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On Saturday, I gave a talk at the First Australian Positive Education Conference. One of the key themes that all speakers, and workshop facilitators spoke about was that of character strengths. 24 Character Strengths were identified by Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson as being valued across all cultures, races and religions. Each of us [...]
I’ve never really watched much of the Channel 10 show, “The Biggest Loser.” However I’ve seen enough to question how it could be that a contestant who lost 13kg IN A WEEK could be berated by the trainers for not being “fair dinkum.” Questions were raised about his effort in training, his adherence or otherwise [...]
I finally got around to reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner. It’s been since about 2005, and has been on my list of “to-reads” but it always seemed to get pushed to the side for another title. Anyway, for those who haven’t heard of it, the book is a collection of observations and [...]
A new way to address digital citizenship in your school It seems that technology is a constant source of stress for teachers at school. If it’s not the pressure to integrate technology into their teaching, it’s the social issues related to students’ use of site such as Facebook, Tumblr or Formspring and apps such as [...]
If you’ve read enough of my Generation Next articles, you’ll know I’m a big fan of embedding social media and other cutting edge technological advancements into the way in which schools engage kids. So I was very interested to see that Headspace and the Cotton-On Foundation have just released an app for iPhone and Android [...]
A couple of weeks ago I attended a lecture at the Sydney Opera House. Speaking was Professor Martin Seligman, the founding father of what has been termed Positive Psychology. His research has led him to devise a model that he has termed the PERMA model for wellbeing. P = Positive Emotions Seligman cites the [...]
Of late, more and more schools are asking me to work with their students as well as their staff. My most popular workshop at the moment is Learning to Bounce where we explore resilience. Resilience is generally accepted to mean the ability to bounce back after adversity. However, inspired by the words of Dr Sue [...]
Kids are getting fatter. And whilst I certainly do not endorse kids being measured and weighed regularly at school, I do think they should be exercising regularly – every day actually. There were some interesting articles doing the rounds in the UK last week regarding the effectiveness of Physical Education lessons with regard to keeping [...]
It seems that the Internet is a constant source of stress for parents, particularly in regard to three main things. Telstra released a report last week that stated Aussie kids spent on average, two hours per day online, and this was relatively high when compared to the rest of the world. The amount of time [...]
Of course we all know that relationships are central to teaching, and of course we all know that good relationships are pre-cursor to good teaching. But I wonder if we can clarify what a good Teacher/Student relationship looks like? In my experience good relationships in the classroom don’t depend on likeability as such. By that [...]
