Thanks to my colleague Dan Reidy for pointing me to this TEDxBloomington talk by Shawn Achor, CEO of Good Think Inc. A new sense of urgency around the power of positive thinking—one that might just have on our personal lives, our community lives and our institutional lives. Could there be something here?
Flipping the relationship between success and happiness
About Stephen Hurley
Stephen Hurley has been involved in public education for over 27 years, serving as a classroom teacher, school-based resource, curriculum consultant and teacher educator. He is most passionate about issues and conversations around school change and innovation, and welcomes all voices to the conversation. You can contact Hurley at stephen.hurley@sympatico.caSubscribe
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I love this but I wonder how do you run you tube in slow motion. I would like to slow him down.
LOL
Well Stephen, you do surprise in expanding your horizons. Education should take a good look at positive psychology. Take for example how Achor states that it should be flipped, happiness first breeds success. I agree with it, because with my youngest in order to re-teach and tutored her at home, I had to get her to see herself in positive terms and not the negative terms that was conditioned by education practices and policies telling her she was not successful nor should she be happy. Happiness in school is taught in such a way – become a good reader and a good student. What happens when a student does not become a good reader? They become an outlier, and outliers are not paid attention to. Once my youngest started to see herself in positive terms, she was eager to learned and applied herself in the hard work of remediation and to improved her academic weaknesses. There is something to be say about schools and average is just the norm. On the dyslexia forums, average is boring. My youngest took that to heart, once she finally understood why she should not strive to be like the other children striving for average. She was not just an average child, but a child that did not fit average, and never will. And that is what makes her not just the average student, and she has embrace it.