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Positive psychology exercises improve students’ outlook & behavior in school

This article, reports that making school students go through positive psychology exercises helps them get a better impression of school in general, improves their behavior in classroom, and a bunch of other good stuff.

For example, one exercise in the positive psychology asked students to list 3 good things that happened to them each day for a week – then the follow-up questions asked what the event meant to them and what can increase the likelihood of this happening again (kind of connecting the dots for the students).

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The net result: positive thinking and resiliency training improved students' school outlook and engagement, improved classroom behavior and cooperation, resulted in more self-control, and more empathy. Not bad!

That's not all – think about this:

students who believed that intelligence was a fixed entity were more likely to show no improvement in their math achievement from 7th to 8th grade, more likely to withdraw or cheat, and less likely to demonstrate mastery-reactions to setbacks. Not surprisingly, the students who believed intelligence could be 'grown' – were more likely to persevere, show resiliency behaviors to setbacks, and improve performance.

See full article.

(Via: http://twitter.com/sandygautam)

Posted via email from Navin’s posterous

Student families in school

My kids’ school, Vidya Valley, has just introduced something they are calling “Tutor groups” in school. A tutor group is a group of 15 to 20 students consisting of a few students from each class from 5th to 10th standard (aka grade). Each tutor group is assigned one teacher (”Guardian Tutor”) whose job it is to ensure the full welfare of the children in this group. Here, “full welfare” specifically refers to non-academic issues, like mental and physical welfare (for example to help with bullying, truancy issues, or special medical attention).

Each student stays in the same tutor group for all the 5 years, and the guardian tutor of the group remains the same throughout. Each year, the students of Std. 10 will obviously pass out and leave the group. At this time, new students from Std. 5 will enter the group. This whole set-up creates a sort of a family unit, where the guardian tutor becomes the surrogate parent, and the other students become surrogate siblings.

The tutor group meets every day for a little time – the school time-tables have been adjusted to allow for this. In addition, they meet once every two weeks for a longer period. These meetings have no agenda. Just hang out and bond and behave like a family.

See this pdf for a more detailed description of the guardian tutor system in Vidya Valley.

It sounds like a very interesting idea, and I have not really heard of anything like this being used in Pune schools (but I could be mistaken). In any case, seems like a neat thing to have. They have introduced it just a few months ago, so it will be interesting to see how it works out in real life.

Interactive science website for kids

Click here. From BBC. Go here for a lot more educational goodies.