A Decade of Positive Education and Implications for Initial Teacher Education: A Narrative Review

This narrative review addresses a notable gap in initial teacher education research by exploring the impact of positive education—a growing international change initiative—in schools. Launched in 2009, positive education is defined as education for both traditional skills and happiness. This narrative review examines how positive education has contributed to a change in schools and related curriculum issues. It draws on various studies from the past decade to evaluate positive education definitions, examine two periods in positive education research from 2009–2014 and 2015–2020. The review argues that positive education concepts may enrich initial teacher education discourse and enhance teacher professional practice; but, the term may be too narrow. Finally, the review recommends adopting the more inclusive term wellbeing education. This term may guide future research of culturally diverse case studies, thereby supporting the greater integration of wellbeing science with teaching theory and practise in initial teacher education

A Decade of Positive Education and Implications for Initial Teacher Education: A Narrative Review

This narrative review addresses a notable gap in initial teacher education research by exploring the impact of positive education—a growing international change initiative—in schools. Launched in 2009, positive education is defined as education for both traditional skills and happiness. This narrative review examines how positive education has contributed to a change in schools and related curriculum issues. It draws on various studies from the past decade to evaluate positive education definitions, examine two periods in positive education research from 2009–2014 and 2015–2020. The review argues that positive education concepts may enrich initial teacher education discourse and enhance teacher professional practice; but, the term may be too narrow. Finally, the review recommends adopting the more inclusive term wellbeing education. This term may guide future research of culturally diverse case studies, thereby supporting the greater integration of wellbeing science with teaching theory and practise in initial teacher education

Case Study of a School Wellbeing Initiative: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Support Positive Change

Drawing from the fields of positive psychology, positive organizational scholarship and educational administration, this case study reports on the process used in a large K-12 school to implement the strategic goal of fostering student wellbeing. This case study outlines the three strategic phases used to build wellbeing over a two-and-a-half-year time period: 1) development; 2) implementation; and 3) monitoring. The school aligned its change process to the goal of achieving wellbeing by adopting appreciative inquiry as the overarching change approach. Appreciative inquiry is a systematic, holistic, and collaborative methodology that follows a strengths-based model of change. Through the use of appreciative inquiry, 15 bottom-up (instigated by students and staff) and top-down (instigated by leadership) initiatives were generated over a two-and-a-half-year period. This paper provides an applied example of how AI can be woven into a strategic change process to support the wellbeing of students. The paper aims to contribute to the rapidly developing field of positive education.

Positive education: Learning and teaching for wellbeing and academic mastery

Over the past decade, positive education has emerged as a rapidly growing arm of positive psychology that has attracted both interest and critique. Through a case study, we show that positive education can positively impact students, teachers, and others within the educational community, but success is not immediate nor imminent. We suggest that successful positive education programs blend evidence-based learning from the science of positive psychology, best practices in learning and teaching, whole school strategy, and evaluation, and consider pedagogy, philosophical assumptions, and the school’s culture. Positive education must be studied, applied, and managed responsibly, as there is also potential that attempts are ineffective or do harm. Finally, we consider implications for training, teaching, and professional practice. Positive education has made significant progress, but future research and application will benefit from a unified theoretical framework that adequately incorporates educational knowledge and pedagogical practice

Similar psychological distance reduces temporal discounting.

People often prefer inferior options in the present even when options in the future are more lucrative. Five studies investigated whether decision making could be improved by manipulating construal level and psychological distance. In Studies 1a, 1b, and 2, temporal discounting was reduced when future rewards (trips to Paris) were construed at a relatively concrete level, thus inducing a similar level of construal to present rewards. By contrast, Studies 3 and 4 reduced temporal discounting by making present financial rewards more psychologically distant via a social proximity manipulation, and thus linked to a similar high level of construal as future rewards. These results suggest that people prefer the more lucrative option when comparing two intertemporal choices that are construed on a similar level instead of on a different level. Thus, changes in construal level and mental representations can be used to promote more desirable choices in economic decision making.Kim, H., Schnall, S., & White, M. P. (2013). Similar psychological distance reduces temporal discounting. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39, 1005-1016

Testing the reliability and effectiveness of a new tool for assessing urban blue spaces:The BlueHealth environmental assessment tool (BEAT)

In order to understand how blue spaces may influence health-promoting behaviours, a reliable and effective assessment tool is needed. The Blue Health Environment Assessment Tool (BEAT) was developed to meet this need. A two-stage approach to testing the reliability of the tool is presented here. At Stage-1, one common and several different expert assessors rated 16 sites independently and their results compared. In Stage-2, two assessors rated 21 sites independently and their results were compared. The Inter-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was calculated to assess inter-rater reliability to both stages. Stage-2 results showed greater reliability after enhanced training of the assessors. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool at revealing differences between sites and for identifying health promoting affordances we carried out intra and inter-site comparisons of a subset of six sites for the Stage-1 and 18 sites for Stage-2. The results showed that overall the tool performs consistently and compares well to the reliability shown by other similar tools. The tool is also highly effective in identifying site-specific differences across the test sample of blue spaces. The results demonstrate that the tool can be used reliably (with training and guidance) and that it provides meaningful data to help planners and designers assess different sites