Professional Learning
Registration opens May 1. Please join our mailing list to be notified of future workshops this fall.
Learning Series - Compassionate Leadership and Classrooms
Wednesdays, October 2 - November 20 from 4:00-6:00 pm
This series will assist learners with understanding how compassionate leaders can develop safe, warm, and caring school environments for children and youth in schools. We will discuss compassion from the perspective of an individual leader to forming compassionate organizations that are responsive to the needs of students and staff alike. Learners will explore how to build and sustain compassionate leadership principles to foster effective professional relationships, even through difficult and stressful times.
Upon completion of this learning series, learners will receive a certificate of completion. This learning series is based on the training provided by the Centre for Compassionate Leadership.
Audience: Anyone interested in creating a compassionate classroom or school culture, including school leaders, teachers, counsellors, learning leaders, faculty, or health/wellbeing champions
Proposed class size: 25-40 learners
Delivery: Online
Dates: Weekly sessions on Wednesdays between 4-6:00 pm
Cost: $599 for the full eight-week session including a certificate of completion
Early Bird: $499 if register by June 30, 2024 (registration opens in May)
Deadline to Register: August 2, 2024
Want to schedule a Compassionate Leadership series for your school, district, or organization? Contact wellbeingineducation@ucalgary.ca for group pricing.
This series will be presented by Astrid Kendrick and include the following eight sessions:
In these first two sessions, you will learn about the personal and professional impacts of compassion fatigue and burnout in educational settings as well as the individual body systems engaged in compassion expression and roles you can make and take to embed compassionate leadership into your school.
In the next two sessions, we will take a deeper dive into developing our skills and competencies as compassionate leaders within school settings, including understanding the nature of nurturing and fierce compassion as a basis for creating a safe and caring workplace culture.
In these next sessions, the focus will shift to developing a culture of well-being in schools and across systems. We will discuss comprehensive school health as a framework for identifying and creating a psychologically-safe workplace and learning environment for children and youth.
In these final sessions, learners will address the question: How might individual and self-directed actions be catalysts for school and system well-being?
Learning Series - Grief Series Workshop
Dates:
- October 8, 15, 22, 29 (online, 4:30-5:30pm)
- November 5 (in-person, 6:00-8:00pm at the University of Calgary)
This series will assist educators in understanding, adapting, and processing loss by exploring current grief research to support personal or student grief. Over the five sessions, participants will grow awareness around how loss affects us, examining the multidimensional grief reactions and responses that can arise.
The sessions will discuss the facets of grief, past and current theories and models, and personal mourning rituals. Using a therapeutic writing technique that targets bereavement, participants will be guided through an expressive storytelling exercise to reconcile and heal tragedy. The knowledge delivered in these sessions can support death and living losses.
Audience: K-12 educators, school counselors, school leaders, wellbeing champions
Modality: Mix of in-person and online workshops
Class size Maximum: 30 learners
Cost: $250 for the entire series (5 sessions)
The series will be presented by Dr. Linita Eapen Mathew and include the following sessions:
The first session will define and explore the facets of grief using a multidimensional perspective, as presented through physical, social, psychological, behavioural, and spiritual repercussions of loss. Participants will be encouraged to identify their grief reactions and responses to life-changing loss.
Date: October 8, 2024
Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Place: Online
In session two, participants will overview past and contemporary grief theories and models. You will learn and become more aware of why certain societal expectations have been placed on you while grieving. After debunking the myths of grieving, more accurate and contemporary theories and models will be introduced based on current and up-to-date grief research.
Date: October 15, 2024
Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Place: Online
In session three, participants will apply the knowledge from the first two sessions to work through 5 processing exercises that target the physical, social, psychological, behavioural, and spiritual facets of grieving.
Date: October 22, 2024
Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Place: Online
In session 4, participants will briefly explore historical worldviews of mourning practices to understand the healing potential of death rituals more deeply. Participants will be encouraged to create and engage with personal mourning rituals and continuing bonds.
Date: October 29, 2024
Time: 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Place: Online
To conclude the grief series workshop, Linita Eapen Mathew will guide the participants through her unique storytelling structure, targeting bereavement. In this interactive, in-person session, participants will learn about the presenter’s grief story and how this research-based, therapeutic writing technique emerged from her doctoral study. Those attending will then work through an unhealed part of their grief story using the expressive storytelling technique to heal and reconcile loss.
Date: November 5, 2024
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Place: University of Calgary (in-person workshop)
Learning Series Presenters
Dr. Astrid Kendrick
Before taking on her current role of Director, Field Experience (Community-Based Pathway), at the Werklund School of Education, Dr. Astrid Kendrick was a K-12 classroom teacher for nineteen years specializing in Physical Education and English/Language Arts. Astrid’s current research focus is on compassion fatigue, burnout, and emotional labour in Alberta educational workers and improving online learning through integrating podcasts. She is on the Board of Directors for PHE Canada and the PHE Canada Research Council and is the co-chair of the Health Promoting Schools Collaborative for the southern Alberta region.
Dr. Linita Eapen Mathew
Dr. Linita Eapen Mathew is a Student Services Learning Leader within the Calgary Board of Education and a Master of Arts – Interdisciplinary Studies Instructor through Athabasca University. She has created and led numerous Grief and Writing Through Grief workshops for educators and bereavement support centers across North America. She is the author of two books, “Life: To Be Given Back Again to Whence It Came: A pilgrimage through prolonged grief, confronting grief illiteracy and healing loss using the art of storytelling” (Winner of the 2024 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry’s Outstanding Book Award), and “The Revelations of Eapen” – both written as grief companions for the bereaved.