Positive Education
Positive Education brings together the science of Positive Psychology with best practice teaching to encourage and support individuals, schools and communities to flourish. Flourishing refers to a combination of ‘feeling good and doing good’. Positive Education focuses on specific skills that assist students to strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, enhance personal resilience, promote mindfulness and encourage a healthy lifestyle. Positive Education is taught through the five domains in conjunction with the V.I.A Character Strengths.
Restorative Practice
Restorative Practice is a strategy that seeks to repair relationships that have been damaged, including those damaged through bullying. It does this by bringing about a sense of remorse and restorative action on the part of the person who has bullied someone and forgiveness by the person who has been bullied.
The rationale behind this approach is that when offenders reflect upon their harm to someone:
- they become remorseful and act restoratively
- practitioners can focus on the unacceptable behaviour of offenders rather than their moral character
- this can lead to healthier interpersonal relations among members of the school community and more effective learning.
Restorative Practice Questions
When Things Go Wrong (Questions for the perpetrator)
- What happened?
- What were you thinking / feeling at that time?
- What are you thinking / feeling now?
- Who has been affected by what you have done? In what way?
- What do you think you need to do to make things right?
When someone has been hurt (Questions for the victim and others)
- What happened?
- What were you thinking / feeling at that time?
- What are you thinking / feeling now?
- What impact has this incident had on you and others?
- What has been the hardest part for you?
- What do you think you need to do to make things right?
Different types of conferencing that the teacher may use:
- to have children conference themselves and report the result to the teacher
- to facilitate a corridor conference
- to facilitate an informal conference
- to facilitate a circle time with the whole class
