Our School uses mutual respect, thinking, and actions to achieve a harmonious School culture. To achieve harmony, community members can develop mutual respect through learning prosocial behaviours and conflict-resolution skills.

These are lifelong learning skills for positive interpersonal relationships. As the saying goes, it is the journey, not the destination – and these skills are learnt through a lifetime of experiences.

To help with the lifelong journey and having a harmonious School culture, we consider the Dr Stuart Shanker Self-Reg model: calm begets calm, and self-regulation refers to how people manage stress, how much energy they expend when managing stress, and how well they recover from it.

Our community’s collective understanding is that self-regulation is the ability to manage one’s own energy states, emotions, behaviours, and attention in ways that are socially acceptable. They help achieve positive goals, such as maintaining good relationships, learning, and maintaining well-being. That is a lot of ability to develop!

We can all do with a co-regulator, someone who will meet our storm with calm. I have my go-to co-regulators, and at times, I am that for others. We co-regulate with others throughout our lives.

I think this is how our School has reimagined its design to work in collective harmony.