The Dogs Connect
Mentorship
We offer all of the necessary training and every resource needed to guide you and your organisation through implementing a very thorough wellbeing program.
We have done this extensively with dogs in schools, hospitals, justice centres, community health organisations, and more. Our training helps to ensure success in the context of your community, and will assure you in learning how to avoid any of the possible ways that this could go wrong.
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Watch the video below to learn more about the
Dogs Connect Mentorship
A Complete Guide to having an organisation wellbeing dog.
The Dogs Connect
Mentorship
Over 10 hours of video content + over 40 downloadable support resources.
12 Modules with a total of over 80 Video Lessons and teaching guides to building learning around interactions with your wellbeing dog in your community.
Backed by evidence and research to support student and staff wellbeing and mental health.
You will feel confident to:
Direct a Core Group that will drive the wellbeing dog program.
By the end of this online program
Oversee the implementation of a highly structured program which will become unique to your organisation.
Explore ways that a wellbeing dog can strengthen existing practices in your organisation.
Support your students and colleagues by building authentic connections with your organisation wellbeing dog.
Be creative in how you connect your professional practice with your wellbeing dog.
Be assured that you will feel competent in achieving
Certain milestones for your organisation such as:
Improving
Connectedness
Enhancing Academic Outcomes
Improve
Relationships
Shift & Eliminate
Challenging Behaviours
By many people in your workplace.
These impacts will be felt and seen
Increased
attendance.
Improve
relationships.
Increased in
empathy.
Increased ability to co-regulate and self regulate
Decrease time out of class.
Increase in
self managing reactivity.
Improve de-escalation process and time needed to re-engage.
Decrease the amount of incidents reported.
Straight away I noticed the impact on the
Students, staff and the whole community.
In 2015 I introduced Sonny, the dog, into my teaching practices at a primary school.
The academic research around student wellbeing & applied learning, combined with my experience of a broad range of teaching & behaviour management practices helped me create and launch the program, Dogs Connect.
From that moment on, I could see how a wellbeing dog could be a powerful support for adversities and trauma that many of us know so well.
The wellbeing dogs become an invaluable teaching and learning facilitator in a school setting, and allows us to see how we can change the way we teach and deepen social and emotional learning.
This helps us support and shift behaviours from the depth of the autonomic nervous system! The results are amazing and I love working with educators who share this passion.
Not Just a Dog
in the Classroom
Unlike therapy dogs, wellbeing dogs work as teaching and learning facilitators to help improve mental health and wellbeing.
Some of the content that we train teachers to teach with a dog include empathy, awareness of self and others, the escalation cycle, self and co-regulation and reactivity.
Improves Culture
and Connectedness
Having a dog as a permanent member of your school community helps students deal with anxiety, trauma, self regulation, resilience, stress management, emotional literacy, mindfulness and sensory processing.
"The Wellbeing Dog Does Things I Can't Do!"
We hear this from so many school staff, just like you. Reports and data gathered confirms that wellbeing dogs can assist in any situation because they deescalate students (and staff too!)
The Proven Impacts
A Wellbeing Dog has on an organisation
Decrease Anxiety for the majority of staff and students
Help students feel ready to learn by offering connection and engagement
Empathy, Awareness and Emotional Literacy helps build empathy, awareness, and emotional literacy in your organisation
Increase Connectedness for staff and students in your organisation
Regulate Emotions and Reactivity and teach the entire community how to regulate emotions and reactivity
Recognise Cues of Safety and help staff and students recognise cues of safety when engaged in interactions
What does it include?
We give you over 50 step by step videos of explanations, demonstrations and tips of how to successfully introduce a wellbeing dog into your organisation. Not just links and dog tips, we are here with you every step of the way.
Access to our Expertise and Experience
As part of the program we include a number of scheduled video calls as well as email and phone support as and when you need it.
Access To Private Community
You will have access to our private Mentorship Group - our online community. We currently have staff from schools across Australia in this community who love to showcase their successes and support others.
The Dogs Connect Accessory Kit
Everything you need to start introducing a dog into your organisation (apart from the dog!)
Your school will be sent signage declaring that you have a wellbeing dog on site, a Dogs Connect duffel bag to support your dogs code switching into work mode and to help ensure that all necessary items for your dog's working day are on the move with your dog. As part of our Accreditation system your school process and practices will be supported and assessed by Australia's leading wellbeing dog organisation. We are the industry leader and we take pride in the support we offer, and the standards we set.
Templates, policy manuals, checklists, signage, timetables, all the communication templates you could need 24/7 access to the mentorship & much more in the form of downloadables.
Everything you need to know from course guides, implementation road maps, to prewritten polices, video announcements, correspondence examples for school communities to colouring competitions.
We're Social!
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Need More Information?
Implementation Schedule
The Dogs Connect Accreditation Pathway
How to Build a Core Group
View & Download our PDFs below.
Trauma Informed
Dogs help us shift how trauma manifests in our bodies! We are becoming one of the first education programs in the world to be accredited by the Polyvagal Institute in The United States. This recognises our leadership in trauma informed practice.
Mitigate Risk & Build Compliance
As with all new programs there's always some risk. We see what works best, and what does not work so that we support with the latest in best practice. As a result of such broad experience, we have become Australia’s industry leader and specialise in not only building best practice around compliance, but in helping communities learn how to understand their dogs so that they can always hold their animal’s wellbeing at the centre of all implementation processes.
Industry Leading Standards -
Animal Welfare
We are Australia’s leading wellbeing dog organisation. We support your community by ensuring that you learn how to build practice and process in alignment with best practice in relation to animal welfare and sustainable practice.
Dogs Connect has been endorsed and declared quality-assured evidence based by the Victorian Department of Education and is available as a Tier 1 support on the Mental Health Menu
The Dogs Connect Online Program is available as a quality-assured program in the NSW Department of Education’s Student Wellbeing external programs catalogue in the theme of Sense of Belonging.