Building Resilience in Adolescence: Investigating the Efficacy of a School-Based Skills Training Program on Social and Emotional Learning.

The universal WISE Teens program is an 8 lesson program adapted from the 30 lesson DBT STEPS-A Program (Mazza et al., 2016). It emphasises a social and emotional learning approach to help improve psychological well-being and to facilitate effective coping using a prevention approach. The program will be run in NSW high schools. The program will span four phases: 1) Initially, participants will complete baseline outcome measures prior to completion of the program 2) Participants will then be assigned to complete the program as part of their PDHPE curriculum learning or complete PDHPE classes as per usual in line with content set by the individual schools. The program will involve 8 weekly lessons. which will run for the duration of the entire PDHPE class. Students will be provided with a workbook containing worksheets used with permission from the Guilford Press published from the DBT Skills in Schools Manual (Mazza et al., 2016). Each class will start with a review of the previous week of material, a mindfulness practice and then discuss the content emphasised in the lesson that week in conjunction with the student worksheets. PDHPE teachers will be present to support students, however, they will not take an active role in delivering the intervention. The intervention will be delivered by provisionally registered and registered psychologists with a minimum of 12 months clinical experience. Training will involve direct facilitator instruction through introductory workshops applying DBT to school populations and ongoing weekly supervision by senior clinical psychologists. The provisionally registered and registered psychologists will be asked to follow the manualised treatment exclusively. 20% of group sessions will be recorded and listened to by the research team to ensure treatment fidelity. Further additional individualised facilitator training will be available from senior clinical psychologists experienced in delivering DBT programs to improve fidelity if necessary. The content of the program as outlined in the student workbooks is described in Mazza et al., (2016) manual where activities have been selected from. The content will be as follows: Week 1: Mindfulness training of 'What' skills (Observe, Describe, Participate) through in class experiential activities using direct face-to-face instruction and audio recordings. Week 2: Mindfulness training of 'How' skills (One-mindfully, Non-judgement, Effectiveness) through interactive in class experiential activities using direct face-to-face instruction and audio recordings in line with those described in Mazza et al's (2016) manual. Week 3: Emotion Regulation - Psychoeducation on the role that emotions serve; how to prevent emotional vulnerability through the PLEASE skills. Week 4: Emotion Regulation - Mindfulness of Emotions activity, Introduction to Dialectical Thinking, Checking the Facts and Opposite Action to Emotion skills. Week 5: Distress Tolerance - Introduction to Radical Acceptance Week 6: Distress Tolerance - Crisis Survival Skills (Wise Mind ACCEPTS, Self-Soothe, IMPROVE the moment) Week 7: Interpersonal Effectiveness - Understanding your communication style and how to get your needs met more effectively using DEAR MAN skills. Week 8: Interpersonal Effectiveness - GIVE FAST and THINK skills followed by Revision of the Program - creation of "My Skills Toolkit." Students will additionally be asked to complete an out of class skills practice log (Diary Card) throughout the duration of the 8 week program. This will be recorded online. 3) One week post completion of the program, students will be asked to complete post-test follow up outcome measures. 4) Finally, students will be asked to complete the same post-test follow up outcome measures 6 months after the program has finished completion.