Aims

The core aims of our school staff workshops are:

• To assist staff in developing habits of self-compassion: Habits of self-compassion help to protect against burn-out and to build resilience. Research demonstrates that self-compassion is linked to increased psychological wellbeing and decreased anger, depression and anxiety. Self-compassion increases a sense of social relatedness and general life satisfaction.
• To help staff develop their skills of validation. Validation means compassionately acknowledging the truth in another person’s experience. It doesn’t mean accepting behaviour that is inappropriate. Validation skills can be taken back into the classroom and used to model and nurture pro-social values within existing activities.

Format

The Creating Space Project sessions are highly flexible and can be tailored to suit particular themes, for example, the values of your school or a relevant issue, or a particular setting.

• We offer one-off experiences as well as series of workshops.
• We currently host one NESA endorsed course Burnout Prevention: Mind-Body Skills for Teachers. Please note that, in order for teachers to receive NESA PD hours, delivery of the course is less flexible.

What happens in a group?

CSP uses frameworks of narrative therapy and mindfulness. Narrative therapy facilitates storytelling as a way of understanding and learning from experience. Mindfulness facilitates ways of intentionally paying attention in the present moment.

Storytelling is one of the ways in which we make meaning of the world. In a Creating Space Project group, storytelling is used to understand experiences such as prejudice and exclusion. Participants get the chance to tell stories of their own experiences and to practise mindfully listening to and acknowledging other people’s experiences.

These stories are then explored in various ways, including open-ended discussion and creative processes, such as art or drama. This exploration draws out and reinforces participants’ core values. This practice of making values explicit and visible supports teachers’ existing ways of interacting with students in ways that match their values, and helps teachers identify ways of promoting those values in a class setting.

Social Enterprise

A portion of a fee paid by a school or organisation to the Creating Space Project enables Ruth and Jodie to deliver workshops with marginalised community groups. As such, in simply booking the Creating Space Project, a school is directly putting into practise the values we are endeavouring to nurture. 

Note: Our programs draw from Alfie Kohn’s (1997) How Not to Teach Values: A Critical Look at Character Education), as well as the body of research into developmental and social psychology.

Burnout Prevention: 
Mind-Body Skills for Teachers