Positive Psychology Intervention in Education Well-Being and Achievement

Education is an essential culture which facilitates individual and the society to sustain and flourish. It has a balancing role in overall development of a nation. Education helps a child develop the inborn potentialities and become productive in future. It is crucial to understand the process of learning. The conventional approach to teaching considers students as passive receptors of information, neglecting their active participation in learning process. Within the conventional learning approach, the pedagogic method used is traditionally one of 'lecturing, note-taking, and memorizing information for later recognition or reproduction' (MacLellan & Soden 2004, p.254). There is a paradigm shift in the process of imparting education from non participatory approach to student centered learning approach, where the student is the central point of the process, the role of the teacher remains dominant, particularly when one considers that students are not all the same. Individuals are naturally curious and enjoy learning, but intense negative cognitions and emotions (e.g. feeling insecure, worrying about failure, being self-conscious or shy, and fearing corporal punishment, ridicule, or stigmatizing labels) thwart this enthusiasm. Learning and self-esteem are heightened when individuals are in respectful and caring relationships with others who see their potential, genuinely appreciate their unique talents, and accept them as individuals. In the current scenario parental expectations from the school system include academic achievement and inculcation of human ethics. It is the need of hour to explore the effectiveness of schools to fulfill the parental expectations. Indeed schools have got a dual responsibility of nurturing well-being in children and helping them to be successful in their life journey. Positive psychology is the scientific study of human strengths and virtues and the use of it in education will empower teachers, parents and students altogether to attain the overall goal of education i.e. helping children to achieve highest self.Positive psychologyPositive psychology is an emerging branch of psychology originated in the late 1990s when Martin Seligman, promoted the significance of including a strengths-based approach to psychology. Its focus is on identifying and mobilizing human assets to help moderate dysfunctional emotions, cognitions and behaviors, prepare individuals with the skills and confidence to address life's challenges, foster and maintain an optimal state of wellbeing whereby a perfect ratio of positive and negative states and experiences exists most of the time. In today's environment the success of education, apart from professional technical skills, depends upon various other factors too, such as, optimism, resilience, motivation, challenging goals, purpose, hope, positive relationship and values.Well-beingWell-being is an umbrella term which includes happiness, health, flourishing, and optimal functioning in all conditions. Well-being is a construct with subjective and objective elements. According to Martin Seligman well-being comprises of five domains: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment (PERMA). Human beings seem happiest when they have positive emotions, engagement (or flow, the absorption of an enjoyed yet challenging activity using one's highest strengths), relationships (social ties have turned out to be extremely reliable indicator of happiness), meaning (belonging to and serving something bigger than one's self), and accomplishments (having realized and attain substantial goals).Academic achievementAcademic achievement is the outcome of education denotes the extent to which a student, teacher or institution has achieved their educational goals, which is commonly measured by continuous assessment or examinations. Self-discipline is twice as good a predictor of high school grades as IQ (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005). …