Dear Parents
Welcome back to Mougins School and I hope all your children have settled into the new and exciting curriculum. We have started a number of new syllabus’ such as Global Perspectives and Positive Education that are really helping to enhance our academic studies throughout the school.
This week I would like to explore the subject of Positive Education and why we as a school thought it was so important to introduce.
Positive Education was started by Prof. Martin Seligman bringing high expectations in academic studies into line with our health and well-being by ensuring that students have a positive psychology in their learning environment. It is helping to create new opportunities for students in school and helping them understand the importance of life skills.
In school we are going through a transitional period where we will be using both the PSHE Learning framework, such as the Your Life books and resources as well as bringing in the Positive Education ideas and ethos.
The Form tutors will be delivering the new syllabus and they will be using a variety of resources from TED Talks, BBC documentaries, United Nations World Days and PSHE life skills. We will encourage teachers to use the PERMA framework in Positive Education to help create happiness and Well-being in our learning environments.
Abraham Maslow (1962) was one of the first in the field of psychology to describe “wellbeing,” with his characteristics of a self-actualized person. The description of self-actualization is a foreshadowing of the PERMA model, which outlines the characteristics of a flourishing individual and Wellbeing Theory (WBT).
In 1998, Dr. Martin Seligman used his inaugural address as the incoming president of the American Psychological Association to shift the focus from mental illness and pathology to studying what is good and positive in life. From this point in time, theories and research examined positive psychology interventions that help make life worth living and how to define, quantify, and create wellbeing (Rusk & Waters, 2015).
These five elements or components (PERMA; Seligman, 2012) are
- Positive emotion
- Engagement
- Relationships
- Meaning
- Accomplishments
Positive emotion
- Engagement
- Relationships
- Meaning
- Accomplishments
The fundamental goal of Positive Psychology is to help people build a flourishing life; or in other words, feeling good and functioning well (Seligman, 2011).
We hope all our students enjoy this amazing new subject and we hope that these positive ideas and emotions will be seen throughout our school in the near future.
Mr Robert Cooke
Head of Pastoral Care and Safeguarding
