Positive education: Learning and teaching for wellbeing and academic mastery

By M. White, Margaret L. Kern. International Journal of Wellbeing, 2018

92 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b8d644ee591216b44c5fee18b7a93f7b49bda3d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. D. Loton
2. L. Waters
3. Margaret L. Kern
4. L. Oades
5. Paige L. Williams
6. Sarah Mercer
7. Adam M. Grant
8. Martin E. P. Seligman

In Social Psychology

1. D. Loton
2. L. Waters
3. Margaret L. Kern
4. Paige L. Williams
5. L. Oades
6. Sarah Mercer
7. Martin E. P. Seligman
8. Benjamin Dreer

Citations in the corpus

• Systems informed positive psychology (2020, background): “…the field has matured over the past decade, such nuances are often not translated into everyday discourse, with activity running ahead of the science, the proliferation of maverick providers with questionable programs, and rhetoric that overclaims what PP can do (White, 2017; White & Kern, 2018).”
• SEARCH: A Meta-Framework and Review of the Field of Positive Education (2019, methodology): “…wellbeing and academic performance) and the priority on academic outcomes that school leaders and administers must place when allocating resources (White and Kern 2018), it is crucial for positive education researchers to more frequently incorporate academic outcomes and other school-related…”