Seeing The Good in Your Students Helps Them To Flourish

What is meant by positive pedagogy?

Positive pedagogy is about applying the principles of positive psychology into education. It is a philosophy that can be applied to all communication, interaction and teaching. In practice, it means seeing the good in your students or in your children. Each one of us has challenges, but in spite of them we also have potential and opportunity in us. While using methods of positive pedagogy, we concentrate on the latter. So, in other words, instead of concentrating on what we lack of or have challenges with, in positive pedagogy we concentrate on what is good and potential in us.

What skills positive pedagogy demands from a teacher?

Teachers should see the character strengths in their students, skills students have and understand that more the student has challenges, the more important it is to find his strengths and skills!

How positive pedagogy could help children to thrive?

In positive pedagogy the objective is that a person finds his strengths and learns to use his full potential. This naturally benefits the individual and the whole society. Especially children, who have lots of challenges, need to be reminded of their strengths and not just to be told what they lack. Students have strengths also in being curious, resilient or self-regulation, for example, and these skills are used in acquiring more specific skills such as learning to swim, read or code.

How about hierarchy between the student and the teacher? How positive pedagogy sees this?

No study has found that carrying out education, which concentrates on correcting the mistakes student does, or disgracing and threating the student, would work. This line of teaching might also harm the students’ emotional development. Studies also show that waking up the positive emotions in student by emphasizing even small achievements is related with physiological changes, which promote feelings of being safe, helps to release stress and thus makes learning more efficient.

If I want to learn more about positive pedagogy, who should I follow?

You can follow our work at www.positive.fi. Professor Martin Seligman wrote his ground-breaking book Flourish in 2011. So that should be in your reading list. Also, a psychologist Lea Waters is someone to watch, and a Nobelist James J. Heckman is worth following.

Kaisa Vuorinen will be speaking in Education House Finland’s webinar “Positivity and Wellbeing During Distance Learning” on Tuesday 19th of May.