Becoming a StrengthsQuest School:
A Primer on Strengths-Based education
-Prepared by Shaun McElroy
Strength: the ability to provide
consistent, near-perfect
performance in a given activity.
-- Clifton & Harter, 2003
What is StrengthsQuest?
 Developed by the Gallup organization (as in Gallup Poll says 2 out of 3 people
prefer…), the premier business consulting company. Did you know they have a
very strong education devision?
 An online tool to help individuals identify, celebrate and maximize their strengths.
 A way of redefining interactions between students, faculty and parents.
Five Clues to Talents:
A Leap of Research
1) Yearnings
Over thirty years of research went into look at the “best
2) Rapid Learnings what comes
of the best” across dozens of different fields:
easily?
 Identified nearly 400 talents—naturally occurring
3) Flow-- times when excellence
thoughts, feelings and behaviors.
was achieved without conscious
 Organized those into themes—Themes become
thought
strengths when appropriately paired with
4) Glimpses of Excellence
knowledge and skill enhancement
5) Intense Satisfaction
Brain research clearly supports the hypothesis that people
develop their strengths from a young age and
Builds on some of the most important psychology of the past 30 years, including such
key figures as:
 Donald O. Clifton, PhD.
o (Gallup's owner)—creator of the Clifton StrengthsFinder tool.
 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD. –
o Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Expirience - Finding Flow -Engagement
in Every day life - Good Busines - Leadership, Flow and
Making of Meaning
 Marting E. P. Seligman, PhD. –
o What you can change
and what you can't; learning to accept who you are - Learned
Helplesness: Using Positive Psychology... - Authentic Happiness...
 Not to mention classics such as Abraham Maslow’s Peek Experiences and Selfactualization, etc.
What the research tells us:
From the business world, the evidence is rapidly growing and pretty conclusive:
1) Focusing on employee weakness causes disengagement in employees
2) Focusing on employee strengths causes engagement
3) Engagement = increased productivity and profit (in education this equation is
exactly the same:
Engagemnt = increased teacher productivity as measured by student
outcomes—the initial research is showing this to be true.)
4) Engagement begets engagement
STrengthsBased intervention does positive impact engagement:
Success for StrengthsBased managers were 86% higher than other managers coming
from a different perspective.
And it makes a difference:
From the education world:
StrengthQuest is now used in over 300 universities such as:
 Texas Tech University
Nonetheless, the treatment group—the one that
 Texas A&M University
participated in a strengths-development program—
 University of Kansas
finished the first college semester with significantly
higher GPAs than the control group. In another
 University of Minnesota
statistically significant finding, only two of the thirty University of Texas
two students (6.25 percent) in the treatment group
 Pepperdine University
failed to meet minimum academic standards,
 Azusa Pacific University
compared to 20 percent of the control group
(eight of forty students).
 Illinois State University
 and dozens of high schools and at
least one other international school (Escuela Campo Alegre).
Azusa Pacific University Study found that students who underwent StrengthsQuest has
higher GPAs (2.77 vs 2.43 after a year) and higher retention (77.6% vs. 65.9% )
Asbury college found that students found a positive correclation between knowing and
 using their strengths and
 being successful in college
 understanding their “calling” in life
 students receiving self-efficacy and stress management training have higher
retention than students receiving learning skills training Research in Higher
Education, (1999,US)
 ‘basic psychological needs such as the need for belonging and self-worth must be
met before engagement and learning can take place’ Strahm et al Studies in
Learning Evaluation, Innovation and Development, (2005 Australia)
About the Instrument: Strengths finder:
Went online in 1999
Gallup found that:
Strengthsfinder has been used with over 4 million
1) High achievers excel because they
people in 17 languages
more fully develop and apply their
It takes approximately 45 minutes
strengths and talents
 180 item web-based assessment from the
2)
High achievers find ways to apply
positive psychology perspective
their strengths to their tasks
 Each item lists a pair of potential self3)
High achievers build their lives
descriptors
around their strengths
 Descriptors serve as anchoring polar ends of a
continuum
 Participant chooses statement in each pair and to what extent
 Results include the students’ top five talents which are known as their
“Signature Themes”
Costs $15 per person (education rate, discounted from $25 commercial rate)
Reliability: .74 (Six-month test-retest reliability across all populations ranges
from .60 to .80)
33,700, 000 possible unique sets of
A Harvard study fund that their students found
Signature Themes
the StrengthsFinder most valuable (53%) in
This means that on this planet,
relation to Myer’s-Briggs Indicator (14%) and
approximately 200 other people who
Values Information Assessment (32%)
share your particular strengths in the
same order as you….
Supports Vision statement
Specifically items 3, 5 and 6
 Serve, with honor and respect, a broad range of children…
 Create programs, assessments and experiences that serve to unite the school and
celebrate the distinctiveness…
 Engage and support teachers, administrators and staff in a unique learn
community that provides opportunities to grow…
Supports SAS’s Mission
Specifically in “fostering the development of each student’s personal potential.”
Even in a simplistic developmental context consisting of self paced study from a
book, the majority of respondents reported that they were making better choices in
their lives, were more productive, and had increased self-confidence as a result of
learning about and focusing on their strengths (Hodges and Clifton 2004).
Supports current initiatives, such as
 Critical friends
 Sunshine committee
 Staff development
 Supervision
 Developmental assets
The big idea: A Vision of a Strengths-Based
School
We originally had planned to target our grade 10
students. We have budgeted and planned for the
implementation of the strengths finder assessment
and follow up activities.
We now see the value in having all high school
faculty do it.
What are strengths?
 Attitudes that sustain efforts toward
achievement and excellence
 Behavior patterns that make a person
effective
 Beliefs that empower a person to
succeed
 Motivations that propel a person to
take action and maintain the energy
needed to achieve
 Thought patterns that make a person
efficient
In addition, I have spoken briefly with Laura Cowen, Jeff Perkins and Diane about the
middles school version: StrengthsExplorer (a brand new product from Gallup). Laura is
giving the program a critical test.
Again I would submit that we would probably want the middle school staff to also
undergo StrengthsFinder identification and training.
Another thought: we could make codes available to interested juniors, seniors and parents
for cost (They would pay $15 and we would give them a code).
Longer term
1) Follow up evaluation of the program
a. Develop a tool to survey students and faculty
b. Compare staff attendance and student attendance from last year
c. Compare discipline and probabtion incidents
2) StrengthsCoach training for select indivudals—perhaps bringing in Gallup trainer
to Shanghai. This would be most cost effective.
3) Infusing strengths into the Supervision process.
4) Presenting our program at conferences such as EARCOS, NACAC, ASCA, ECIS
etc. If our goals it be one of the best international schools in the world,
presentations like these tend to attract world class faculty. When Bambi Betts
joined ECA, teacher application went substially up simply because of her
presentations and workshops.
Reading:
 http://www.pilambda.org/horizons/v83-3/hodges.pdf
 http://media.gallup.com/DOCUMENTS/whitePaper--InvestingInStrengths.pdf
 http://www.strengthsquest.com/educator.asp