Articles

The following key principles shared by Westwood Primary School undergird our focus for a school to flourish, that is, to strive for both excellence, and for wellbeing, leveraging on character strengths of resilience, gratitude, community-spiritedness and future-ready confidence for the 21st century school.

Positive education, a movement that is gaining momentum across the world, works to create a school culture that supports caring, trusting relationships; encourage and support individuals and the community to flourish and focuses on specific skills that assist students to build positive emotions, enhance personal resilience, promote mindfulness and encourage a healthy lifestyle.

Optimism is associated with a healthier life. The Science of Optimism tells us that healthy longevity is based on genetics, wealth and possibly geography. To quote studies at the American Heart Association, the trait most associated with healthy longevity is optimism.

How do youths, in facing life problems, setbacks and challenges, overcome them? How can youths learn to support their peers in need? What are questions that we as educators (and parents) can ask ourselves to better understand and learn from the challenges that youths are going through, and empower our youths to develop character and to support one another?

In his latest publication, John Hagel III, a business strategist and entrepreneur who has lived forty years in Silicon Valley provides precious insights and tools to help us recognize fear for what it is, look beyond it and see the expanding opportunities that lie ahead of us.

Watching my daughter struggle as she repeatedly attempted to perfect the handstand to backwards bridge combination made me acutely aware of the fact that resilience is always, in all ways, a part of our daily lives. She reminded me of the Japanese saying, fall seven, rise eight. Dealing with challenges, change and setbacks is a shared human condition.

According to Daniel Cordaro, contentment is our felt sense of unconditional completeness regardless of circumstance. It is an emotion that sits at the deepest core of human wellbeing and is foundational to the experience of fulfillment in life. Contentment is available to us at any given moment.

At heart I’m an optimist. Honestly, I am. However, the ‘eyes down’ movement disturbs me. As we edge closer to the middle of 2021, one of the more noticeable trends occurring in adolescents is an unhealthy relationship with their digital devices (Burns & Gottschalk, 2020).

In its most basic, mindfulness helps us to be more aware of what is actually happening, rather than worrying about what has happened or might happen. We learn to bring greater curiosity to whatever it is that we are experiencing. Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founding father of secular mindfulness, described this skill as ‘being alive and knowing it’.

Learning dispositions, or habits of learning, are the different characteristics with which children approach the learning process. More specifically, some have referred to dispositions as “enduring habits of mind and action; the tendency to respond to situations in characteristic ways”.

What began as a ground-up initiative on the part of the Student Development team at Bukit View Secondary School has evolved into a whole school approach in formalizing the adoption of positive education, and the integration of the six domains of PERMAH (Seligman, 2020) into the academic and student development curriculum, as well as culture and ethos of the school. SPEN speaks with Principal Kevin Ang, and Vice Principal, Shirley Lee about the journey they have taken with their staff.

Many people think about Optimism as something which is “unrealistically positive”. Until I read about Optimism from a psychological perspective, I, too, had many misconceptions about Optimism. Here are some of the most common myths about Optimism and debunking them.