Positive Education -
an interview with Dr Mathew White,
Head of Positive Education What is Positive Education?
How is it being taught?
Positive Education at Geelong Grammar School is a whole-School approach to teaching and learning from ELC to Year 12. It uses implicit and explicit teaching of Positive Psychology skills and principles across all aspects of School life: academic subjects, pastoral life, the co curriculum programme and specific Positive Psychology programmes in Years 7 and 10.
Positive Education is being taught explicitly in Year 7 through the Penn Resiliency Programme (PRP) and in Year 10 through the Strath Haven Positive Psychology Curriculum. These explicit Positive Psychology Programmes are written by some of the world’s leading psychologists in Positive Psychology and resilience, and have been developed in collaboration with experienced classroom teachers.
The aims of Positive Education are to: • increase the experience of positive emotions in our students • encourage students to engage their signature strengths for personal and community goals • engage students to live meaningful lives to find purpose and make a difference to our communities at large
Why does GGS think that Positive Education is important? At Geelong Grammar School Positive Education is for everyone. We have understood for a long time that parents want schools to teach more than academic achievement. They also want us to cultivate creativity, resilience, optimism, character strengths, and wellbeing in their children. We know that schools are associated with results, high stakes competition, league tables, and sporting events. But schools can be much more than factories. Schools can, and should foster the optimism of the young; establish hope and ambition for a new generation. There is also a very real need to address the increasing occurrence of depression in young people. The organisation Beyond Blue has found that depression and anxiety are the most common mental-health problems in young people. At any point, up to five percent of adolescents experience depression that is severe enough to warrant treatment, and around 20% of young people will have experienced major depressive symptoms by the time they reach adulthood1. And there is another very good reason why GGS believes that Positive Education has an important place in the School environment - increases in overall student wellbeing are likely to produce increases in learning. Positive mood produces broader attention2, more creative thinking3, and more holistic thinking4. In contrast, negative mood produces narrower attention5, more critical thinking, and more analytic thinking6. Both ways of thinking are important, but schools have traditionally emphasized critical, rather than creative thinking. Imagine if we were able to teach our students both. 18
In addition to the explicit Positive Psychology Programmes, Positive Education is also being taught implicitly in specific timetabled lessons from ELC – Year 12 and through all aspects of School life: academic subjects, pastoral life, and the co curriculum programme. Our pioneering approach of running explicit and implicit programmes across all aspects of School life is gaining interest from Education Faculties at Universities across Australia and also overseas.
Who is teaching it? This is where, what we are doing at GGS is ground-breaking. Previous deliveries of similar courses have been assigned to the Physical Education Department or humanities teachers, but in 2008 the Leadership Team of the School took the visionary decision to create the Positive Education Department, comprising 12 teachers at Corio, to teach the explicit programmes. The rationale for the structure of the Department was to mirror the way we engage with wellbeing in life rather than compartmentalise wellbeing into a particular subject discipline. Teachers are drawn from departments including Literature, Languages other than English, Economics, History, Geography, Experimental Sciences and Mathematics. The strength of the team is that all teachers are involved in the School’s pastoral programme and cocurriculum programme. The creation of the Positive Education Department and my position as Head, is a powerful statement of the School’s commitment to ensuring that Positive Education is central to life at GGS. But the boundary of Positive Education does not end with the members of the Department. More than 160 Geelong Grammar staff have taken part in intensive residential training courses with Professor Martin Seligman and his team of experts through which they learned and practised the principles and skills that build resilience, optimism, character strengths, engagement in the classroom, positive communication, and positive relationships. Each of these teachers is able to use this learning in their classes and activities and it is in this way that Positive Education can
Dr Mathew White Head of Positive Education Dr Mathew White (GGS Staff 1998-) is Head of Positive Education (HOPE) and a Fellow in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. He has held administrative and pastoral positions of responsibility since 1999 including International Baccalaureate Coordinator, Assistant Head of Barrabool and Manifold Houses. He maintains his pastoral role as a tutor in Manifold. He has taught Senior School English Literature and French, Theory of Knowledge and coached tennis and soccer. Mathew is a member of the Australian Practitioners’ Advisory Board for 2nd Australian Positive Psychology and Wellbeing Conference.
influence every student - in the classroom, on the sports field and in their House - at each of our campuses, every day.
What are students learning? There are seven over-arching topics in the implicit approach around which discussions are based: • emotion • strengths • self-efficacy • mindfulness
• gratitude • creativity • resilience
Combined with this are specifically created lessons delivered through the explicit Positive Psychology Programmes in Years 7 and 10, which teach students the skills required to tackle life’s challenges. These include: • Thinking and Explanatory Styles • Thinking Traps • Detecting Icebergs (Underlying and Surface Beliefs) • Challenging Beliefs • Putting It Into Perspective • Real-time Resilience
What difference will it make to students? Positive Education is a promise, not a guarantee. But there have been a number of measurable benefits from the programmes that we are teaching. In previous studies, students who have completed the explicit Years 7 and 10 programmes have reported differences including: positive effects on depressive symptoms, improved explanatory style for negative events and significant impacts on depression, anxiety, and adjustment disorders. There have also been reports of increased levels of creativity, better critical thinking skills and increased levels of positive emotion.