Applying Positive Psychology to Education
John C. Wade, Ph.D.
Emporia State University
Kansas Association of School Psychologists
2012 Fall Convention
Overview
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Fundamentals of Positive Psychology
Creating Hope
Setting the Stage
Working From Strengths
Addressing Problems and Framing Solutions
Goals
 Stimulate thinking
 Approach, not just techniques
 Foster reflection and intentionality
 Interactive/exercises
Very Brief Introduction
to Positive Psychology
“Happiness is mostly a by-product of doing what
makes us feel fulfilled.”
- Benjamin Spock
“The most basic assumption that positive
psychology urges is that human
goodness and excellence are as authentic as disease,
disorder and distress.”
- Christopher Peterson
Positive Psychology
 Study and science of the factors that lead to
successful, meaningful and happy lives.
 People want not only to move from feeling
miserable to feeling OK, but from feeling
OK to feeling good (satisfied, productive,
etc.)
 Study of success, achievement, and positive
outcomes
Happiness Is…
 According to some ancient Greek traditions, we
can’t answer if we are happy until after we die…
 Happiness = set point + life circumstances +
volitional activity (Lyubormirsky, Sheldon, &
Schkade, 2005)
Or layman’s language:
 Happiness = Genetics + Circumstances + Actions
Well Being
 When have you experienced well-being?
Role of Circumstances
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Lottery winner/paraplegics (Seligman, 2002)
Positive and negative implications of adaptation
We are poor predictors (Gilbert, 2006)
Actions are only area we have total control over
(Seligman, 2002)
 We don’t habituate to actions like we do our
circumstances (Lyubormirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade,
2005).
Best Route to Happiness:
Intentional Activities
 Gratitude – counting our blessings.
 Inhibits social comparisons.
 Lyubormorski’s (1994) research – gratitude had the
strongest correlation with happiness.
 Examples:
 Writing down three things each day we are
thankful for.
The Bottom Line
Barbara Frederickson – Positive emotions are not just good
because they feel good. Research indicates that when we
feel positively we are likely to learn more, be more creative,
demonstrate more initiative and be more productive.
Negative emotions tend to be of immediate help in urgent
situations, positive emotions tend to broaden our repertoire
of adaptive behaviors and lead to growth and development
over time.
Broaden and Build studies (e.g., Fredrickson, 2001;
Fredrickson, 2003)…
Candy study (Isen, Rosenzweig, & Young, 1991) …
Facilitating Hope
Hope and Competence
 Typically, people have hope who have
successfully met developmental tasks
(Snyder, Rand, & Sigmon, (2005).
 Lopez et al. (2004) – importance of setting
developmentally appropriate goals
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Learning zone, not comfort or panic zone
 Bandura – mastery…
Hope and Growth
 Hope = Agency + Pathways (Snyder &
Lopez, 2007)
Goals
 Goals direct attention and effort toward goal
relevant activities and away from goal
irrelevant activities.
 Locke and Bryan (1969) – car driving (goal)
research
Goals
 Have energizing function – higher goals
equated with higher effort
 Persistence
 Arousal, discovery, and/or use of task
relevant knowledge and strategies
 For new tasks people engage in deliberate
planning to develop strategies to help attain
goals (Locke & Latham, 2002)
Feedback
 Connect to goals
 Clear and direct
 Losado ratio
Implementation Intentions
 Putting goals into practice
 Implementation Intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999)
Engaging the Elephant
 The elephant and the rider (Haidt, 2006)
 Hope - springboard for growth, providing
energy and momentum to power the work
required for change
 Engineering for early success
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Punch-cards
5 minute room rescue
How to?
 Discuss an example of when you have
helped someone become more hopeful.
 Discuss an example of when someone else
has helped to make you feel more hopeful.
Setting the Stage
“All systems are perfectly designed to achieve the
results they are currently getting.”
- Marv Weisbord, organizational consultant
“First we shape our structures and then our
structures shape us.”
- Winston Churchill
Enabling Institutions
 “Institutional level virtues” – characteristics
of the organization that contribute to the
fulfillment of its members - (Peterson, 2006)
 Think of good educational settings you
have been associated with. What factors
made them good?
Four Follower Needs
 Hope
 Stability
 Trust
 Compassion
(Lopez, 2011)
Identifying & Working with
Strengths
Strengths Exercise
 Share a story that illustrates a strength of
yours.
 Partner – reflect back the strength(s) you
heard in the story.
Studying What Is Right
With People
 Buckingham and Coffman (1999) –
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Don’t focus on the weaknesses, work with the
strengths.
Focusing on strengths helps us deal with deficits.
Clues to Strengths
 Flow…
 Satisfaction
 Desire to learn more
 Excellence
Identifying Strengths
 Bill…
 Questions to ask?
Positive Deviance
 Positive deviance (e.g., Spreitzer & Sonensheim,
2003)
 Success builds on success.
 Positive deviance –examples of success and
building upon these
 Success comes from using strengths, not
improving deficits
 Milton Erikson case example
 Driver’s ed example
Academic Role Models
 William James
 Role models for students
 Think of characteristics you admire of a peer or other
role model you know - be specific
 Which of these characteristics do you already
demonstrate?
 How can you amplify these even more?
 What characteristics would you like to possess more?
 What is a realistic step to make progress?
Role Models
 Impact of priming
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Standardized tests scores
Athletic ability
Celebrity vs. information priming
Scared straight
Reducing teen pregnancy
Pygmalion studies
Fostering a Positive
Pygmalion Effect
 Start early
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Identifying real strengths
Helpful to be armed with info before meeting student
 More specific the better
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Engineer early success
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Operate in individual student’s “learning zone”
Addressing Weaknesses
 Use strengths to address weaknesses
 Remember how you have worked with or
overcome problem areas in the past
 Strengths based approach – report card…
Addressing Problems and
Framing Solutions
“A problem well-stated is a problem half solved.”
- Charles F. Kettering
“Life is not about waiting for the storms to pass, but learning to
dance in the rain.”
- Anonymous
“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can
be made.”
- Neils Bohr
Exercise
 Describe a time when you have had a
problem or struggled with a situation.
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If you grew and made positive change, what
enabled you to make progress? (Personal
factors, situational factors…)
If you remained stuck and were unable to
make progress, what factors kept you stuck?
(Personal factors, situational factors…)
Shrink the Problem
 Engineer to early success to create hope
 Use scaling.
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Student reports being at 2 or 3. Supervisor
notes being 20-30% of the way there.
What would it take to get you to a 3 or 4?
“What’s the next action?”
Adapted from Heath & Heath (2010)
Learning Orientation
 Positively associated with performance
(Button, Matthieu, & Zajac, 1996; Phillips & Gully, 1997)
 Learning viewed as process
 Mistakes – opportunities to learn and reevaluate strategies
Mindset Training
 Create the expectation of failure along the
way
 Carol Dweck (e.g., 2006)
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Growth mindset recognizes effort rather than
skill
Junior high students – “brain is like a muscle”
training
“Everything can look like a failure in the
middle.”
Rosabeth Moss Kanter
Harvard professor
Failure
 Convey to students the paradoxically
optimistic message – you will struggle, but
succeed in the end.
 NY teacher grades
 Patina
Eastern/Narrative Perspectives
 Eastern perspective/dialectic
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What is being left out?
 Narrative Therapy
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The person is not the problem, the problem is the
problem
Envision possible different narratives and future
directions
Discussion/Questions
Contact Info
John Wade
jwade2@emporia.edu