POSITIVITY IN EDUCATION
The world’s best schools are making attempts to bring positive cultures to enhance education.
Operating on positivity improves performance, pride, and culture, helps retain our best teachers, and
deepens student, family, and community relationships.
It is my great pleasure to be involved in bringing the Happiness Advantage to your school in 2019. Under your leadership becomes a never-before-seen partnership between Education, Business and the Community-at-Large in service of positive education and the greater good.
The subject of happiness is now officially out of the self-help books and into the forefront of business and education optimization. When we constantly scan the world for the negative, it comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.
When we encounter unexpected challenges or threats, the best way to propel ourselves forward is to focus on what is going right, hold on to the people around us and operate with the belief that our behavior matters. Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that together we can.
Recent research concludes that investing in the future of the education system and the business community will result in better educational outcomes, a better prepared workforce, better business and community relations, reduced crime, and increased health to name but a few.
I invite you to join us on this journey.
Shawn Achor
See How the Workshop works for Staff, Teachers, Students, Families and Teachers
THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE
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Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, then happiness will follow.
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But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward. Happiness fuels success, not the other way around. When we are positive, our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient, and productive. This isn’t just an empty mantra. This discovery has been repeatedly borne out by rigorous research in psychology and neuroscience, management studies, and the bottom lines of organizations around the globe.
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Research shows that when we are positive our brains become more engaged, creative, motivated, energetic, resilient and productive. The Gallup Student Poll released in March 2016, indicates high school students who are engaged and hopeful are about 1.6 times more likely to report that they are headed to a two-year or four-year college after high school, compared to disengaged and discouraged students.
Ninth grade students getting positive psychology training reported they were more positive and engaged. These student’s teachers reported that students who participated in the program had improved skills related to learning and engagement in school; including increased curiosity, love for learning and creativity as well as improvement in social skills such as empathy, cooperation, assertiveness and self-control. Positive psychology in other studies has also been shown to improve student grades. (Seligman, Ernst, Gillham, Reivich,& Waters 2105)
From Cardinal School Superintendent Joel Pedersen: When I became superintendent of Cardinal Community School District, a district serving five small communities in southeast Iowa, staff, teachers and even students, had adopted the minimalist belief that We’re just Cardinal.
That negative outlook shaped how the entire community viewed itself. It formed the lens through which everyone viewed both expectations and outcomes. Enter Shawn Achor’s Happiness Advantage | Orange Frog.
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The Orange Frog is a parable by Achor about a frog named Spark who lives on an island that was experiencing “the thrall” and a crisis of identity much like our district. In the story, Spark turns orange the more positive he becomes. Spark however is also looked upon with a certain amount of suspicion by other frogs that question his motivations. Eventually, Spark spreads his positivity to all the other frogs overcoming the thrall — which is the same thing we’ve done in at Cardinal.
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All of our teachers and support staff have completed the workshop, and we ensure all students receive copies of the book and a stuffed version of Spark. This makes it not only fun but also effective because all of us know the metaphors and speak the same language.
I believe we’ve proven the impact of positive belief and action in K-12 education and I’m proud of the results. ACT scores of Cardinal students have increased by three composite points since 2009, a 15 percent increase. At the same time, average daily attendance has moved up from 92 percent to 95 percent.
Since focusing on positive psychology and school happiness, we have had a net change in funding exceeding $1 million since 2005 from gains in student open enrollment and we were named by the Des Moines Register as one of the Top 150 Workplaces in Iowa in 2015.
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~ Joel Pedersen (School Superintendent
Cardinal School District)
Positivity in Education for Schools
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In 2016, the Orange Frog Workshop commenced for students at both iLead in Carrollton, KY and Hoonah in Alaska.
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Students were immersed in the entire workshop and developed their own culture committee to make substantial positive routines and new social scripts at the school.
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Train The Trainer (Step One) with Orange Frog Public Workshop
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Overview
A positive engaged brain is the greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy. It is ESSENTIAL in rapidly changing environments and is needed today more than ever before. That is why companies are lining up to schedule THIS workshop and why we are finally bringing it to a public format.
The Happiness Advantage | Orange Frog workshop provides a blueprint for increasing employee engagement and tapping into people's intrinsic motivations.
See why THIS workshop has been credited with raising engagement scores, increasing levels of optimism and well-being, reducing stress and producing record breaking financial results. See why Harvard Business Review put Shawn Achor on its cover, his TED Talk is among the top 20 of all-time.
If your team is not fully maxed out with positivity, don't miss this unique opportunity to experience The Happiness Advantage at work and meet Shawn Achor!
Upon successful completion of the Train the Trainer Workshop and on-site certification*, facilitators are certified to conduct The
Happiness Advantage | Orange Frog Workshop™ to participants inside their designated organizations.
*On-site certification is the additional required final step for trainers. This involves a custom plan that includes onsite coaching, co-training and evaluation of 2 or more workshops.
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