By Shivani Arivuchelvan, Year 9
Student Action Team
As the Student Action Team, we have been looking into Key Focus Topics for our actions in Westlake Girls this year. This year our interests regarded the mental wellbeing of our peers here at Westlake. Several of our peers, and ourselves, believed that tuning and strengthening our mental wellbeing could aid us to achieve more success; gaining us the ability to have a positive and growth mindset to our learning and completing our assignments, as we strived through our journey. We found that this focus area of developing and strengthening our mental wellbeing encouraged us to become resilient young women leading active and productive lives, as stated in our 3rd School Goal. The skills we gained within wellbeing would refresh and inspire us to take notice of the actions and challenges we will face in our future.
Being strong inquirers, with our vision of action set out in a concrete plan, we started our phase of ideation. The method of ideation represented the aim of generating a range of ideas for a solution. As a team, we always pursued creativity and productivity with an element of fun and enjoyment. We were hoping for improvement. Wellbeing is a strong factor linked to culture and the atmosphere here at Westlake Girls, so we didn’t want to build something different, but to develop ideas and plans to complement existing techniques. With the advice of teachers, peers, and even ourselves, we have finalised an overall action and image that is endorsed by various factors/activities. We organided immersive and free-spaced mental wellbeing workshops.
Our wellbeing workshop was designed with the encouragement of factors such as guidance from seniors, guest speakers, engaging events, open discussions as a whole, and take-away lessons in the form of a small gift accompanied by a podcast series. We built a prototype to test our vision. Our prototype was in the way of a mock-up session on the theme of helping the Year 9’s Guide to Exams and the tension that could arise around it. A small group of students enjoyed our activities, and the smiles of trust as they left the session gave us confidence within ourselves. Activities enjoyed among the participants included Five Top Tips from our seniors, scenarios and solutions, Do’s and Don’ts on planning for an exam, and the exam buddies bookmark.
As a team, we were delighted with the constructive advice we gained through the workshops and were open to all feedback on the changes they would like to see in future workshops. Our tree of action will continue to prosper, and we look forward to having this club set up and running in the years to come at Westlake. The journey with the SAT this year has allowed us to realise that the knowledge and actions we seede within ourselves create the golden pathway for us to be prepared and enjoy a great future for not only us, but generations to come.
As a team, we are very grateful to be guided and supported by our fantastic Student Action Team Teachers Mrs Cleaver and Mrs Desote. Without them we would not have been able to accomplish our actions and have the courage to keep going even in these unforeseen times. Thank you for your time and support this year, you have really helped us and our ideas grow.