Title: Help colleagues and students cope and indeed thrive with the life changes wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic
This “project” (broadly defined) involved developing and delivering five targeted workshops (and organising another one) as detailed below, as well as providing related ad hoc peer mentoring.
Theoretical Background: Social support plays a central role in mental health (Adams et al. 2016). According to the stress-buffering hypothesis model (Cohen & Wills 1985), social support mitigates the adverse effect of challenging events and decreases stress and symptoms of depression (Musumari et al. 2018). On the other hand, stress intensifies with a lack of social support, isolation, and loneliness (Wang et al. 2020).
My Initiatives Undertaken:
Description: How can you prevent physical distance from becoming social distance? What strategies might you employ to foster higher-quality relationships with your colleagues, family and friends? Come along and join us in a fun and safe environment to learn some skills to help build high-quality connections.
Impact: Organiser Jen Lafferty emailed me: “I just wanted to say thank you so much for presenting your workshop today. I found it very enjoyable and learnt a lot. You clearly put a lot of time and effort into the content and also in taking time to train up on zoom to do the presentation. Thank you for all that you have done.”
Description: The presentation addressed strategies for:
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Maintaining your corporate athlete (i.e., physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual capacity)
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Build high-quality connections (by engaging respectfully, fostering trust, being task enabling, and engaging in play)
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Be in learning mode (by setting learning goals, avoiding social comparisons, interpreting setbacks as informative, and celebrating progress.)
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Facilitated a Bounce Back Resilience workshop for the UNSW Business School’s Academic Women’s Career Advancement Program (AWCAP) on 1 September 2020.
Description: This workshop equipped attendees to be more resilience by applying well-validated techniques to handle their stressors both proactively (by cultivating their self-efficacy and fostering their positivity) and reactively (through emotional self-management, fostering a growth mindset, and self-coaching at points of choice.)
Impact: AWCAP organiser Wei Chen emailed: “Great to attend the inspiring resilience session this morning! It was excellent, and I have learned a lot of techniques and strategies.”
Abstract: Considering increasing rates of mental health problems, identifying modifiable targets that reduce symptoms and increase wellbeing can inform large-scale treatment efforts. In this talk, I will present meta-analytic evidence regarding the potential to leverage growth mindsets to improve mental health. I will conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical applications of the findings.
Description: See above.
Impact - ECA organiser Weiting Zheng emailed me: “It was a very useful and fun session. Hope to have you back for next year’s program too.”
Description: When appropriately prompted, students generate great ideas about what they could do (and avoid doing) to create a productive and inclusive learning community. They also can and do provide high-quality feedback about each others’ valued contributions to fostering the learning that happens in the class.
Students are often:
My presentation discussed a procedure that reliably generates these positive outcomes.
Impact: Another presenter in this showcase (Alanya Drummond) emailed me: “I really liked the idea of learning how to create positive impact. I find that when I ask students to critique the work of others they often fall back on just generic comments like ‘it’s great’ – the framework you suggested puts the onus on specific, personal feedback which is a really great idea. Appreciation is a nice lens for students to look at their contribution – we tend to give our students an engagement grade in our discipline’s classes and something I have tried in the past is to ask students to self-grade their participation through the lens of ‘how much did I help someone else to succeed today?’ – i.e. evaluating the positive impact of their contribution on others, so similar positive angle. I think writing it down would really help, great initiative!”
This “project” (broadly defined) is potentially relevant to: 4. Educational leadership
References
Adams, T., Rabin, L., Da Silva, V., Katz, M., Fogel, J., & Lipton, R. (2016). Social support buffers the impact of depressive symptoms on life satisfaction in old age. Clinical Gerontologist, 39(2), 139–157
Cohen, S. & Wills, T. (1985): Stress, social support, and the buffering hypothesis. Psychological Bulletin, 98(2), 310-357.
Musumari, P. M., Tangmunkongvorakul, A., Srithanaviboonchai, K., Techasrivichien, T., Suguimoto, S. P., Ono-Kihara, M., & Kihara, M. (2018). Grit is associated with lower level of depression and anxiety among university students in Chiang Mai, Thailand: A cross-sectional study. PloS one, 13(12), e0209121.
Wang, C., Pan, R., Wan, X., Tan, Y., Xu, L., Ho, C., & Ho, R. (2020). Immediate psychological responses and associated factors during the initial stage of the 2019 coronavirus Disease (COVID-19). Epidemic among the General Population in China. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17, 1729.
