School counselors are the mental health leaders in K-12 schools and can provide training that helps the whole school stay healthy. The new Whole School Wellness Starts with Teacher Wellbeing is a workshop series designed to provide a science-based and engaging guide to helping teachers optimize their wellness. The five one hour workshops focus on five essential areas for health, wellbeing, and happiness. The workshops include some of the most impactful stress management strategies known, which are also shown to prevent depression and reduce anxiety. Many of the strategies taught can be shared in the classroom with students and will create a whole school culture of health and wellness.

Greg Brigman, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Villares, Ph.D. have recently co-developed this workshop series. Dr. Brigman has taught a doctoral level Wellness Counseling course for years and brings his extensive knowledge to this workshop series. Dr. Villares also has years of experience incorporating these stress management skills and the wellness strategies and concepts into her Masters and Doctoral Counseling courses at FAU. They can provide an outstanding in-person or virtual training for school counselors to lead these much needed workshops for teachers. 

This workshop series includes seven key stress management and wellness strategies that are reinforced through goal setting, progress monitoring and success sharing. The seven strategies are:

a) The Looking Good/Feeling Good goal setting tool that focuses on Nutrition, Fun, Exercise, Social Support and Sleep-all tied to improved mood and increased energy. These five areas have been shown to be highly effective in reducing stress, anxiety and depression and increasing health, wellbeing, and happiness.
b) Building a Caring, Supportive and Encouraging Community-reinforced each session
c) Calm Place: Training in relaxation and positive imagery
d) Ratio Breathing
e) Keep Kool Tunes: The Power of Music to reset our negative self-talk to a positive state
f) Positive Self-talk-reframing negative self-talk with positive statements
g) Mindfulness

COST: The cost of the 4 hour training for counselors is $4,000, (a 20% discount from the regular price of $5,000). Counselors will leave with everything they need to deliver the five wellness workshops in person or virtually. To get to the cost per teacher, imagine only 20 counselors bring this workshop series back to their schools. Imagine each school has 50 teachers. 20 schools x 50 teachers each = 1000 teachers. So, the cost per teacher is $4 for five evidence-based wellness workshops.