Positive schooling is an approach to education that incorporates student well-being and virtues as learning goals in addition to academic achievement. It aims to promote human development by teaching students how to make themselves happy, decreasing depression, and facilitating academic performance. Key aspects of positive schooling include teaching positive thinking, sharing excitement, fostering trust in the classroom, and emphasizing the importance of diversity.

1. Positive Schooling
Dr. Suresh Kumar Murugesan PhD
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2. What is Positive
Schooling?
An approach to education that
incorporates student wellbeing and virtues
as learning goals, besides academic
achievement.
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3. Positive Schooling
▪ Positive schooling is
▪ teaching children to think positively
▪ sharing excitement with the multitude of others
▪ turning students into teachers who continue to
share what they have learned with others
▪ creating sense of trust in the classroom
▪ fostering the importance of diversity
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4. Importance of
Education
The ultimate objective of education is
1. imparting knowledge to students,
2. enhancing their skills,
3. helping them in building their character, and,
4. finally, producing skilled and responsible citizens for
nation building.
Therefore, schools play an important role in achieving the
objective of education and in shaping the career of a
child.
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5. Positive Education
● Positive education is an approach to education that draws on positive
psychology's emphasis of individual strengths and personal motivation to
promote learning.
● Positive Education brings together the science of Positive Psychology with
best practice teaching to encourage and support individuals, schools and
communities to flourish.
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6. Positive Education
Flourishing as a combination of ‘feeling good and doing good’.
Positive Education focuses on specific skills that assist students to
strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, enhance personal
resilience, promote mindfulness and encourage a healthy lifestyle.
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7. Positive Discipline
● Positive School Discipline is a comprehensive approach that uses discipline to
teach rather than punish and, as a result, helps students succeed and thrive in
school.
● Schools that take this approach promote positive student behavior while
preventing negative and risky behaviors.
● Positive School Discipline is integrated into the policies, programs, and
practices of a school and is applied systemwide—in the classroom, school,
and community—to create a safe, supportive learning environment for all
students.
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8. Positive School Culture
Proven ways to build a positive school culture
1. Create meaningful parent involvement
2. Celebrate personal achievement and good behavior
3. Establish school norms that build values
4. Set consistent discipline
5. Model the behaviors in school
6. Engage students in ways that benefit them
7. Create rituals and traditions that are fun for students and teachers
8. Encourage innovation in the classroom
9. Professional development for teachers
10. Maintain the physical environment of your school
11. Keep tabs on your school’s culture, and make adjustments when necessary
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9. Positive Education
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17. Positive
Schooling
The aim of positive schooling is to
● Promoting human development
● Teaching students how to make themselves
happy
● Decreasing depression
● Facilitating academic performance
● Offering easier systems for teachers
● Increasing motivation among students
● Boosting resilience
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19. Care, Trust
and Respect
for Diversity
1. Teachers must model positive emotions and care
for their students in the classroom.
2. Development discipline: helping students who
have insecure attachments to caregivers.
3. Encourage students to be sensitive to students
who are different and also respectful.
4. Positive classroom management techniques,
including when punishment and reward are used.
5. Implement "Jigsaw Classroom" and focus on
group-based goals
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20. Motivation
▪ Brighten the course content for students
▪ Be sensitive to the needs and reactions of their students, and take their
questions very seriously + make every effort to give the best answers.
▪ Take risks and try new approaches in class.
▪ Give praise (best to be delivered privately) to students so that they feel valued
and will be energized.
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21. Plans
● Teaching necessitates a careful planning process on the part of instructors
● Make material relevant to students, so as to better engage students in learning.
● Take reference from the students' own contexts
● Class demonstrations using discrepant events
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22. Plans and
Motivation
● Teachers who are creative, enthusiastic, and
connect with their class help motivate students.
● These skills also help make the material easier to
understand and more relevant to the class. This
helps motivate students and teach them to reach
their goals.
● Through motivation and planning, student goals
can be universally met.
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23. Goals
▪ Teachers can have negative or positive effects on their students. Positive
teachers teach students to appreciate and gain respect towards learning.
▪ Learning is a process that doesn't just happen inside the classroom, it can
happen anywhere.
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24. Goals in Positive
Schooling
▪ Goals that are agreed upon by students
and teachers.
▪ Goals target the student's learning efforts.
▪ Reasonably challenging goals engender
learning.
▪ Avoid emphasizing grades too strictly once
learning goals are made
▪ Make goals understandable and concrete.
▪ Take larger learning goals and subdivide
into smaller sub goals to be tackled in
stages.
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25. Hope in Positive Schooling
▪ Hope helps students become lifelong problem solvers and positive schooling encourages the
process of learning how to learn.
▪ Positive schooling not only teaches the course contents, but it also produces a sense of hope. A
hopeful student believes that they will continue to learn even after stepping out of the classroom.
▪ Use the goals, planning and motivation previously built to encourage a spirit of inquiry in the
classroom.
▪ Teaching disposition should communicate a deep caring about the ideas and how these ideas
are derived, understood and expressed.
▪ This passionate caring will be modelled unto students, who are empowered to become lifelong
problem solvers, and instill a sense of hope.
▪ Hopeful thinking that is generated will know no bounds in the life of a student who never stops
learning.
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26. Giving back
(Teachers)
▪ Care, trust, and respect for diversity is key to a positive
school
▪ Attachment theory principles
▪ This helps kids with insecurity about their caregivers
▪ "we/me" environment is important to the classroom
▪ Shown through the jigsaw idea which places group-based
learning, and teaches trust, respect, and cooperation with
others.
▪ To help give back to your teachers, you can visit them,
encourage them, and help whenever you can.
▪ Give thanks to those teachers in your life that have
encouraged or inspired you
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27. POSITIVE SCHOOLING
PRACTICES
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28. PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM PRACTICES &
STRUCTURES
Encouraging POSITIVITY
Supporting students to develop positivity skills and
experience positive emotions
• Provision of opportunities for students to experience and
amplify positive emotions and build positive learning
environments e.g through the use of music, dance,
humour, cooperative learning tasks
• Explicit teaching of the values and skills needed for a
Positive Mindset
▪ Optimistic thinking, positive tracking, positive
conversion, hopeful thinking and expressing
gratitude
▪ Mindfulness
∙ Provision of opportunities to practise these skills
1. Encouraging Positivity
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29. 2. Building Relationship
PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM PRACTICES &
STRUCTURES
Building RELATIONSHIPS
Supporting students to develop the social skills and
pro-social values that underpin positive relationships
and building positive relationships within the school
• Strategies for developing:
• a safe & supportive school culture
• positive student-teacher relationships,
• positive student-peer relationships
• positive school-family & school-community relationships
• Explicit teaching of social skills and pro-social values
• Provision of opportunities to practise these social skills
• Interpersonal structures that facilitate relationships e.g.
cooperative learning groups, cross-age teams, cooperative
games,
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30. 3. Facilitating Outcomes
PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM
PRACTICES & STRUCTURES
Facilitating OUTCOMES
Provision of optimal learning environments
and opportunities to learn specific skills that
enhance students’ outcomes &
accomplishment
• Adoption of evidence-informed teaching strategies
• Explicit teaching of skills for:
• Organisation
• Goal achievement (e.g. effort, persistence + willpower
(grit) and problem solving)
• Effective studying
• Promotion of a Growth mindset
• The use of critical and creative thinking tools that
challenge and scaffold
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31. 4. Focusing on Strengths
PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM PRACTICES &
STRUCTURES
Focusing on STRENGTHS
Taking a strengths-based approach with students,
teachers and the whole school community
Adoption of strengths-based approaches to organisation,
curriculum and planning which results in:
▪ Students identifying, exploring and applying their character
and ability strengths in lessons, in extra-curricular and
leadership activities
▪ Teachers using task differentiation based on students’
character & ability strengths
▪ School psychologists and coaches using strengths-based
approaches
▪ • recognition and application of teacher and parent strengths
and collective strengths using change strategies such as
appreciative inquiry
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32. 5. Fostering Sense of Purpose
PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM
PRACTICES & STRUCTURES
Fostering a sense of PURPOSE
Supporting students to develop a sense of
purpose and meaning
Provision of opportunities for students to:
▪ participate in student-owned and student-directed
activities
▪ be involved with community service or service
learning
▪ make contributions to the school through ‘student
voice’ & participation in decision-making about
aspects of the school
▪ undertake roles requiring peer mentoring or peer
support
▪ undertake leadership roles
▪ explore spirituality
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33. 6. Enhancing Engagement
PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM
PRACTICES & STRUCTURES
Enhancing ENGAGEMENT
Providing opportunities for high student
engagement
Adoption of:
▪ evidence-informed teaching & learning
strategies
▪ relationship-based teaching strategies
▪ activities that incorporate critical and creative
thinking
▪ curriculum differentiation and extra-curricular
activities so students experience ‘flow’
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34. 7. Teaching Resilience
PROSPER SCHOOL PATHWAYS EXAMPLES OF SCHOOL & CLASSROOM
PRACTICES & STRUCTURES
Teaching RESILIENCE
Supporting students to develop the
skills and attitudes that underpin
resilient behaviour.
Explicit teaching of skills for:
▪ Coping and acting resiliently in both personal
and academic contexts
▪ Acting with courage
▪ Good decision-making
▪ Self management
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35. References
1. https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-positive-education/
2. http://det.wa.edu.au/studentsupport/behaviourandwellbeing/detcms/school-support-programs/behaviour-and-
wellbeing/positive-classrooms/positive-behaviour-support.en?cat-id=13613981
3. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-0077-6_1
4. https://coggle.it/diagram/WJWQLfSr1AABz0Vv/t/positive-schooling-%F0%9F%8E%93
5. Source - The PROSPER framework: Seven School Pathways that enable all students to PROSPER
6. https://psywb.springeropen.com/track/pdf/10.1186/s13612-015-0030-2
7. https://www.teacheracademy.eu/blog/positive-education/
8. https://positivepsychology.com/what-is-positive-education/
9. https://positivepsychology.com/positive-education-happy-students/
10.http://positiveschooldiscipline.promoteprevent.org/what-positive-school-discipline
11.https://www.prodigygame.com/in-en/blog/school-culture/
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