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Visible Well-Being

At CIS, we seek to empower students to develop a sense of agency, learn from failure, nurture the resilience needed to challenge themselves and foster the self-understanding and caring relationships that contribute to a healthy emotional life. Our well-being focus is not a formally taught programme. Rather, it is a set of attitudes inspired by Chinese traditions of self-cultivation, as well as the insights of positive psychology, that we aim to bring into every classroom and all aspects of school life to make well-being visible and support students in becoming the best version of themselves possible.

Well-Being 1.0:

Positive Education
In 2011, school leaders responsible for student support and counselling began to look for new ways to support the emotional well-being of students. Vanguard members of the faculty attended seminars, met with advocates and practitioners, visited schools, and read widely.

In 2013, CIS began working with Professor Lea Waters from The University of Melbourne to train all staff in the foundations of positive psychology. With her support and inspiration, what we called “Positive Education” was introduced to CIS and took root.

Well-Being 2.0:

Visible Well-Being Partnership
In 2018-19, a task force comprised of students, staff and parents reviewed CIS’s well-being achievements to date and made recommendations to deepen opportunities for student and staff well-being and agency.

From 2020, CIS again began working with Professor Lea Waters to adopt her Visible Well-Being “SEARCH” framework and bring a common set of goals and practices to all stakeholder groups. The goal is to ensure that well-being and agency become integral parts of school culture, governance and policies, as well as academic and co-curricular life.
The SEARCH framework
which underpins the
Visible Well-Being Approach. 
Professor Lea Waters is a Positive Psychologist Expert & Educator who worked with CIS in 2013 and 2020.  CIS' Head of School, Sean Lynch, sat down with her to discuss how to make well-being an ever more visible dimension of life at CIS.

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Visible Well-Being in Action 

Through the videos below, we hope that you will see well-being and agency in action in the way that our students and teachers interact with each other, in our school governance structures, and in every step we take on our journeys as lifelong learners.