Symposium 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Flourishing Classrooms (#209)

Laura Allison 1
  1. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Vic, Australia

The field of positive education has predominantly focussed on teaching students wellbeing skills and implementing interventions to achieve outcomes at the individual student level (Chodkiewicz & Boyle, 2017). However, wellbeing is not just influenced from within the student themselves, but is also shaped by the different settings in which they learn at school (Ciarrochi et al., 2016). This suggests that positive education research needs to also consider the importance of context and, thus, conduct research that helps schools to more intentionally develop wellbeing environments.Methods to examine classrooms settings have been used in research dating back to early 2000’s, however these methods have focused on ‘learning environment’ rather than ‘wellbeing environment’ and they have not been adopted in the field of positive education. Adopting a systems approach to positive education, this paper will walk the audience through the development of a tool that allows teachers and researcher to assess the degree to which a classroom creates a flourishing system via the design of the Flourishing Classrooms Observation Tool (FCOT) (Allison, Kern & Waters).