Positive education : Theory, practice, and challenges

Education is an active process of developing individuals to become fully functioning human beings, intellectually, emotionally, and socially. While many schools worldwide place an enormous emphasis on intellectual development, educators and psychologists have increasingly advocated the development of non-academic personal attributes through education. Promoting a whole-person development perspective, some schools have introduced modifications of educational processes to enhance the well-being of students under a new umbrella term known as ‘positive education’. At its infancy, the focus of positive education programs is mostly placed on well-being issues related to students, with program contents including social and emotional learning which encompasses self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. With positive psychology being the primary theoretical underpinning of such programs, positive outcomes in individual well-being are expected. However, the shift from a focus on intellectual development to individual well-being is not only challenging to teachers who need to adjust their pedagogy to that effect, but it also seems difficult for teachers to implement without an overhaul of the existing curriculum. For positive education to be successful in schools, there is a need to establish a theoretical framework in which positive psychology and other educational psychology theories are identified, and their synergies established to complement each other. This chapter explores (1) essential theoretical aspects of positive education, (2) effective teaching practices for achieving student learning and well-being outcomes within the existing school curriculum, and (3) major challenges in promoting positive education in the current school context. Major challenges discussed include: a lack of an explicit theoretical model to bring well-being education to scale at a systems level, the need for a sound instrument to empirically demonstrate program effects, the identification of crucial contents to achieve positive education outcomes, and the challenges for sustainability of any positive education initiative. To facilitate whole-person development, teachers need professional development to master positive education theory and practice to promote students’ intellectual and well-being outcomes as well as their own well-being.