Nikki Bonus comes to education with a passion for wellbeing; physical and emotional. She has built her reputation on it.
Nikki’s goal is to equip every teacher with mindfulness leadership training, to enable calmer classrooms and better outcomes for students. Her practical advice comes from more than 20 years of developing programs for schools, as well as working with business, executives and within her own life; juggling priorities and family.
Key points
- Nikki Bonus and Life Skills Group has long been supporting wellbeing programs in schools
- Life Skills GO is set to transform 21st century learning by delivering measurable social, emotional & physical skills through education technology
Nikki’s path started as a yoga teacher in Sydney, she founded, Yoga to Go, a business that brought yoga to students and teachers in schools. She created lesson plans and training, as she knew the benefits in bringing wellbeing practices into the classroom.
With the importance of social and emotional learning now so deeply understood in modern teaching practice, Nikki looked to the tech space to innovate and offer solutions for teachers on how to continue supporting students, as well as measuring outcomes.
This is where Life Skills GO comes in. It’s a digital platform set out to transform 21st century learning by delivering measurable social, emotional and physical skills through education technology.
It’s a fun and engaging place for students K-6, loaded with curriculum-aligned resources that allows educators to confidently teach the invaluable skills of social, emotional and physical learning.
Nikki and her team came at the creation of this tool from a place of extensive knowledge and experience.
Nikki’s Life Skills Group, which has 80 teachers working with 600 schools, has long been supporting students and teachers in wellbeing programs whose learning outcomes include:
- Developing a healthy respect for the body and its important role in our development and growth.
- Understanding and practicing a range of mindfulness techniques and exercises.
- Awareness of wellbeing language, and its impact on society.
- Experiential understanding of positive emotions and how it affects our brain.
- Practical awareness and strategies to use character strengths in a range of contexts.
- A toolkit of wellbeing strategies that can be drawn upon in a range of environments within the community.
Life Skills Group has been in a successful partnership with NSW primary schools since 2009.
So important are these soft skills, that as part of its work around 21st century learning, the OECD has outlined the core skills it sees students needing to thrive in a changing world, including, handling stress, building resilience and improving self-regulation.
The NSW Department of Education has taken this notion and distilled it down to five skills, and four dispositions that need to be focused on: problem-solving, metacognition, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, self-efficacy, motivation, perseverance and conscientiousness.
As Australia’s leading provider of wellbeing and social emotional learning programs for young people, Nikki brings two decades of experience in this space to Life Skills GO. Life Skills GO (Life Skills Group Online) was founded in 2018, the online program has been successfully piloted and is currently in 50 schools across NSW and rapidly growing.
Nikki spoke at an EduGrowth AWS EdStart Launchpad Insight event in Sydney in November 2019. Her presentation discussed the importance of soft skills in the workplace. And how young people with key soft skills such as strong resilience and emotional intelligence have better learning outcomes and are more likely to be happy.
Learn more about Life Skills GO