News
At the start of the project, we started working with young people from the Flemish Youth Concil. Now it was teachers' turn. Teachers from Belgium wrote letters to their pupils, which produced a nice result. Definitely check it out.
The teachers themselves found it inspiring and took it further within their schools.
The first pilot of our teacher training programme took off in Belgium. Teachers tried out the toolbox and gave feedback. Below response from teachers:
"A toolbox where you can find many topics and try them out immediately!"
"I learned that, as a teacher, you can also talk about well-being in the classroom in a low-threshold way, without dealing with heavy issues."
"Well-being should be talked about more often in the classroom, thank you for the tools you gave us."
We are developing the training further and will take all feedback on board!
Meanwhile, we are busy developing the toolbox. We are very happy to show you our first draft of the visual. All together, we decided to divide the toolbox into 4 topics that work in a staircase system. Below we can already give you some teasers, more info will follow soon.
How to flourish; here we focus on awareness of e.g. emotions or lifestyle, we focus on accessible exercises on self-compassion, mindfulness and group dynamics that you can use in the classroom.
How to deal with challenges; here we will focus on e.g. relaxation exercises, emotion regulation, dealing with social media and conflicts.
Learning about mental illness; here we get to know signals about mental health problems, we develop a kind of file that helps you identify signals and give you knowledge.
How to find help/support; here we look for addresses to refer, but we also look at how this can be done communicatively.
We met again, this time in Tallinn. During our meeting, we looked at how to use social media for our project and which schools are participating in the pilot of the teacher training. We went into content and started developing the toolbox and teacher training. Finally, we looked at where all the dissemination opportunities lie.
Our partner of Basque country had the lead of developing an informational brochure aimed primarily at teachers, containing information on mental health in the context of secondary education in a concise way.
You can find it here.
We merged all national reports into one transnational report. With these, we continue to work on developing the toolbox and training.
You can read it here.
Each partner developed a national report about mental health in the context of secondary education. The reports focusses on possibilities of teachers to positively impact their student’s mental health. In this stage, we want to find out what exactly are the problems in regard to mental health in the context of secondary education, and what teachers can do to strengthen mental health and well-being of their students.
With the sentence: “It’s okay not to feel okay”, we want to commit to raising awareness among young people who are mentally unwell as our mission statement reflects changing the attitude and reducing stigma.
It was important to hear everyone's voice. Therefore, we looked for ways to hear the voices of both young people and school professionals. We conducted interviews, but also looked for other ways to identify issues.
We looked for needs, barriers, good practices, …
In Belgium, an interactive focus group was organised during the holidays. However, there were numerous young people present, which once again reflects the need.
Curious about an example of a letter from a young person? You can find it here.
We were very happy that the project could start. We met further in Cologne and brainstormed for the first work packages. Here you can find some examples of what was on the program.