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Resilience and Wellbeing: What works for you
Strategies to support resilience and wellbeing for teams and service
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Catharine Hydon, Early Childhood Consultant
[Catharine Hydon, Early Childhood Consultant]: Hello everyone, my name is Catharine Hydon. In this video, we're once again going to hear from early childhood educators who participated in the survey and the focus groups.
This time they're going to talk about the ways in which their service, their organisations, built in strategies and addressed challenges that focused on resilience and wellbeing.
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Mariam, Coordinator
[Mariam, Coordinator]: "Most of the educators when we speak about them, it's first, initially when we have started this initiative at that time they just took it as, they just pause, okay, what do you mean by that? Like self care? And then we ask, okay what do you do which make you happy, for yourself, not only for your kids, for your families, for the children in your care?"
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Hannah, Educational Leader
[Hannah, Educational Leader]: One thing I would really like to focus on especially after all the difficult times we've all been through recently, is finding ways to really elevate the great little things that happen every day in the centre and in the rooms.
And I think there's so many wonderful, amazing moments and so many things that the children are supported so beautifully with every day.
So I'd really like one of my first projects to be finding ways to really celebrate with the teams the amazing things they're doing every day and find a way to make it visible to families and visitors to the centre as well.
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"Our service helps us to understand work-life balance. To know when to say no and having these boundaries supported by my director and the Ed leader really helps."
Survey Respondent
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[Survey Respondent]: Our service helps us to understand work-life balance. To know when to say no and having these boundaries supported by my director and the Ed leader really helps.
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"To me, having a community is essential for resilience. Belonging, being and becoming isn't just for children."
Survey Respondent
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[Survey Respondent]: To me, having a community is essential for resilience. Belonging, being and becoming isn't just for children.
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"Working in a team who support each other. As soon as that breaks down, it's not a healthy environment for anyone."
Survey Respondent
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[Survey Respondent]: Working in a team who support each other. As soon as that breaks down, it's not a healthy environment for anyone.
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"It's all about the team, not the team you're given but the team you build, at work, online and at events. You need to find your tribe, the space where you belong. It builds you up and keeps you going."
Survey Respondent
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Voice actors have been used to read survey responses
[Survey Respondent]: It's all about the team, not the team you're given but the team you build, at work, online and at events. You need to find your tribe, the space where you belong. It builds you up and keeps you going.
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Megan, Assistant Manager
[Megan, Assistant Manager]: Team building exercises we've done in team meetings before have of okay, tell me three random facts about you and then that opens so many conversations and questions about people.
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Melissa, Early Years Leader
[Melissa, Early Years Leader]: There's useful websites that I do tend to use for myself or I do send out to others. So that's something that I do use quite a bit and just going, I know everybody's different.
So, it is really hard to say, hey, this is going to work for you because it may not work for them. So, it's about really building that relationship with the other person, knowing what they enjoy, and then you're able to obviously tailor it or support them or direct them in the right direction of what may work for them.
[Hannah, Educational Leader]: It's our job as early childhood educators to notice the curiosities of children and build their sense of belonging and their sense of value.
So why wouldn't we do that with our teams and with our educators as well? I think there's a lot of things that we do brilliantly with the children that we need to do more of with ourselves.
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"Making an effort to stay at the same service has helped me. Trust takes time and you can't be resilient by yourself."
Survey Respondent
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[Survey Respondent]: Making an effort to stay at the same service has helped me. Trust takes time and you can't be resilient by yourself.
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"Doing ongoing learning has really helped us connect with our purpose, connect with quality and help with relationships. So in wellbeing, we do things like Be You, reflection. We do extra research and we engage in really good communication. It's all of these strategies together that help us to draw positives from negative experience."
Survey Respondent
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Voice actors have been used to read survey responses
[Survey Respondent]: Doing ongoing learning has really helped us connect with our purpose, connect with quality and help with relationships. So in wellbeing, we do things like Be You, reflection. We do extra research and we engage in really good communication. It's all of these strategies together that help us to draw positives from negative experience.
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"As long as you're learning, it keeps you going."
Survey Respondent
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[Survey Respondent]: As long as you're learning, it keeps you going.
[Catharine Hydon, Early Childhood Consultant]: In a lot of the conversations we've had today, we would encourage you to connect with the available resources that focus on educators' wellbeing and resilience. Especially we'd like to encourage you to connect with Be You
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Be You, BeyondBlue
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Mental health continuum
Flourishing, GoingOK, Struggling, Severely impacting everyday activities
[Catharine Hydon, Early Childhood Consultant]: On the Be You website, there is a number of resources focused particularly on the wellbeing of educators and their resilience.
We encourage you to access those and to talk about them with your colleagues in your own setting. In the survey, you told us about the ways in which organisations leaned into the available resources in the community more broadly, including the Department of Education and Training
And we once again, encourage you to make connections with what's happening locally in your community but also with the resources and materials available through the Victorian Department of Education and Training.
One of the things that might be helpful after watching this video collection is to take time to bring these ideas to a reflective practice discussion.
I encourage you with your colleagues to really think about what it means to build a culture of resilience and wellbeing. Not only for early childhood educators but also for children and their families.
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Summary
- Get to know what works for individuals within your team
- Plan opportunities for connection, collaboration and purpose
- Engage in going professional learning - see the Department's Supporting professional learning and practice webpage
- Focus on Educator Wellbeing - access Be You
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The Education State, Victoria State Government, Education and Training
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Victoria State Government
Authorised by the Victorian Government, Melbourne
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