Presenters Dr. Tiaan Kirsten Dr. Charles Viljoen

Potchefstroom Campus WORKSHOP MOVING FROM TOXIC SCHOOLS TO HEALTH PROMOTING SCHOOLS: WHAT THE LEADERS CAN DO PresentersDr. Tiaan KirstenDr. Charles Viljoen

Health Promoting Schools • WORKSHOP • OPERATING ON TWO LEVELS • Personal development • Self knowledge • Skills • Attitude • Behaviour • Professional development • Leader • Vision, mission & values Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Key questions to be handled during the workshop include: • What are the characteristics of a toxic school? • What is the impact of a toxical school on the people involved? • What are the characteristics of a positive school? • What are the core values of a health promoting school? • How do we listen to and transform toxic stories into health promoting stories? • What strategies are there in overcoming negativism? • How can organisational development be used in transforming the school into a health promoting school? Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • South Africa: a few snapshots • SA faces many challenges of development • Reconstructing education to a system that brings equity to the education of all children is one of the most urgent • The children are the future, and must be prepared to meet the demands of that future. The challenge cannot wait: it must be faced now. • The main problems in SAfrica's education system related to the troubled past, and in particularly to the policy of Apartheid and its consequences Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • What is needed to be understood is the nature of the educational challenges which face South Africa now, at this juncture in its history. • Years of oppressive rule under the Apartheid system were laid to rest in 1994 when the nation elected its first multi-racial and democratic government. • From holistic-societal point of view recent indicators give an insight into the challenges to be grappled with in education in South Africa. • Crime, violence, and a variety of psychosocial problems continue to grow as the promise of a new life for many is too slowly to be realised. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Unemployment and low incomes are the after-effects of years of anti-apartheid international sanctions. And conflicts abound as both blacks and whites attempt to redefine their roles in the new society. • Currently, more than half of South Africa's population is under the age of 20. • Various problems continue to frustrate the effective delivery of education. Education is being characterised as: inefficient, costly, unequal, and poor in quality; the training of teachers is inadequate Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • there is a lack of basic materials; • communication between departmental officials and teachers is poor to non-existent; • rationalisation and redeployment of teachers is causing uncertainty and lack of motivation; • drop-outs and repetition of grades and subjects is more the rule than the exception; • misappropriation of funds is widespread; • chronic absenteeism of teachers and pupils as well as drunkenness while on duty cast a further dark cloud over the education sphere; Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Health and nutrition: the National Food Consumption Survey (2000) survey eating patterns South African children between the ages of one and nine years old. One out of two children has an intake of less than half the recommended level of a number of important nutrients such as iron, zinc and vitamins A and C. These deficiencies cause: undernourished children to suffer from apathy, short attention span drop in learning ability due to iron deficiency; poor weight gain and growth retardation; poor cell functioning and structure due to zinc deficiency, poor growth, poor digestion, low mental alertness and poor resistance to infection because of a lack in vitamins. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools School culture Every school has underlying assumptions about what staff members will discuss at meetings, which teaching techniques work well, how amenable the staff is to change, and how critical staff development is. That core set of beliefs underlies the school's overall culture. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Positive or negative culture In a school with a positive culture, there's an informal network of heroes and heroines and an informal grapevine that passes along information about what's going on in the school. A set of values that supports professional development of teachers, a sense of responsibility for student learning, and a positive, caring atmosphere exist. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Culture of the school The culture of a school consists primarily of the underlying norm values and beliefs that teachers and administrators hold about teaching and learning. Culture is also composed of traditions and ceremonies schools hold to build community and reinforce their values. Staff and administrators in a positive school culture believe they have the ability to achieve their ambitions. Their counterparts operating in a negative school environment lack faith in the possibility of realizing their visions. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Positive or negative culture In a school with a positive culture, there's an informal network of heroes and heroines and an informal grapevine that passes along information about what's going on in the school. A set of values that supports professional development of teachers, a sense of responsibility for student learning, and a positive, caring atmosphere exist. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools On the other hand, in a toxic school environment, teacher relations are often conflictual, the staff doesn't believe in the ability of the students to succeed, and a generally negative attitude prevails. Staff and administrators in a positive school culture believe they have the ability to achieve their ambitions. Their counterparts operating in a negative school environment lack faith in the possibility of realizing their visions. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools ORIGIN OF TOXIC CULTURE/SCHOOLS Negative views of their work, their abilities, their students No leadership to help staff to overcome adversity, avoid negative rationalizations, no closure to conflict Drift towards negativity slow, gradual, new shared viewing of the school counterproductive Pockets of negativity influence whole school Keepers of negativity and cynicism (rumourmongers, hostile storytellers, antiheroines and antiheroes, harmful exemplars) Use complaints to gain power and attention Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • CHANGING A TOXIC CULTURE • Schools with a negative, or toxic, culture • lack a clear sense of purpose • have norms that reinforce inertia • blame students for lack of progress • discourage collaboration • often have actively hostile relations among staff • In fighting such a negative culture, the staff must assess the underlying norms and values of the culture and then as a group activity, work to change them to have a more positive, supportive culture. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools TOXIC SCHOOLS HEALTHY SCHOOLS Lack shared purpose shared purpose Aggression in workplace commitment team spirit Unhealthy healthy Bullying care for each other Unproductive productive Degenerative growth Fragmented cohesion Not serving needs of all all stakeholders important Negative values collegiality, performance Disgruntled staff professional community Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Hopelessness shared sense responsibility Attacking new ideas network positive communication Always criticizing rituals/ceremonies that reinforce core values School is battleground/war interpersonal connection Oppositional groups shared sense respect and care Spreading frustration for everyone Negative conversations stories that celebrate Stories of failure told successes Animosity against principal professional relationship Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Context • Research amongst role players suggests various issues: • Education Department • Dysfunctional schools • Absenteeism of educators • Mismanagement • Lack of ethics • Schools and teachers • Demands from education department • OBE • School organisation • Multicultural environments Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Schools and teachers • Parents/families • Attitudes of learners • Discipline • Societal/community demands • Physical ailments in educators and learners • Learners • Lack of learner support • Disregard for human dignity • Lack career orientation & life orientation • Observe stress in teachers • Teaching & learning not realised optimally Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Parents • Dysfunctional teaching • Abuse of learners • Perceive school as primary educator • Schools should be safe – routes to schools • Social ills – violence, drug abuse, etc. • Inefficient parenting roles/skills • Absent parents Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Innovation in the Schools Key questions to be answered … Doing something I/we know about more often? Doing something I/we know about better? Doing something somewhat different? Doing something altogether different? Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Innovation in the Schools • Conceptualisation and definition • The ability to deliver new value to the customer (a new way of doing things or a new way to create customer satisfaction) • Innovation utilises creative acts that must result in quantifiable gain • Extending the utilisation of a product or process • Any idea, practice, or material artifact perceived to be new by the relevant unit of adoption • No innovation as long as the present course of action is considered to be satisfactory. Discrepancy between satisfactory and actual performance urges the need for alternatives Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools or … Innovation is process, involving multiple activities, performed by multiple actors from one or several organisations, during which new combinations of means and/or ends, which are new for a creating and/or adopting unit, are developed and/or produced and/or implemented and/or transferred to old/or new partners (adapted from Gemuenden, 2004) Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Innovation in the School • The more open and willing an organisation is to accept and even seek out new ideas from its external environment, the more innovative it is (Zaltman & Wallendoff, 1979). • The tendency for large organisations to adopt more innovations has been attributed to critical mass (eg. the number of people convinced about the innovation; number of people engaged in the innovation; the amount of positive energy generated at the point of entry of the innovation; the amount of success generated after the point of entry of the innovation (success stories) Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Critical success factors of innovation • Team/individual discensus • Conflict properly managed is a positive force in innovative thinking • Team/individual creativity • Generation of ideas and new improved ways of doing things • Team/individual commitment • Willingness to transform intellectual in-puts into out-puts. It is about doing new things Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools What is meant by health? Popular and general meaning of health New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998: 864): “…the state of being free from illness or injury…” A person being “restored” to health would then mean a person whom was ill or who had an injury, but is now free from such problems. This general meaning of health as a concept is loaded with the connotations and denotations of health as only being about the physical body, curative and very medicalised – in fact a very bio-medical approach Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools World Health Organisation Definition The World Health Organisation (WHO, 1948, 1999) defines health as: “A state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Probably the most often cited definition of health Definition recognizes social wellbeing and therefore the links between individuals and their social world. Important for the role it has played in highlighting that health is much more than the absence of disease, and That it is much more than a physical state (Wass, 2000: 47) Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • Ryff & Singer’s (1998:1) conclusion • It also seems that in traditional everyday use, and because of the longstanding emphasis in human health on illness, and • Also because science has until now relegated health to the biological sciences, • The state of the art conceptualization of health is that it is primarily concerned with the body. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Wellness informed holistic definition of health (Kirsten & Viljoen (2004) Optimal states of the domains of well-being in which an individual as a biopsychospiritual being, is physically, psychologically and spiritually integrated, interrelated and in harmony with the total living, non-living and symbolic environment, conducive to living a life of quality and actualising his/her potential in all the contexts of human existence, based on sustainability and for the common good. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Scriven & Orme (1996: 22) The “indisputable” logic of intersectoral collaboration, that if health is more than the absence of treatment or disease, then promotion and maintenance lies beyond the remit of any one professional group or sector has not yet dawned upon most professionals groups or sectors in South Africa. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Contexts of human existence – Adapted Meta-Approach Transparency Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Illness-wellness continuum Transparency Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • What is a health promoting school? • Global strategy • An approach to strengthen health promotion in all aspects of education, where children, teachers and other members of the school community learn, work and play. • Is a school community that takes action and places priority on creating an environment that will have the best possible impact on students, teachers, family members and members from the community. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools • What is a health promoting school? (cont.) • Recognises and acts upon the need to establish environments that will most positively impact upon health for all through the formal school curriculum, the school atmosphere and the interface between the school, family and community. • The health promoting school model bases its definition of health on that of the WHO, which encompasses physical, psychological, social, environmental and spiritual well-being. Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools Potchefstroom Campus

Health Promoting Schools “Health is created and lived by people within the settings of their everyday life; where they learn, work, play and love”(Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion) Potchefstroom Campus

Presenters Dr. Tiaan Kirsten Dr. Charles Viljoen