Roundtable Presentation 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Integration Of Positive Education Into A Pre-Kindergarten Through 12th Grade School (#282)

Sharron Russell 1 , Erin McLaughlin 1
  1. The Shipley School, Bryn Mawr, PA, United States

The practice of Positive Education must not be contained in one department, course, division or area of a school. In order to have the most impact, Positive Education must become integrated into the day-to-day experience of students, which naturally includes core subjects such as math, English, science, social studies and foreign language. After spending the first year of our school’s Positive Education integration on “Learning and Living”, the second year began work on “Teaching and Embedding” (Roadmap, Geelong Grammar School). The school convened a team of teachers to work together towards this integration. The week-long “Summer Symposium” was an inter-divisional and inter-disciplinary learning experience. Creating the ideal classroom experience for the participants was achieved by consciously cultivating PERMA. Training was provided in curricular development, positive education (an inspirational Skype from Dr. James Pawelski and a session by Dr. Alejandro Adler), viewpoint diversity (Erin McLaughlin), cultural competency, and interdisciplinary work so that participants could develop course/unit or lesson plans that nurture PERMA, particularly in the area of meaning or purpose. The process and overview of the course will be provided, as well as examples from teacher integration of positive education into core subject curricula across grade levels.