criteria for ADHD. In France the figure is .5%. As in POINT five. Half a percent. Why is this? Well, first of all the way in which French psychiatrists [...]
