The What and Where

Keith, Sabre and Ben are working with school leaders, schools and school districts/divisions in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Each relationship is producing a different set of understandings but all focus on flourishing of persons and cultures in context of learning communities.

Purpose

Imagine if schools were organised with a disciplined focus on ensuring the well-being of all those in the learning community? What might it mean to teach, learn and lead in school cultures where the main attention of everyone was on flourishing and helping others to thrive?

These and other questions are at the heart of our ongoing research to learn how schools, the persons in school buildings, flourish. Through our authentic partnership with schools in BC and SK, we are learning alongside other educators and their students about three domains (subjective well-being, leaderful mindsets, adaptive community) that support flourishing and about the professional virtues of trust, hope and compassion.

We are intrigued as we explore stories describing what it means to work from a place of well-being and to support positive practices that generate school cultures such that they are alive with a sense of purpose, passion and play.

School Improvements

Framed within research from positive psychology, positive organisational studies and school development, we have shifted away from a deficit-model of school improvement toward a strengths-based, appreciative and generative view of what is working in schools.  We are developing a toolkit of resources for educators with practical resources for growing awareness and the relentless development and sustaining of positive practices and mindsets.

With our participants we are co-authoring monographs of their stories about what it means to notice, nurture and sustain flourishing in their schools.