Positive Education

When I meet people in psychological research, I always want to know what brought them to it. It is usually a personal story – as it is with me. I was top of my game as an international elite athlete, where one has to be both physically and mentally strong. At that peak of my life I was involved in a life changing accident and had to overcome the challenges that followed. What helped me through that really tough time were the qualities and abilities that I built as an athlete."Surely there must be an easier way to learn these psychological skills than by training twice a day for 10 years,” I remember thinking. That’s when I learned about positive education.

What is positive education?

Positive education aims to raise a student’s wellbeing by helping them to feel good (hedonia) and function well (eudaimonia). Psychological practice in education has slowly been moving away from a model of deficit-focused service delivery toward more positive, holistic and preventative models. Indeed, a large part of positive education is about addressing the growing prevalence of psychological ill-being in young people. Suicide is now Australia’s leading cause of death for those aged 15-44 years and the annual cost of mental illness in Australia is in the order of $20 billion. Taking action in adolescence may help to prevent adult psychological ill-being, its severity or duration.

Hasn’t this been around in other forms?

Yes. Initiatives to help a child’s mental health and wellbeing have been around in schools in other forms. For example;

• Social and emotional learning (SEL): aims to build social and emotional competencies and assets.

• Positive Youth Development (PYD): aims for human thriving through the ‘five Cs’ of competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring.

• Health promotion: enables people to increase control over, and to improve, their health.

• Mental health initiatives: support student mental health and wellbeing with a universal approach.

Positive education holds similar eudaimonic objectives, but differs (as far as I can tell) in its emphasis on the hedonic aspect of wellbeing; feeling good in addition to functioning well. And when you feel good, you tend to function well.

What does it look like?

Approaches to positive education can be explicit interventions, usually delivered in the classroom, or in a school's implicit practices. A well-known example of an explicit approach, adapted from positive psychology, is ‘Three Good Things’ where students are instructed to say or write down three good things that happen each day for a week. A reflection on why it happened, what it meant or how to make it happen again can also be written. Implicit approaches, can range from positive behavioural management practices to geography students considering cultural differences in wellbeing criteria for different places.

Won’t this distract from ‘actual’ school-work?

Students who feel good tend to function well and there is evidence of this. Studies show greater positive affect is strongly and consistently related to cognitive flexibility, problem solving, widened attention and enhanced working memory. Social and emotional learning corresponds to an 11 point gain in academic achievement. And students who report higher wellbeing are more likely to have higher grades and fewer absences.

So why isn’t everyone doing it?

There is overwhelming enthusiasm for positive education in Australia and around the world, but often barriers to positive education exist. These can involve school resources, expertise and workload. In addition, positive education is still relatively new and while there is strong evidence for the interventions used in it, few real-world positive education evaluations and frameworks for action are available. This area is what my research hopes to address, so watch this space.

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REFERENCES

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2009). Mental health. Australian Social Trends, March, 2009.

Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2016). Leading causes of death 2011-2013. Retrieved 3/3, 2016, from http://www.aihw.gov.au/deaths/leading-causes-of-death/

Elias, M. J., Zins, J. E., Weissberg, M. T., Greenburg, N. M., Haynes, N. M., Kessler, R., . . . Shriver, T. P. (1997). Promoting social and emotional learning: Guidelines for educators. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Fredrickson, B. L., & Branigan, C. (2005). Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought‐action repertoires. Cognition and Emotion, 19(3), 313-332. doi: 10.1080/02699930441000238

Howell, A. J. (2009). Flourishing: Achievement-related correlates of students’ well-being. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(1), 1-13.

Huppert, F. A. (2009). Psychological Well‐being: Evidence Regarding its Causes and Consequences†. Applied Psychology: Health and Well‐Being, 1(2), 137-164.

Isen, A. M. (2012). A Role for Neuropsychology in Understanding the Facilitating Influence of Positive Affect on Social Behavior and Cognitive Processes The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, (2 Ed.).

Green, S., Oades, L., & Robinson, P. (2011). Positive Education: Creating flourishing students, staff and schools. InPsych, 33.

Lerner, R. M., Almerigi, J. B., Theokas, C., & Lerner, J. V. (2005). Positive youth development. Journal of Early Adolescence, 25(1), 10-16.

Proctor, C., & Linley, P. A. (2013). Research, Applications, and Interventions for Children and Adolescents. Dordrecht: Springer.

Seligman, M. E., Ernst, R. M., Gillham, J., Reivich, K., & Linkins, M. (2009). Positive education: Positive psychology and classroom interventions. Oxford Review of Education, 35(3), 293-311.

Suldo, S., Thalji, A., & Ferron, J. (2011). Longitudinal academic outcomes predicted by early adolescents’ subjective well-being, psychopathology, and mental health status yielded from a dual factor model. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 6(1), 17-30.

Yang, H., Yang, S., & Isen, A. M. (2013). Positive affect improves working memory: Implications for controlled cognitive processing. Cognition and Emotion, 27(3), 474-482. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2012.713325

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