Going into our 2nd year of partnership with Castlemont Elementary School we started off this year with a ‘Back to School Retreat Day’ for our Counseling Enriched Classroom (CEC) program consisting of our Seneca staff team (therapist, student support assistants, supervisors) along with school district staff. This was a way for us to come together to celebrate our successes and progress over the past year as well as acknowledge the challenges and areas of growth to strengthen our communication, understanding and collaboration with one another. Providing safe, inclusive, and fun learning spaces for our students means also continually bringing intentionality in creating this environment for the adults who work together on this team. We started the day with a mindfulness grounding exercise led by our Seneca school based therapist and then engaged in a powerful icebreaker ‘Just By Looking at Me’ where each of us took turns to share the vulnerable aspects of ourselves others may not know or see from the outside, helping to build empathy and understanding with one another. As always, in the beginning of the school year, we felt it was also important to ground ourselves in the Unconditional Education (UE) model to remember our purpose, values and mission in supporting the students. We then reviewed over CASEL 5 SEL (social-emotional learning) core competencies and each picked one we felt aligned with to focus on intentionally this year for team. From this, we created community agreements to hold in all our spaces with one another and reflected on our overall Team Journey of Life, identifying the successes and obstacles we have overcome as well as the ongoing dynamics and challenges we will face on the horizon. One of the intentions behind this particular activity as outlined beautifully by the authors (McParland et al., 2022) of the article ‘Narrative therapy approaches to team away days: creating communities’ is ‘to give space to acknowledge that the journey has not always been smooth, whilst also providing hope and a pathway for the future’. Each of us have unique qualities and skills we bring and it is important to remember especially in times of tension/stress how we are stronger together with our different ideas and perspectives, shifting narratives we may hold about ourselves or others and to connect, transform and strengthen our team identity.
Blog By: Jennifer Lin, Clinical Supervisor
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