Positive Education
Positive Education for Mental Health & Well-being
Are you happy? Always, or just occasionally? Can you discern what makes you happy? Experts break down individual happiness like this:
10%: our basic needs such as safety, sufficient food, and shelter;
50%: genetics, i.e. the way we’re wired;
40%: intentional activity, our free will gives us control over this.
Positive psychology leverages that 40%. Positive Education is a marriage of the science of Positive Psychology with best-practice teaching, a union that encourages and supports individuals, schools, and communities to flourish. Positive Education focuses on specific skills that assist students to strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, enhance personal resilience, promote mindfulness, and encourage a healthy lifestyle.
Format
Now more than ever schools acknowledge their roles span beyond delivering academic programs. Equipping staff with research-based approaches for supporting mental health and well-being is becoming essential. Luckily, there is over 30 years of research on human flourishing and resilience that can be easily applied in the classroom! In this one-hour workshop, participants gain an overview of the comprehensive science of Positive Education. Participants will understand how to help students, staff, and themselves towards greater well-being through an array of simple, effective, and hands-on classroom activities.
Benefits
Participants in a Positive Education workshop will:
- Differentiate Positive Psychology from conventional Psychology
- Explore the well-being continuum and what it means for the classroom
- Understand that Positive Education is a rigorous evidence-based approach
- Identify a simplified approach to building emotional intelligence
- Define the 6 pathways (PERMA-V) to flourishing
- Experience basic resilience- and happiness-promoting activities for personal and classroom use
- Explore next steps for infusing the science of flourishing into one’s work.
Additional Workshop Topics
To expand on the content presented in the Positive Education program, additional workshops are available on Mindset and Strength. See program descriptions below.
Fee
There is a $500 fee for each one-hour workshop
“An amazing group of professionals, with experience, compassion, and a wonderful knack for audience engagement. Just a joy to feature them at our community event!”
— Paul McNeil
Program Director
CLOSE Community Coalition
Developed & presented by Patricia Ehret, M.Ed.
Mindset Workshop
Format
What makes for a languisher versus a flourisher? Mindset. Researchers confirm that holding a growth mindset is a prerequisite for success. How is a mindset achieved? How do we train mindset? And most importantly, how do we detect and redirect when students are developing a fixed mindset about their capacity? Join us for this one-hour program on the science of mindset: where it comes from and how to shape it. Uncover the role of praise, criticism and social comparison in mindset. Learn practical, ready-to-apply strategies for helping children view failure as feedback, value effort, and persist in the face of setbacks. Use these skills to help children drive success and academic tenacity.
Benefits
Participants will:
- Understand what beliefs are, where they come from and how they are shaped
- Distinguish between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset
- Identify how to get people out of criticism mode and into learning mode
- Discover how to spot harmful beliefs and mindsets in oneself and children
- Uncover how mindset shapes perspectives on effort
- Learn how mindsets impact social comparison and perfectionism
- Learn a simple technique for developing a growth mindset and maintaining an openness to learn
- Identify how to sustain curiosity in students as they generally lose it overtime
Strength Workshop
Format
Over the past 30 years, scientists have uncovered the ingredients, and more importantly, they’ve identified how to use that knowledge to help children flourish personally, academically, and socially. In this 1-hour workshop, discover the 24 strengths of character and how to help children know, show and grow their strengths. Learn to have strengths-based conversations and implement activities to bring out the best in ourselves and our young people.
Benefits
Participants will:
- Understand the origins of a strengths-based approach
- Differentiate strengths from traits, talents and skills
- Explore the “strengths mindset” and how to hold it while working with children
- Understand the role strengths play in overcoming challenges
- Apply 3 simple, ready-to-use strengths activities