Changing Behaviour in Schools

My latest article for Positive Psychology News Daily is a review of a new Positive Psychology-based book by ed psych and consultant Sue Roffey, called Changing Behaviour in Schools: Promoting Positive Relationships and Well-being.

One of the great strengths of this book is its breadth, not just in terms of aims but also its evidence base. It draws on quantitative research from more than a dozen areas including restorative approaches, school culture and leadership, mental health, and values education, not just positive psychology. Thus the suggested approaches have a multi-dimensional foundation.  Not surprisingly, there isn’t space in just over 200 pages to describe positive psychology theories or research in great depth.

Roffey makes use of most of the main positive psychology concepts, such as flow, strengths, resilience, optimism, positive emotions, and emotional intelligence, although with the exception of emotional intelligence, they aren’t described in detail. Depending on your expectations and your association with positive psychology, this might be a disappointment or a welcome relief! I particularly liked the chapter on Being and Becoming Emotionally Literate, with its 11 dimensions of social and emotional literacy, and numerous questions for personal development.

I love the core message, which is that school can be a positive transformational experience, and that building positive relationships and school connectedness lead to both improved learning and better behaviour for all students.

Despite its limitations, I think this is a fabulous resource book for anyone working in primary or secondary education. Dip into almost any page and you will find some gem of information, a question that will challenge your thinking, an activity, or an insightful case study. If you picked up this book expecting it to help you manage challenging student behaviour you may be in for a surprise. It does this exceeding well in my opinion, but it does much more than that.

This book sets out the expectation that everyone in an education role, every teacher, trainee, teaching assistant, support person, and early childhood practitioner, can be a role model of well-being. Changing behaviour is schools is based on the premise that a theoretical knowledge of the subject isn’t sufficient. Teachers have to be able to do well-being in order to teach well-being.

For the full review, click here.

An interesting (and revealing) article from Stacey Burling at The Philadelphia Inquirer on Professor Martin Seligman, often quoted as the founding father of Positive Psychology.

Image courtesy of the US Army

Ultimate Multi-tasking

Here’s a link to my post to Positive Psychology News Daily this month, on the subjects of happiness, busyness and holiday letters.

Please feel free to add your comments and thoughts here or on the PPND site.

Image: sha in LA

• All in the Mind - Claudia Hammond interviews Professor Martin Seligman about the benefits of optimism, such as living longer and increased resilience. You can learn to be happier, more optimistic and more resilient. Hammond also visited Wellington College in Berkshire where they have been teaching happiness on the curriculum for the past 3 years. Ian Morris, who teaches the happiness lessons, and head teacher Dr Anthony Seldon, are keen to point out that higher well-being is linked to better pupil performance and exam results. Another school which is following in Wellington’s footsteps is Haberdashers – where I have been involved in writing the happiness curriculum.
• Off the Page - Dominic  Arkwright interviews my colleague and fellow MAPP graduate,  Miriam Akhtar about what happiness is and how she found it, as well as Dr Phil Hammond (a potential convert to positive psychology) and Guardian journalist Lucy Mangan (a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic). Miriam gives a very personal perspective on her discovery. You can find out how to do it for yourself using her Happiness Training Plan CD.

Teaching at its best

Here’s a link to my article on Positive Psychology News Daily this month, about teachers’ wellbeing, and wellbeing in schools generally.

As usual, please feel free to add your thoughts and comments here, or on the PPND website.

Image: Thanks to Chicago 2016

If you want the most up-to-date research on how to manage change successfully, you need to take a look at IBM’s Closing the Change Gap report (2009), which is based on the results of surveys and interviews with more than 1500 change practitioners from 15 nations across the globe between 2006 and 2008.

Not surprisingly, project success isn’t evenly spread across these companies: the pareto rule applies, where 20% of the change practitioners (the so-called Change Masters) are responsible for 80% of the successful projects. In contrast, the bottom 20% (the Change Novices) report a success rate of merely 8%.

So what is the key to the Change Masters’ success? IBM’s summarises the key facets in a Change Diamond as follows:

• Real insights, real actions

• Solid methods, solid benefits

• Better skills, better change

• Right investment, right impact

Now you’ll be forgiven for thinking that this is all a little obvious. It’s perhaps where the IBM model falls down. In their haste to create something which looks well-balanced and compact, persuasive and acceptable to business, I think that the IBM team has glossed over the real gems of the research, which means that you have to dig a little deeper into the report to find them.

What are the real gems?

Although it’s been recognised for years in management theory that project success is due to people and not to technology, it seems that the vast majority of the organisations which took part in IBM’s research have been a bit slow on the uptake. Either that or they’re companies which believed that technology really is superior. So the main strength of the Closing the Change Gap report is the acknowledgement that “…the ‘soft stuff’ is the hardest to get right”. In fact the top 6 of the top 10 factors which make the difference to the success of a change project are soft:

1. Senior management sponsorship 92%
2. Employee involvement 72%
3. Honest & timely communication 70%
4. Culture which motivates and promotes change 65%
5. Pioneers of change 55%
6. Change supported by culture 48%
7. Efficient training programmes 38%
8. Adjustment of performance measures 36%
9. Efficient organisation structure 33%
10. Monetary & non-monetary incentives 19%.

The role of Positive Psychology

And where does positive psychology come into all this? For me the big ticket items are the two Rs: resistance and resilience. IBM mentions the first but oddly enough, not the second. So even though ‘for its very survival, the Enterprise of the Future must better prepare itself as the pace, variety and pervasiveness of change continue to increase’, nothing is really said about how organisations should be preparing their staff from a psychological perspective to cope with this. It’s assumed that understanding and implementing a robust change management process which covers all four facets of the Change Diamond will suffice. Hmmmm, I’m not so sure!

Fortunately there is a great deal organisations can do to increase the resilience of their staff, including developing optimism, taking control of emotions, understanding the impact of beliefs on behaviour, and how to manage unhelpful thinking patterns, as well as actively managing stress levels. All of these things can help employees get back in the driving seat with renewed energy, engagement, sense of purpose and focus. Which is exactly what organisations need to meet the challenge of continual, complex change head on. And be successful.

Thanks to Paul Barrett for the link

We were talking about this just the other day: so here’s an uplifting tale from the States (where else?) on the positive after-effects of losing your job.

The moral of the story? Write a best-seller about your experience, and sell the film rights!

Thanks to Caroline Rivka for the link

Image: Alex Cheek, reused under Creative Commons License

I had to include the good old Change Curve model (it explains the emotional roller coaster we experience as a result of change we didn’t expect or didn’t want) which you may already be familiar with.

There are various practical steps that we can take to increase our ability to manage negative change more effectively; I’ve suggested three activities here. I’m sure you can think of many others – please share them with us in your comments. To paraphrase Darwin, it isn’t the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most

As with any happiness or life satisfaction league table, who comes top depends on exactly what’s being measured and how. In this article by The Observer journalist John Carlin, Iceland is referred to as the happiest country in the world. How can this be? We all know that it’s Denmark!

Carlin’s conclusion is based on Iceland’s ranking in the Human Development Index (HDI), one of the four United Nations assessments of human potential – it measures three basic dimensions – a long and healthy life, education and a decent standard of living.

1. Health is measured by life expectancy at birth,
2. Education is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined gross enrolment ratio in primary, secondary, and tertiary education,
3. Standard of living is measured by Purchasing Power Parity (PPP US$).

So the HDI isn’t actually quantifying either happiness or life satisfaction, and it’s questionable (in Positive Psychology terms) whether health, wealth and education significantly contribute to happiness anyway.

In fact there are some elements of Icelandic society which would contradict the conclusion that it’s one of the best countries in the world to live in, for example, the highest divorce rate in Europe. However, this doesn’t mean they have unhappy families – in fact writes Carlin, “The kids will be just fine, because the family will rally round them, and likely as not, the parents will continue to have a civilised relationship, based on the usually automatic understanding that custody of the children will be shared”.

The article provides further insights into those character traits which might explain why Icelanders are generally happy people (if not the happiest), for example, optimism, resilience, self-confidence and a can-do attitude. That said, if we follow Lyubomirsky’s “Happiness Pie” model, after genes (50%), what we chose to do with our time is the largest contributor (40%) to our happiness – do we have any readers who could comment on how the average happy Icelander spends his/her time?

Whether or not it’s the happiest country, Iceland takes first place in the 2007/08 HDI, followed by Norway, Australia, Canada and Ireland. The USA is in 12th position, Denmark 14th and the UK 16th. At the bottom , not surprisingly are the West African countries of Guinea (175th), Burkina Faso (176th) and Sierra Leone (177th). For the full list, see here.

Image: Gúnna