Social & Emotional Programs
The Berry Street Educational Model (BSEM)
All Djidi Djidi Aboriginal School staff are trained in The Berry Street Educational Model. This model provides strategies for teaching and learning that enables teachers to increase engagement of students with complex, unmet learning needs and to successfully improve all students’ self-regulation, relationships, wellbeing, growth, and academic achievement. The BSEM pedagogical strategies incorporate trauma-informed teaching, positive education, and wellbeing practises.
The domains within the Berry Street Educational Model (BSEM) are Body, Stamina, Engagement and Character, all anchored by Relationship. These five areas are pedagogical lenses: each domain reflects the durable understandings and evidence-based practice that inform daily classroom learning.
Zones Of Regulation (ZOR)
Zones of Regulation is an approach used to support the development of self-regulation in children. All the different ways children feel and the states of alertness they experience are categorized into four coloured zones. Children who are well regulated are able to be in the appropriate zone at the appropriate time.
Social Thinkers
Alongside the ZOR the Social Thinking method assists students to decipher the social cues to share space, flexibly interact and regulate emotions. The program supports students to improve their social competencies, including: Self-regulation, Social-emotional learning, Executive functioning, Perspective taking and Social problem solving. For example, it provides the opportunity for students to figure out the hidden rules, expected and unexpected behaviours, making a smart guess, having flexible versus stuck thinking, matching a size of a reaction to the size of the problem and sharing imagination. These are all significant social learnings to last a lifetime.