Celebrating Student Capacity with Nairn Walker

Explore how to adopt a mindset that will enable you to recognise the strengths that all students and families bring to an educational setting. Develop effective ways to enhance student engagement and well-being, attendance, and academic performance.

This workshop will empower you to engage with families from a position of strength and empathy, and to build strong bonds with your wider school community.  

Explore how to establish relationships of mutual respect, and the 3 essential elements for achieving optimal results with families. Examine what we mean by “capacity”, and how we can use this definition to measure outcomes. Learn the impact that students’ assets have on the way they think, operate and communicate. Better understand the contextual, cultural and historical dynamics that are always at play during everyday interactions.  

You will leave this session feeling better equipped to navigate the complexities of human interactions with more understanding and empathy. Importantly, you will build your own capacity to see the capacities that everyone brings to educational settings. 

Audience

Recommended for all Victorian government school teachers and leaders. 

Facilitator

Nairn Walker has worked across Australia and internationally, identifying potential, highlighting capacity, and increasing outcomes for individuals, schools, and communities.  

Having spent 20 years as a licensed trainer with Dr Ruby Payne’s company providing Bridges out of Poverty and A Framework for Understanding and other Aha! Process trainings, she has now developed a strengths-based offering that draws upon this expertise as well as the research, methodologies and constructs gathered, developed and blended from many other places and many other authors.  

Nairn’s focus now is on celebrating capacity: distilling all that she has learned over the course of her career to optimise outcomes for individuals and organisations in schools, workplaces, families, and communities. 
https://socialsolutions.com.au

Structure

This a full-day face-to-face workshop held at the Academy, Moe. 
Friday 21 March, 2025 
8:30 am – 4:00 pm 

This a full-day face-to-face workshop held at the Academy, Mildura. 
Thursday 1 May, 2025 
8:30 am – 4:30 pm 

Learning outcomes

You’ll gain a deeper understanding of: 

• the keys to establishing relationships of mutual respect  
• how to define ‘capacity’ and use it to measure outcomes  
• the impact on thinking and behaviour of assets and resources  
• the contextual, historical and cultural factors that impact relational dynamics. 

You’ll develop the skills to: 

• make interpersonal decisions using knowledge and empathy  
• recognise the capacities that each person brings to educational settings 
• build stronger relationships with your wider school community  
• influence colleagues to engage with improvements in practice. 

Fees and financial support

Fully subsidised by the Department of Education for Victorian government school participants.