From New Zealand to Canada, our Mayerson Academy team has been fortunate to work with extraordinary educators around the world. Last week, we had the tremendous privilege of working with education leaders at Discovery College (DC) in Hong Kong. DC is a private independent school operated by the English Schools Foundation (ESF) that is contributing to the development of Hong Kong as a global leader in positive education applications and research. The college is committed to building a collaborative network to build the capacity of positive educators. As part of that vision, and with support from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and The Hong Kong Jockey Club, DC invited partner schools from the PEAR project to join them in a multi-day workshop presented by Mayerson Academy.
Over the course of three very full and highly engaging days, participants explored and applied the science of character strengths from a personal, classroom, team and organizational perspective. Their insights for application were quick and powerful.
As the group studied their personal and team signature strengths, they identified strategies to bring out the best in themselves and others to accelerate performance, motivation and engagement. They became aware of the synergies and collisions that their unique profiles indicated and established processes to enhance and support their default ways of being. While the gleaned insights are unique to those who generated them, others may discover their own insights from their shared reflections.
Team Strategies for Performance, Engagement and Motivation
Because our team ranks high in the strength of the humanity virtue category, we need to plan to allow a few minutes at the beginning of our meetings to simply connect and greet one another.
Our strengths are associated with thinking and feeling and therefore we are going to close our meetings with action items so we make sure to move to implementation with our ideas.
The strengths of judgment and perspective are very prevalent in our team so we need to make sure we have plenty of time built into agendas to thoroughly discuss each topic.
Our team tends toward the heart and intrapersonal strengths so we will include a practice of affirming strengths we have seen in one another at the beginning of our team meetings.
Classroom Strategies for Engagement, Performance and Learning
I will support knowledge building and strength spotting by making classroom posters interactive. Students will be able to add the name cards of other students onto a given character strength poster as they spot that particular strength in a student.
Our class newsletter will have a dedicated spot to introduce and recognize strengths to build parent understanding.
In students’ digital portfolios, we will add character strengths tags to include the strengths that the work process and product represent.
We will build our classroom rules around the 24 strengths, reminding us that we are all capable of the behaviors we want to see.
What would you add to the list?
