First, a quiz. In two words or less, what do you most want for your children? Now a second question: in two words or less, what do schools teach?

How much overlap is there between your two lists? While most parents hope for happiness, confidence, contentment and love for our children, many of our schools are still firmly entrenched in teaching only problem solving, conformity, work and achievement.

Happily, a growing number of public and private schools in Australia are catching up with recent changes in national and state policies that are encouraging schools to develop not just your child’s mind but also their wellbeing and sense of civic and social responsibility.

What’s driving this shift in our schools?

As globalisation has shifted the needs of employers and communities, the remit of schools is being questioned and extended to promote individual development and social cohesion, to strengthen economic prosperity and environmental sustainability and to prepare our children for active global citizenship.

School has also come to play an increasingly important role as a social institution to guide the formation of character and morals, as the impact of the church and the availability of extended family have been diluted. With children still spending, on average, 13,000 hours of their youth in the classroom, teachers have a great opportunity to help develop the whole child, not just their thinking ability.

The need for teaching our children the skills of wellbeing has also become increasingly important as the average age for the onset of depression has now fallen from 30 to 14. As the pressures of bullying, alcohol and drug abuse, body issues and family conflicts take an increasing toll on our children’s mental health, it’s estimated that one in four young Australians now experience symptoms of depression.

No wonder the National Scientific Council has advised, “If we really want to build a strong platform for healthy development and effective learning then we must pay as much attention to children’s emotional wellbeing and social capacities as we do to their cognitive abilities and academic skills.”

Surely this must become the future measure of every school.

Why happy schools are the answer

As our schools try to respond to the challenges of modern life, your children will need to broaden their academic performance, embrace pro-social behaviours and improve their resilience. A reliable body of neurobiological and psychological research shows that helping children to explore the beliefs and behaviours that help them to feel good and function well is positively correlated to improved academic performance, the heightening of empathy and altruism and the prevention of depression.

These results aren’t achieved by painting on a smiling face, wishing away your problems with positive thinking or pretending they don’t exist. Instead, scientists define happiness as the experience of positive emotions — such as joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love — combined with deeper feelings of meaning, accomplishment and purpose and the presence of positive relationships. It implies a positive mood in the present, satisfaction about the past and a positive outlook for the future.

Why does this matter? Positive emotions flood your brain with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make you feel good but dial up your learning centres and neural connections to help you to overcome obstacles, make the most of opportunities, build good relationships and conquer your most ambitious goals. Perhaps the most accurate term for this life-giving ingredient isn’t “happiness”, then, but what Aristotle called eudaimonia, which translates as “human flourishing”.

For example, a meta analysis of 213 studies involving 270,034 students from kindergarten to high school showed that, on average, school students enrolled in a social and emotional learning program ranked 11 percentage points higher on achievement tests than school students who didn’t participate. Programs like “The Roots of Empathy” improved students’ emotional literacy leading to an increase in empathy and pro-sociability, as well as decreases in aggression, bullying and negative behaviour. And initiatives like the Penn Resiliency Program have been found to reliably prevent depression, anxiety and conduct problems in young people.

Are happy schools achievable?

Since the 1970s, non-profit programs to help teachers improve the self-esteem, character, social skills and resilience of our children have been popping up in Australian schools. Wellbeing initiatives like “Bounce Back”, “You Can Do It” and “Reach” all have had positive impacts on the lives of kids, but all acknowledge they can achieve better results when embedded into a whole-of-school approach.

It was this challenge that Geelong Grammar School took on in 2008 when it decided to become the world’s first positive-education school by teaching both accomplishment and wellbeing. Just as there are formulas and practices used to teach the skills of literacy and numeracy, it turns out that Dr Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, has discovered the formula and practices that can be used to teach the skills of wellbeing.

Dr Seligman and his team spent more than a year at Geelong Grammar working with the staff, students and parents to teach, “embed” and “live” the mindsets and skills proven to promote resilience, gratitude, strengths, meaning, engagement, positive relationships and positive emotions. Results to date include higher morale, lower staff turnover, increase in admissions, applications and donations and continued improvement in academic results.

Most importantly, Geelong Grammar’s incredible courage and generosity in sharing its positive-education journey with educators around the world has validated the idea that happy schools are possible. As a result, its whole-of-school positive-education philosophy and curriculum of proven well-being exercises is now starting to find its way into other schools across Australia.

What does a happy school look like?

St Peter’s College in Adelaide, South Australia’s oldest school, has set itself a modern-day challenge of going from good to great by embracing a wellbeing and positive-education framework as part of its philosophy.

“Our hope is to build a flourishing school, of which happiness would be a subset,” explains headmaster Simon Murray. “When a child walks through the gates of our school we want them to feel safe to be themselves and to know that their peers and teachers value them for their own unique strengths of character. We want our students to be truly confident about themselves — and to be themselves — so that they can flourish and grow in the very best of ways.

“This doesn’t mean that it’ll be a smooth and easy path through their schooldays, but it does mean that they’ll have the beliefs, skills and relationships that they need to successfully face the challenges and adversity that are a normal part of school life,” explains Simon. “They’ll be able to sail successfully through choppy waters.”

He adds, “In order for our students to flourish, however, it’s essential that we also invest in the wellbeing of our staff. Not just the teachers, but all of our staff. After all, these are the people who nurture and support each child who attends Saints.”

To bring to life its goal of educating minds, building healthy bodies and nourishing spirits, Saints kicked off a program in 2011 that saw different positive psychology leaders from around the world visit the school each month. These experts opened up conversations about wellbeing that allowed staff, parents, students and the wider community to take their understanding of flourishing and wellbeing to new depths.

As the curiosity and engagement of adults and children grew, Saints provided more in-depth training in positive psychology for its senior leadership team. By the end of 2011, Saints leaders had embedded positive education at the centre of the school’s new strategic plan that saw the principles and practices they learnt included in teacher training, academic courses, on the sports field, in the music room and through pastoral care during 2012.

Saints also partnered with the South Australian government to bring Dr Seligman to South Australia as a “Thinker in Residence” to provide guidance on creating a flourishing State. Dr Seligman collaborated with Saints as it developed an evidence-based approach to wellbeing and helped Saints train 100 staff in positive psychology and resilience principles.

It is anticipated that in 2013 they’ll also offer training for parents, so that the conversations that are occurring between teacher and child can also be held between parent and child at home. Saints hopes this approach will ensure that the trinity of child, parents and school will provide students with the best support possible.

Affording happy schools

Saints is not alone. The Peninsula School in Victoria has adopted a whole-of-school positive-education approach to teaching and learning in the hope of producing well-educated, well-rounded, resilient individuals who are capable of flourishing.

Knox Grammar School in NSW is also using positive education as an idea and a practice underpinning the school to help students on the journey towards a purposeful and meaningful life. Kingswood College has run positive psychology training for teachers and parents and is infusing the principles into its cyber-citizenship policy and instituting mindfulness programs for all year 7 and 8 students. But is it only private schools who can afford wellbeing?

Associate Professor Lea Waters, Director of the Masters of School Leadership (MSL) at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education in the University of Melbourne, is proving these principles and practices can be successfully achieved in the public education system. During 2010 and 2011, 60 lead teachers, vice principals and principals from secondary and primary schools were exposed to the science and possibilities for positive education as a leadership opportunity within their schools. As at the end of 2011, 10 of the participants were integrating a whole-of-school approach for positive education and another 40 schools were teaching elements of the positive-education curriculum to specific year levels.

Examples of positive psychology interventions that have been instituted via the action-research assignment in the MSL include: a school-wide positive behaviour initiative in a rural high school (grades 7-12); a 10-lesson positive psychology curriculum designed to increase learning confidence in 10th graders; character strengths projects for children of all ages; the use of gratitude to boost teacher moral; and the use of growth mindsets and character strengths to facilitate a teacher-classroom observation program.

One teacher reports, “We’re now using the language of positive psychology and strengths in dialogue with parents, students and staff to change the mindset from looking at what we’re having trouble with to what we’re doing well and how we can use that. In year level meetings we used to often ignore the students who were achieving or working above expectations, but now we have a section of the meeting designated to this and are sending home postcards for good achievements.”

To date the outcomes of the research evaluations for students include significant increases in self esteem and life satisfaction, decreased behavioural issues (fewer detentions, fewer time-out room visits, fewer behavioural referrals to the principal), increased results in “attitude to school” and increased learning confidence.

The positive psychology interventions aimed at staff have produced outcomes such as higher moral shown through the ”Staff Opinion Survey”, staff feeling more valued as reported through qualitative interviews, less union action, greater team moral and greater use of strength-based language.

Getting started

“For positive outcomes to be wide reaching and sustained, students need to be exposed to positive education across multiple year levels of their schooling and within various sections of their school,” explains Lea.

“It needs to be woven into the DNA of the wider school culture — across policies, pedagogy, curriculum and assessment — so that every aspect is supporting conditions that allow staff and students to thrive.”

For example, Lea proposes that policies can be oriented in a more positive, growth based way. Behaviour-management policies can be evolved from shaming students to building empathy and compassion by requiring that they put themselves the shoes of others, such as the policy of Restorative Justice. In addition, The Peninsula School has changed its staff appraisal system to focus on developing and rewarding strengths rather than weaknesses.

“Positive education is not a spectator sport,” explains Lea. “If you’re going to teach it to your students you have to go through a process of growth and renewal yourself in order to embed it in your classroom.”

This is why she advocates all staff be trained in positive-education techniques. Not only does it improve the levels of wellbeing for teachers and staff, which has been found to have a positive influence on the students, but it also advances classroom pedagogy so that creating a positive mood is understood as a means of enhancing learning and social relationships.

It also provides teachers with the necessary knowledge to incorporate the study of positive emotions, character strengths, gratitude, hope and resilience into the obvious English, health, personal development, religious studies and PE curricula. Further, it helps them to explore less obvious examples like using geography to discover what makes different cultures happy or maths to teach the statistics of wellbeing.

“Finally, only when the measures of school success include wellbeing, will educators really prepare themselves to support the changes towards 21st-century schools,” adds Lea. “Parents should be asking for reports that cover academic performance, character development and levels of wellbeing. In addition, governments should be broadening measures used on the My School website to include indicators of wellbeing.”

The role of the parent

If your child is in a school that’s embracing wellbeing, be sure to take an interest in what it’s teaching. Many schools like The Peninsula School hold parent-education nights that are open to the general public and a great opportunity to learn more so that you can help your child to flourish.

“The initial response from parents has been extremely gratifying with parents nodding their approval as the common sense underpinning the science of positive psychology is explained,” reports Phil Doll, deputy principal at The Peninsula School.

“Pleasingly, parents are beginning to report that conversations about character strengths and expressions of gratitude are now becoming more commonplace at the dinner table and that they’re enjoying hearing their children talk more about the good things that have happened during the day.”

If your child isn’t in a school that’s exploring positive education, don’t despair — there’s still plenty you can do to balance the academic focus of their classroom. Some ideas to get you started:

Praise your child for effort rather than intelligence. Every word you speak shapes how your child thinks about themself and their abilities. When you praise intelligence — “You’re so smart” — your child doesn’t understand what they’ve done and how it can be repeated so they come to fear making mistakes and interpret their failures as “being dumb”. When you praise effort — “You’ve worked really hard on that” — your child understands that making an effort can influence the result and they come to welcome challenge and interpret their failures as an opportunity for learning. This is called a “growth mindset” and Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck has a wonderful online program called “Brainiology” that you can use with your children. Her book Mindset has more parenting tips.

Help your children discover their strengths and put them to use at school. If your child’s reading well, have them take the VIA Survey for Youth online (www.viame.org) to discover their character strengths. If your child’s younger, start looking out for the best aspects of their character and point these out when they’re acted upon. For example, “You have a real strength of kindness. Thanks for sharing that with your brother.”

Teach them to challenge their interpretation of the events. Show your child how to master challenges, overcome frustration and relish their achievements by divesting themselves of pessimistic approaches and adopt optimistic ones. Dr Seligman’s book The Optimistic Child is based on the Penn Resiliency Program taught at Geelong Grammar and is a great guide on how to help your child build the skills of resilience.

Show them how to find the good things in their life by hunting for gratitude. At dinner or before bed ask them to share three things that went well that day so you can boost the positivity in their life.

Most importantly, keep lobbying your school and your educators to create a learning environment that allows your child to flourish.

 

What can your school do to be happier? “Positive education is a significant change for any school, so it’s important to plan accordingly,” cautions Lea. Having assisted several schools on this journey she recommends that you: Assess what you’re already doing well. You’ll be surprised by how many wellbeing initiatives you’re already investing in and that are working. Adopt a positive-education framework to guide your choices. Dr Seligman’s PERMA model gives school leaders a way of ensuring that staff, teachers and students across all levels and areas of the school are provided with positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and achievement. Think about change as a process. Identify your leaders and change agents across the school (these will be the people already supporting wellbeing) and leverage their interest to guide decisions and recruit supporters. Plan your communications carefully. Consider how you’ll engage and support staff, parents, students, community and policy makers to share in the evolution of the school so that a common language and ideology is developed. Embed it into your school strategy. Target curriculum, co-curriculum, pastoral care, the broader teaching and learning environment, the playground, organisational structures, policies and processes so that every aspect of your school culture is supporting the conditions that allow staff, teachers and students to flourish. Evaluate your results. Build in measures that enable you to assess the effectiveness of different initiatives and the overall impact of your efforts. Connect with other educators and schools who are trying to flourish. Share your positive-education journey with others and benefit from their knowledge, resources and experiences.

 

 

Michelle McQuaid completed her Masters of Applied Positive Psychology with Martin Seligman and is an award-winning researcher, facilitator and designer who is passionate about bring out the best in people of all ages. W: www.michellemcquaid.com