What is your thrive plan?

Geri Sumpter

Welcome, everybody. It’s really great to have you back joining us for our final session of day one of our Virtual Conference 2023. For those who didn't see me there, so I'm Geri Sumpter and I'm the head of Be You delivery at Beyond Blue. I'm delighted to be joined by two of my peers. This is Louis and Tina.

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

Hi, Geri, hi everyone. My name is Louis Hamlin-Harris, and I am the Be You Executive Manager for Early Childhood Australia. I've got a page full of notes. I'm really excited to reflect on the conference today.

 

Tina Martin

Hi, I'm Tina Martin. I'm the Be You Strategic Relationships Manager. I've really enjoyed today too Louis. So, I'm like you, I've got lots of notes. And I'm sure everybody out there has too so let's have a good conversation.

 

Geri Sumpter

Yeah, fantastic. So as Louis and Tina have alluded to, there, we are here for a conversation and reflection on what we've heard today, and also open to getting your questions.

So, if you do have a question for us, please feel free to put that in the chat. And we'll try to answer a few as we go through our session this afternoon. But also, be able to get back to you with any that we don't get the opportunity to feedback on immediately.

Before we do get started with this next session, I just wanted to briefly mention our virtual booths. So, the virtual booths are a new opportunity that we put forward through the conference this year. I understand they've been extremely busy, which is a very exciting prospect, those virtual booths are an opportunity for us to speak directly with one of our Be You Consultants and ask them a question.

As I said, it's been busy in there. So, if you were to try to join one of our virtual booths, and you didn't get the chance to speak to a Consultant, our team are going to put a link in the chat in our website as an opportunity for you to pop your question in and allow a Consultant to feedback to you personally with the answer to that question.

No one misses out. I'm sorry, if you didn't get the chance to pop into the booth. But please feel free to still ask your questions. And hopefully, that's gone into the chat for you.

One of the things to point out with the booth is that you enter by clicking on one of the yellow bAnners that you might see in your timeline, or on the access page to the conference. Clicking into a session that's through a white bAnner. So, the booths are the yellow bAnner, the sessions are the white bAnner, so please be mindful of which you click in so you're getting the right opportunities at the right time as well. If you've got any more questions about the booth, please feel free to pop that into the chat.

So, Louis, and Tina, let's reflect on what we've heard today.

There's been a lot that kind of really helps us think about what our Thrive plans might be for ourselves and for the learning communities that were associated with. So, the first sort of point for reflection is around recognising our individual and collective needs, and what it takes for a whole learning community to thrive. So, Louis, I'll throw to you to start with, what's your reflection?

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

Yeah, I really enjoyed Dr. Kelly Ann’s session at the beginning, I think kicking off a conference like this by talking about belonging is actually a really powerful stake in the ground. Belonging is such an important concept in early childhood, obviously, our Early Years Learning Framework is called, you know, belonging being becoming.

And I think part of what committing to belonging is about it's about saying that childhood, early childhood, young adulthood is a stage of life. Right. It's actually not just preparation for university for what's next for the workforce.

But I was really struck, and I'm curious, your thoughts, Tina, some of the feedback that Dr. Kelly Ann shared, I found really fascinating, you know, for example, that the number one self-reported driver of young people's wellbeing in school context, was teacher support/educator support in the back, did that. catch you off guard? A little bit?

 

Tina Martin

Yeah, I was a little bit surprised, Louis, certainly, thinking about it in the context of teenagers. You know, we always say their peers are the more important group. And so for me, I thought, Oh, that was interesting, because that didn't come up. Like the teacher engagement, or the teacher support was higher than their peers, which I thought was very interesting.

 

Geri Sumpter

Yeah. Really interesting. And, and I was reflecting as well with Tina and Louis earlier in saying that my daughter has just transitioned from school, where she felt a very strong sense of belonging, and I could see it through all of the factors that Dr. Kelly Ann mentioned.

And now it's transitioned to university where some of those factors have been taken away for her and she's having to re-find her belonging. And I'm actually now glad that I've got a name for what's happening with her. It's quite nice to kind of go away and have that conversation with her and she's transitioned on as well. So, it’s important, but we have to consider in this space.

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

It's that important reminder about voice, right? I think Dr Kelly Anne did such an important job of bringing children and young people's voices into the conversation and the answers we get aren't always what we expect.

The other thing that jumped out to me is when Dr Kelly Anne threw to the group and asked the audience to share what promotes their sense of belonging, there's a real theme in the responses around the sense of a connection to something bigger than ourselves. Julia Gillard talked about a connection to purpose.

And it made me reflect, you know, sometimes we think about wellbeing as doing less about, you know, taking it easy, relaxing, and sometimes it obvious, it's right, if you're, if your workload is way too high, you probably do need to do less. But we also know that, you know, drivers of wellbeing include things like job satisfaction, a sense of accomplishment, a sense of meaning. And Caroline talked about, you know, a human right to a meaningful occupation. So yeah, really interesting, multi-dimensional ways of thinking about belonging and wellbeing.

 

Tina Martin

I think the other thing for me was that importance of the educators. You know, their role in this as sort of, you know, the coordinators, the watchers, the kind of ones that, bring it all together. And, and often I think, as children get older, as an educator, you might feel like you've got less impact or less involvement, but in actual fact, I think it's probably greater based on some of the conversations that have happened today. And for we shouldn't lose sight of that.

 

Geri Sumpter

Yeah, absolutely. And going back to, to what she was talking about, at the start, where she was talking about, even babies, and those very young children, and creating those opportunities for belonging for them, and how that plays out. So, Louis I'm interested in your thoughts around that.

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

Yeah, well, that's attachment theory, like we explore the world, because we have a secure base to come back to. So yeah, I mean, such a central idea.

And I loved some of the really practical things - she taught to write, you know, we can actually have a dialogue with a preverbal child with an infant with a very young child, right. But we need to approach that interaction a little differently, probably need to slow down a little bit. We need to leave some tarry time, you know, someone in their chat was talking about the kind of serve and response way of thinking about interactions.

So again, yeah, I think actually, probably, we've got a lot to learn from educators who work with infants and toddlers. And that, yeah, that that's that how central belonging is, I think, to our ability to connect with others, but also to be able to go out into the world and kind of make it our own.

 

Tina Martin

And, you know, we know that relationships are really important in our ability to be resilient. And while it was a fantastic presentation by Caroline around what resiliency is, and what it means for us, but that fundamentally that connection, whether it be belonging, relationships, whatever it is, that does, you know, definitely feed into our ability to cope with things that come our way and our mental wellbeing.

 

Geri Sumpter

Absolutely. I think the other thing that really struck me about the importance of belonging was around that necessity to really find those opportunities to think about those protective and preventative approaches, and being intentional about doing so.

So, giving people the opportunity to explore those skills that they might learn through that belonging in those spaces. So, I wonder because there was a lot in the chats. And obviously it's going to develop the resource that we mentioned around those practical strategies. But from both of your experiences, what are some of the practical strategies that might be employed, or you've seen work well, to sort of create those opportunities to strengthen belonging?

 

Tina Martin

Well, I think for me, having a welcoming environment is, which, again, taps into a bit about that sense about occupation, person environment, but you know, to walk into a place where you feel like, you know, we want you to be here and, and I know, people's experiences might be different. But for me, I know when my son went from childcare to school, you know, it was like you leave them at the school gate, where at childcare, I was much more involved in, like the University example. And I'm generalising, obviously, but to have an environment where you feel like you can actually go past the school gate or, you know, into the Uni and have a conversation, I think is really important about feeling like I can see myself here.

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

Yeah, I mean, I think about we talk about early childhood education and care, right? And because those two things actually have a really strong relationship, and we say sometimes, you know, care is the curriculum, right?

And so, again, you know, thinking about the wonderful work that so many infant toddler educators do around really treating caregiving routines, we might think of them as rituals, right? So, you know, mealtimes, nappy changes, rest times, right?

As opportunities to really slow down to invite cooperation and participation, and to build that sense of connection and belonging. And you can think about that again, right? In terms of a kind of attachment model, right? Those are the kinds of ways we fill children's tank or we pour children's cup, so that they can then go out and do more of that self-directed, self-driven play. Yeah.

 

Geri Sumpter

Yeah. And that, that all sounds good and if there's any questions to come through that you pop those into the chat. And let's move on to another topic. So, the next thing to discuss is around exploring how going beyond self-care can build capacity in our diverse learning communities.

And one of the things that really stood out for me in this space was around, you know, culture is everything, which then ties back to your belonging, the enjoyment, and you're getting your space, and the benefits and, and the role of that, you know, the leadership in sort of developing that culture and setting that tone.

And I was thinking about that in, in reflection of our new Educator Wellbeing Guide, which is a leadership tool, but it is really inclusive to be used with all of the team that's, that's at the school or early learning service. Because it is around collecting the information from the people working in that, in that environment, say, what is it that you need? What is it that you feel we need to do? What should we as a collective look at that whole of learning community approach? So yeah, keen for your reflections.

 

Tina Martin

Interesting for me, I was also quite fascinated about the importance of words, and having a shared understanding about what words mean, not that there's a right or wrong definition. But there's a shared understanding. And I'm thinking, Geri, you know, when you talk about the Educator Wellbeing Guide, that is another way of making sure that you have a shared language in your learning community around what does it look like for us? So, you know, that was the thing that I took from it was, was the importance of language.

 

Geri Sumpter

And I think it's also sort of along with the language comes the conversation. And it's that conversation prompt that well, if you're, you know, if we're talking about language, you're going to have the right conversation.

 

 

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

I also, Geri, had the Educator Wellbeing Guide kind of playing in the back of my mind throughout today. Because one of the themes of that guidance, a theme, I think, of so many of today's sessions, right, is that educator wellbeing is an individual benefit, but it's also a social responsibility. It's a collective responsibility. And it really is both things, right.

And I think Dr. Kelly Anne, and the panel did a really good job of establishing that the educator is, sorry, the individual is still important, right? There are things that only I can do to take care of my own wellbeing. But we can also think collectively, and we can think about what our responsibilities are to one another, such that when things get hard, we kind of get through them together. And I'm glad that you mentioned leaders and leadership, right?

Because you don't stop being a human being when you become a leader, right, you still have wellbeing needs. And I think it's really important that we talk about leaders’ wellbeing and prioritise it. I love that Julia Gillard talked about saying no. My experience of being a service director, and this would certainly be true of you know, school principals and people in leadership positions in schools, is that the job never finishes. Right. There's always something more to do. But you know, if Julia Gillard can say no, then I can probably say no too, right? So that boundary setting I think, is a really important thing to think about.

 

Tina Martin

And I think one of the challenges I've experienced, and I'm sure I'm not alone, is when you're a leader, you feel like you can't be necessarily open around your own wellbeing needs. And you know, you might feel like you can't say I'm having a bad day today, and I need your support, because you've got this leadership badge on, but in fact, to be a good leader.

 

Geri Sumpter

A little bit of vulnerability doesn't hurt, does it?

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

It’s that authorising environment, I think, yeah. Where your team then goes, okay, it's okay to say I'm not doing so. I need some help.

 

Geri Sumpter

One of the other things that came up through that Educator Wellbeing session as well as around the Be You Surveys and how they might be used within a school or early learning service. So, what do you hear from your Consultants around the benefits of the use of the surveys?

 

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

The other thing I've been thinking about, and this is a bit, I was going to say obsession, maybe it's a bit of a key concept in Be You is implementation, right.

And implementation is about saying, you can't actually just wake up tomorrow, decide that you want to make change in terms of, you know, mental health in your learning community and snap your fingers and expect great results, right.

But there are actually things that are evidence supported, that we know have a pretty good shot of increasing your chances of making change. That's not only positive change, right? But that's sustainable over time. And often, that process starts with gathering really good information about your learning community, if you don't ask young people, what drives their sense of belonging, you might not know how important that, you know, your role as an educator as a teacher is, right.

So, I think surveys are such a great tool in those early stages. And, you know, as you start to think about change, and implement change, to figure out what your needs are, what your goals are, what barriers and enablers you might face. And it gives you something that you can come back to over time, it gives you the snapshot, that's really helpful in terms of setting measures of success. And you know, revisiting later.

 

Tina Martin

I certainly know in the school environment, they're used frequently, for very similar reasons, obviously.

So, I agree with you, you know, one of the strengths of the Be You initiative is obviously the evidence base. And the survey is another example of an evidence base, it's an evidence base for your learning community. And you use that in conjunction with all the other resources that are available with Be You, then you've got a great foundation to start on.

 

Geri Sumpter

Absolutely. It's around that gathering that initial data, isn't it, and anything that’s data informed is going to give you outcomes that are actually reflective of your needs at the time. So, absolutely agree.

I'm going move on to the next topic, which was around resilience. I loved the resilience of Caroline in that session. So, apologies for the technical challenges that we had there. But, but seeing sort of the comments coming through in the chat saying, I've missed some crucial information at the start, we need to see this, it was lovely to then see your reflections that this had worked well, for us to sort of reset that session, and show Caroline sort of going back through, you know, the information that was critical to the understanding.

So, reflecting on resilience and what it means for educators. Yet again, I think a lot of this came down to words in this session for me, and resilience is one of those words, as has been described that some people really resonated with, and some people got very turned off from.

And there was one thing that was, that was said, are we talking about bouncing back? Or is it better to talk about moving forwards? And I really love that concept. So, I'm going to reflect on that a little bit myself. But interested in what your thoughts were.

 

Tina Martin

I thought that was a really good kind of conversation about bouncing back. Because it is, we don't always want to go back to where we were.

Because we're about learning and moving forward. And whatever that might look like for people will be different than I actually thought yes, you're absolutely right. Are we trying to do what we've always done, which in some ways, can be stagnant, not current, you know, all of those sorts of things.

I am definitely triggered by the word resilience. I don't know why, but it's just that I think, through COVID, you know, was used so often, in so many different contexts that it sort of lost a common understanding of what the word was for me. And so that's why I kind of react to it. But yes, I thought that was really, again, important to think about. That's actually a personal response for me. And if I'm a leader, I need to be mindful of that.

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

And that's why I think Caroline's word cloud was such a good kind of empathetic exercise. I'm a bit like you I when I hear resilience, I hear put up.

And so, it's interesting again, you know, to go back to some of the definitions of wellbeing and our Educator Wellbeing Guide, for example, because wellbeing is not the absence of sadness, or adversity, right. Because those things are parts of life. It's the ability to cope to you know, absorb those experiences into your story, right and to tilt towards optimism and towards hope.

 

Geri Sumpter

I had another one with that that was from that session that said, you can build resilience and be resilient, but still experience stress. I think it's really important to recognise that because it's not that you live in this lovely stress-free life, it's that you've got the strategies at play to support you through those times as well.

I also loved the occupational therapy model that was put forward, the the PEO model is something that is, is really helpful to think about. And, you know, thinking about the person, those personal qualities to build resilience, but then those environmental needs and benefits to build resilience.

And then what is it that you're doing? What's occupying your time, and I think having that description as well around, you know, occupational therapists around what's occupying your time was really helpful. So keen to hear your thoughts on any of the three aspects of that PEO model, and then any strategies that you've got at play or thought about from today?

 

Tina Martin

I thought it was very accessible, you know, I liked the model as well. It kind of resonated with me straight away without me having to think about it, you know. And I think it tapped back into one of the things that I think has been happening today, which is really around wellbeing, being layered or holistic, or, you know, it's not just about you as an individual. It's about the culture in which you're working in, it's about the sectors and structures that we operate within. Like, it's broader than that. And I think for me, that model would help me think about not just myself, it would help me actively think about those other areas.

 

Geri Sumpter

And again, it comes back to, you know, what we really talked to a lot in Be You is around the whole learning community approach. And I think that model gives you the opportunity for that whole learning community to resilience as a concept.

But then also thinking about, you know, the person in this, that's where again, you can collect data from your entire community to tell you those sorts of things that we can work on as people as a collective within our environments, as well, I thought that was interesting to think about.

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

Those drivers of resilience that Caroline shared, they’re so resonant with the things we know, that build belonging, that build wellbeing. I used to work with this wonderful educator, and she'd say, children are resilient, right. And sometimes we say children are resilient in this kind of glib way, when something goes wrong, or we don't think about our transitions very thoughtfully.

And children come and go, or they get stuck waiting. We know children are resilient. And she'd say, children are resilient. But children's resilience is a precious resource, so don't abuse it. And I thought about that when Caroline was talking about the danger of, you know, when we say, oh, that child's so resilient, right?

Because there's some assumptions and right, what we might actually be saying is, that child doesn't show their emotions in the way that I expect. There's probably some cultural assumptions, we might want to think about thinking about the way experiences of trauma or adversity might have impact on the way we show emotion. So, I thought that part of it was really interesting and really practical too.

 

Tina Martin

And again, the importance of the educator. In picking those things up or, or consciously thinking, yes, this child seems to bounce back over time. Want of a better word, but, you know, what that’s about? Yeah, let's dig a little bit deeper.

 

 

Geri Sumpter

Yeah, absolutely. And I think also with that, it was, it was resonating when Caroline was talking about, you know, she likes to talk things out. And I thought, yep, that's me as well. But I think reflecting on what your needs are, because you talked about your responses, but your needs as well. And what do you need to be able to support your resilience in those different circumstances that we might face? So, Louis, what are some of the things that you need to build your resilience?

 

Louis Hamlyn-Harris

Well, first of all, I really appreciated that message and it came up in the panel, as well, because I think it connects to the idea of professional autonomy, right? Mindfulness, yoga, bowling, these might be wonderful ways to build team culture. They're not going to be for everybody, right?

A very simple thing that we can do is to make sure that we really frame these initiatives as invitations and not as mandates, right. Should we read some of the great feedback? So, Carmen is talking about the human side of being a leader. Again, I think that's really important. I love to learn about more resilient techniques and teach the children to become more resilient in difficult situations.

 

Tina Martin

It was interesting, because I was thinking about the kind of wellbeing and thinking about some of that call to action, which will come up more tomorrow.

But thinking about in the context of the RAP, and the Indigenous and Torres Strait Islander community, and I was thinking, you could argue that we have to heal there first, like that’s our beginning. And if we then embrace that, and have a greater understanding of that, then that should actually help us.

 

Geri Sumpter

Yeah, and where can we move to? So, I think we can summarise and say that today's session, it's clearly given us all food for thought. That's been the same for all of you out there in the audience, as well. And I'm going to give us a little bit of a precis around what we're going to see tomorrow.

So first, we've got another fabulous opening keynote, we've got Rebecca Ray joining us. And I'm really excited for this session, she's going to be talking to us around empowered boundaries for educators.

And I think boundaries are something that we all need to be very mindful of, and we'll be thinking about so. Rebecca is going to give us a fantastic session to kick off tomorrow. Then tomorrow really is all around those, those practical strategies. So again, sort of turning what we learned into action, and getting some outcomes from what we've gone through with our professional development.

So, tomorrow is going to be run a little bit differently, we're going to have different streams for early learning services and schools. Some of the topics, again, are our sub themes of the conference, we've got sessions on educator wellbeing, we've got towards resilience.

So, reflections from disaster impacted communities, and we've got new Professional Learning modules on natural disasters and recovery within Be You for you to all enjoy as well.

We've got a couple of sessions around inclusion, one is called Walk with Me. And the other one is around supporting neurodiversity, and disability inclusion. So again, some fantastic things coming up tomorrow that we hope you all enjoy.

If you want to think about what next from today, so what to do from here as well. We'd love for you to connect with your Be You Consultant. As I said, your Consultants, they're the point of difference for our initiative, they’re there to answer your questions. Our Consultant workforce is absolutely incredible. They're a font of knowledge. And they know all about everything that we're talking about in spades. And they sort of like nuance to your individual settings as well. So please tap into our Consultants.

Our Consultants do lead the Be You implementation sessions. So that's where you can have conversations to ask about your implementation activities around Be You, but also to have conversations around specific topics that have come up.

So, for example, in early learning, we might be talking about looking at how Be You and wellbeing links into international quality frameworks, we might be looking in schools around school refusal, which has been raising its head at the moment, around self-harm in primary school.

So, we've got some really great topics for you to tap into there as well. And then, of course, on our website, we've got all of our planning and implementation tools. And that's everything from our surveys that we mentioned.

And right through to some Fact Sheets and other resources you can look for. We've got plenty that you can do to learn more about Be You, where you can register as a whole learning community to receive that more response. And that's more than the individual learning about Be You, and you can tap into all of our resources that we said. Also tap into our socials, we've got socials, as you can see listed there.

We've also got a brand-new Instagram channel, so please follow us and see the information and see the different information that's tapped across some of the different streams across early learning primary and secondary schools.

So, we're going to leave it there for today.

Thank you everybody for your input. All of your questions, all of your comments. As I said, we'll get back to you with some individual comments as well from questions that have been asked. I look forward to consolidating some of the information that you've seen in some resources for you.

Most of all, we look forward to seeing you all tomorrow as well. So please stay tuned and we'll see you back tomorrow. Have a lovely evening.

End of transcript.