Positive Education
This term saw one of the biggest Positive Education focused days of the year at Playford International College. In attendance were all of the Playford staff, guests from our feeder Primary Schools, a select group of our Student Leadership group, and guests from the School Board. The day started with welcome to country and a Keynote presentation from Leanne Polkinghorne on Playford’s Positive Education journey so far. Attendees experienced five workshops on different aspects of Positive Education presented by Playford and DCP staff members. The day was a rousing success with attendees taking many new ideas and concepts away to actively utilise in their personal and professional lives.
The workshops included:
Character Strengths – Sam Trotter
This session examined how a Supported Learning (Special Education) class learnt about character strengths, as defined by the VIA Institute, through a variety of tasks, cumulating in their production of one or more artefacts relating to two or more of their top character strengths. It also examined further tasks that could be attempted by students that included character strength concepts.
Personal Wellbeing – Emily Richichi and Leanne Polkinghorne
This session looked at one’s own personal wellbeing and how Positive Education principles can support us in one’s professional and personal lives. It focused on how someone can reduce risk of burn out. Implementing Positive Education principles in everyday lives can lead to the development of better classroom pedagogy.
Positive Emotion and Flow – Tim Kloeden
This session took a different look at lesson preparation by predicting how the dynamic of the classroom with unfold through a student analysis. It took an in-depth look at student skill levels versus the difficulty of the challenge presented to them each lesson is only half the story. What role do emotions play on engagement? Where do we as educators need to focus the most? The answer is all about knowing our students and what strategies we can action to guide them in to a state of flow.
Positive Relationships – Paul Eckermann
This session provided opportunities to learn and practice effective methods of praise and criticism as well methods of responding to news that creates and develops positive relationships. Participants had the opportunity to practice methods such as person v’s process praise and active constructive responding as well as identifying the patterns of praise and feedback they use in their teaching and personal life. This session also investigated how to effectively teach students by providing effective feedback and build positive relationships with their peers and other significant people in their lives.
Think Tank – Chevonne Craker and Matt Krieg
This session provided allocated time for staff to begin conceptualising how Positive Education would look in their classroom. Staff considered how elements of Positive Education could be incorporated into curriculum, assessment or the physical learning environment.
Positive Education Day
On Friday the 9th of June 2017 Riley Baker-Hall, Liam Litchfield and Hayley Allen attended the positive education day with 115 teachers and staff members from Playford International College and local feeder primary schools. At the training day we covered 7 different topics for example; wellbeing, the think tank, character strengths and positive relationships. We gained many different skills and techniques from this day, for example; confidence, constructive thinking, recognizing character strengths and self-care. From learning these skills, we are inspired to try to help the community learn these skills and how to treat themselves with respect. From this we want to find ways to support, in particular the year 8s, to understand the things we have learnt. We also see that positive education day is important to the school for positive change and we are grateful for the opportunity of this day and we hope we can go again. By Riley Baker Hall and Liam Litchfield
