What Is Positive Education?

By Ron Lalonde

This article was originally published on May 20, 2018 on LinkedIn.

This synopsis of the state of Positive Psychology and Positive Education outlines the history of this developing field of study and highlights some of the impressive early results from Positive Education interventions. Becoming an informed consumer of information about Positive Psychology is a critical skill for school leaders: the societal shift toward an interest in happiness represents a great opportunity for advancing the science of well-being but it also presents the potential pitfalls of bandwagons, false starts or superficial adoptions. In order to assist school leaders in thoughtfully planning how to best benefit from this burgeoning and potentially impactful field, this brief focuses on the findings suggested by an impressively large, replicated, controlled study of Positive Education interventions that took place over several years across three countries.

Positive Psychology, and its application to schools, Positive Education, offer a rich vision for education in which emphasizing student strengths and de-emphasizing deficits lead to improved student well-being and improved academic engagement and achievement. Recent findings suggest that school-wide projects that help teachers and others in the community understand and experience the power of these interventions through immersive experiences is an important factor in ensuring that students benefit from a school culture that believes in and supports their right to flourish. As school leaders consider investing in social-emotional programs for their schools, it is important to understand that the terrain of character education has shifted. While many still speak of creating programs based on the values that we think students should embody, a strengths-based approach engages young people from the positive traits that they already exhibit in order to link goals and aspirations to proven practices that will yield results. The science of character is about identifying and engaging in practices that develop one’s capacity to achieve life goals. It turns out that many of the traits we historically think students “should” embody are now supported by research into practices that help young people experience greater happiness and success. Our highest aspirations for students are now within closer reach thanks to this developing science of human flourishing.

Positive Psychology is a term receiving increasing mention in the popular media, often in relation to the concept of “happiness” (Time, 2017). In education, research interventions that have targeted students’ mindsets, their relationships to peers and teachers, and aspects of their character have represented a growing domain of Positive Psychology research. These two phenomena are part of the larger movement within psychology to engage in rigorous research focused on the science of human flourishing. The term arose in 2000, when the newly appointed head of the American Psychology Association, Professor Martin Seligman, and a noted researcher and developer of the concept of “flow,” Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, engaged in a discussion to articulate the scientific study of human flourishing and highlight a potential of psychological research that had long been overshadowed by studies of abnormal and aberrant behavior within psychology. Their goal was to put the science of human flourishing at the forefront of psychological studies. Together, they declared this intention in the January 2000 edition of The American Psychologist, an edition that included 15 articles discussing such topics as enabling happiness, self-regulation and autonomy, optimism and health, wisdom, and realizing talent and creativity. This paper can be looked at as an inaugural event within the field of Positive Psychology.

This science and practice will also reorient psychology back to its two neglected missions — making normal people stronger and more productive and making high human potential actual. (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p. 8)

In what follows, I outline several other landmark events in the short history of Positive Psychology and Positive Education that led to the current state of rapid growth and promising possibilities.

1990 — Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi publishes Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience in which he shares his findings of a state of consciousness, termed flow. The expertise of a subject and the challenge of a task come together in ways that elicit great enjoyment, engagement and creativity. Csikszentmihalyi’s work goes beyond documenting this state and outlines practices by which it can be developed and called upon.

2000 — Professor Martin Seligman and Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi co-author Positive Psychology: An Introduction, introducing the term Positive Psychology and dedicating an entire issue of the American Psychologist to the findings of researchers such as Deci and Ryan, Kahneman, Diener, Peterson, Larson and Winner.

2001 — The VIA Institute on Character is established as a non-profit organization to advance the science and practice of character. Upon the publication of Character Strengths and Virtues, and with the support of the Mayerson Foundation, VIA becomes the leading implementer and developer of tools and research to support development of the character strengths.

2004 — Seligman, Peterson and 55 other researchers publish Character Strengths and Virtues, a comprehensive classification of character strengths and virtues to answer the question, “What is best in people?” In this work, they identified 24 transcultural and transhistorical character strengths that they clustered into six virtue-based categories. This work has provided the backbone for Positive Psychology as researchers have sought ways to impact the development, enhancement or application of the traits in educational situation.

2006 — Professor Carol Dweck of Stanford publishes Mindset, the results of decades-long research on the influence of the attitude of subjects when they initiate a task. Her distinctions: fixed mindset — those who believe that abilities are fixed — and growth mindset — those who believe that abilities can be developed — opens up further educational research and interventions to help students cultivate growth mindset to positively impact learning.

2007 — The International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) is founded with the mission: To promote the science of Positive Psychology and its research-based applications; To facilitate collaboration among researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners of Positive Psychology around the world and across academic disciplines; To share the findings of Positive Psychology with the broadest possible audience (www.ippanetwork.org). The group begins hosting biannual World Congresses for researchers and practitioners.

2007 — Geelong Grammar School in Melbourne, Australia begins work adopting tenets of Positive Psychology schoolwide. Professor Seligman works with the school on research, training and development. By 2014, the experience expands into the Institute of Positive Education, an annex to Geelong Grammar School that teaches and promotes their successful implementation model.

2011 — David Yeager and Gregory Walton publish Social-Psychological Interventions in Education: They’re Not Magic in the Review of Educational Research, introducing results linking interventions focused on transforming student mindset with improved academic achievement.

2011 — Professor Martin Seligman publishes Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being in which he outlines the PERMA model and clarifies that Positive Psychology is about more than the popular notion of happiness. Professor Seligman broadens the idea of living well into five areas: Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment.

2015 — The International Positive Education Network (IPEN) is founded with the intention of linking both the pursuit of academic excellence with the pursuit of well-being and character strengths. The organization brings together educators, parents, academics, corporations and government with the goals of supporting collaboration, changing education practice and reforming government policy.

2016 — Angela Duckworth publishes Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the story of field research in schools, in the military and into the minds of high-achieving, high-performing individuals. Her work, supported by a MacArthur Genius Grant, demonstrates promising results from focusing on the character trait of perseverance and leads to the development of Professor Duckworth’s character lab at the University of Pennsylvania.

2017 (February) — The World Government Summit, in collaboration with the International Positive Education Network, publishes The State of Positive Education. Professor Seligman is present to release the document during the World Government Summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

2017 (July) — The Fifth World Congress of the International Positive Psychology Association takes place in Montreal, Canada. At this international event, which included such leaders as Barbara Fredrickson, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Lea Waters, Ryan Niemiec and Angela Duckworth, Dr. Seligman introduces the research of Alejandro Adler. His large-scale positive results, replicated in three countries, suggest that great benefits result for students through immersive experiences for faculty in strengths-based programs that emphasize both learning about and practicing character strengths.

This timeline is provided as a highlight of key events in the blossoming of Positive Education, the branch of Positive Psychology concerned with human flourishing for students. The list may include titles that you have read, as many popular promising ideas have emerged since research into developing human capacity has expanded and taken root in the popular imagination. The list is intended to help you see that these ideas are not single-point solutions, but, rather, notes in a broader theme that, treated more comprehensively, represent a dispositional and cultural change for schools that will facilitate 21st-century learning. What a more comprehensive understanding of Positive Education reveals is that this shift is not about adding a few classes on well-being (Green, 2014). A shift toward Positive Psychology in the school environment requires a transformation toward a non-deficit model of education. Educators in an environment that is considering programs in wellness first need to have immersive experiences in which the interventions may impact their own lived experience of the transformative possibility of positive practices. Teachers need to feel how a non-deficit approach creates a better starting point. What Green calls the “implicit approach” involves going beyond learning about and toward living practices that lead to greater well-being.

While thoughts on this type of educational shift might have intuitive appeal to leaders, the lack of direct evidence supporting character education thus far can quell this enthusiasm: “Many are rightly skeptical about incorporating well-being to schools’ curricula due to limited rigorous experimental evidence on the effects of well-being on academic achievement.” (Adler, p. 11). In addition, the task of transforming school culture in order to support character education programs is daunting. It is no wonder that school leaders often choose to invest in professional learning linked to academic performance despite their intuitions that investing in character education, well-being and positive community initiatives are good things to do. The twin goals of schooling: academic growth and character development seem to be at odds and so, due to it being an easier and more proven road, academic growth gets more attention. This is a damaging choice for schools as it leads educators and the public to think of these aims of education as mutually exclusive. This can foster the thinking that one has to align with one side or the other. At the very least, it can cause school leaders to think compartmentally about these two aims and think that time spent in one is time lost in the other.

While schools have generally upheld the importance of developing character, the tools to measure the impact of programs were limited to anecdotal or introspective claims (Adler, p. xi). The aspirations laid out in the early days of Positive Psychology have led to the development of academic programs at universities, a proliferation of researchers in the field and well-supported, controlled studies aimed at bringing scientific tools to bear on measures of well-being. One leading researcher, Alejandro Adler, of the University of Pennsylvania has recently published the results of a study involving nearly 800,000 students across three countries. Dr. Adler’s work has been the consuming passion of a budding academic career. He was fortunate enough to begin his work while the government of Bhutan sought to find ways to address its aims of fostering Gross National Happiness. Adler and his team developed a secondary school curriculum focused on the non-academic life skills of mindfulness, empathy, self-awareness, emotional coping, communication, interpersonal relationships, creative thinking, critical thinking, decision making and problem solving. They then embarked on a 15-month study (with a control group receiving a placebo curriculum) to ascertain whether such a curriculum would increase well-being, whether it would increase academic achievement and whether it was possible to execute a life-skills curriculum at scale (18 secondary schools, 8,385 students). The success of the study on all three measures encouraged Adler and his team. They were invited to replicate their results for the state of Jalisco, Mexico (70 public secondary schools, 68,762 students) and subsequently, in a nationwide program (694 schools, 694,153 students). In both Mexico and Peru, the non-academic life-skills program was analogous to the Bhutanese program, but was tailored to the cultural context, beliefs and aspirations for those particular well-being initiatives.

One crucial aspect of all three studies is that they involved immersive well-being retreats for educators in which teachers themselves (Bhutan) or school leaders and trainers (Mexico and Peru) were given the opportunity to learn about, to live and to find ways to infuse the principles of the well-being curriculum into their subject areas. The impact of this positive, non-deficit approach was noticeable:

In the classrooms in this study, for instance, both teachers and students soon learned that adolescent learners did significantly more things right than they did wrong, and thus the fact that positive feedback became more frequent than negative feedback was a more accurate representation of students’ academic performance and behavior. By experientially learning the skills of effective communication and empathy, the environment in classrooms changed from being rigid, dull, and hierarchical to more egalitarian, respectful, energetic, and motivating. (p. 50)

Impressively, in all three studies, surveys measuring life skills showed significant growth in well-being. In addition, all three studies discovered significant increases in academic results on standardized state exams for students receiving the well-being curriculum.

In the three first large-scale, whole-schools randomized studies on well-being and achievement, we showed that teaching the skills for well-being at a large-scale is possible and that it lastingly improves academic performance. (Adler, p. 55)

These promising results draw into question the idea that investing time and resources in community well-being takes emphasis off academic performance. In fact, the significant positive impact of these skills courses on academic achievement suggests that a focus on well-being interventions “might yield even more academic dividends than directly targeting academic performance” (Adler, p. 50). Adler’s initial inference is that Positive Education skills enhance a young person’s ability to focus on what is beneficial about school and to have increased confidence in deploying the skills that they possess (p. 51).

What the studies point out is that the success of life skills and well-being initiatives involve a commitment of time and resources to help teachers develop understanding and experience transformation toward the tenets of Positive Education. Orienting toward the positive is not necessarily easy. The human negativity bias tilts our perception in favor of noticing danger, threat and deficiency (Marano, 2003). In a school environment, this is exacerbated as teachers are charged with moving young people from not knowing to knowing. When one’s work is continually focused on the gap between where a student is and where you want her/him to be, it can increase the already stressful climate of schools. Beyond teachers’ own increasing exposure to Positive Education in their professional literature, schools need to engage faculty in practices that help reshape the day-to-day and enhance the positive ways that teachers relate to young people in their care.

From the results that he has observed through his research, Dr. Adler adds his voice to a growing chorus of Positive Education researchers who promote the ”need for an education that simultaneously raises adolescent psychological well-being and teaches academic skills (Steinberg, 2014). Such a “Positive Education” offers a new educational model that, in addition to academic learning, emphasizes well-being as a buildable lifelong resource (Seligman et al., 2009)” (Adler, p. 54). In my time as an international educator and school leader, I have also seen the promise of programs that promote student agency through providing students with powerful tools of self-knowledge, community values and self-efficacy. Positive Education, with its emphasis on shifting toward a strengths-based culture, has captured my attention for the way in which it promotes schoolwide transformation in the service of student flourishing.

About the Author

Ronald D. Lalonde is an interstory coach who leads the River’s Path group on Positive Education. Dr. Lalonde is also the regional manager of the Institute of Positive Education and the founder of Riverspath Coaching and Consulting. He is formerly the middle school principal of the American School of Dubai and the American School Foundation of Monterrey, Mexico. Dr. Lalonde has researched extensively and developed applications of positive psychology to middle-level education. He continues to seek ways to reimagine student relationships with schools, as well as adult attitudes toward adolescents and adolescence. Schools under Dr. Lalonde’s leadership have been commended for the healthy student-teacher relationships and high student well-being.

As a school leader, Dr. Lalonde created a successful Instructional Coaching Program and has gone on to explore and promote leadership coaching in international schools. In his 20 years in international education, he has held leadership positions at schools in England, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico. He speaks about leadership coaching and personal transformation, as well as the critical role they play in improving school cultures and creating space for school change. Dr. Lalonde has been a key contributor to developing and refining teacher supervision and professional development models in three schools, and this continues to be central to his consulting work.

Works Cited

Adler, A. “Teaching Well-Being increases Academic Performance: Evidence From Bhutan, Mexico, and Peru.” University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons. Retrieved online 2017/08/27 from http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3358&context=edissertations, 2016.

Csikszentmihalyi, M.. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1990.

Duckworth, A. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Toronto: Collins, 2016.

Dweck, C. S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006.

Green, S. “Positive Education: An Australian Perspective.” Handbook of Positive Psychology in Schools, 2nd Ed. Furlong, M.J., Gilman, R. & Huebner, E.S. New York: Routledge, pp401–415, 2014.

Marano, H. E. “Our Brain’s Negative Bias: Why our brains are more highly attuned to negative news.” Psychology Today, June 20, 2003.

Peterson, C. and Seligman, M. Character strengths and virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Seligman, M. E. & Csikszentmihalyi, M.. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” The American Psychologist. 55. pp5–14, 2000.

Seligman, M. E. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being. New York: Free Press, 2011.

TIME Magazine. The Science of Happiness: New Discoveries for a More Joyful Life.TIME. Special Edition, Gibbs, N. Editor, New York: Time Inc. Books, 2017.

Yeager, D. S. and Walton, D. M. “Social-Psychological Interventions in Education : They’re Not Magic.” REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 2011 81: 267 published online 19 April 2011.