Christine Duvivier’s Bio
Christine Duvivier, MAPP, has a background leading positive change in global businesses — engaging employees from executives to the front-line in remote locations. For the past eight years, since founding Impact Partners, she has spoken to business groups about how to Have More Impact In Less Time™, facilitated positive strategic change — in multinational firms and large non-profits — and coached individual executives. Since earning her masters degree in positive psychology (2007), she has extended this work by guiding executives to unleash powerful, positive momentum — around the world — by building on “what’s right” in themselves and their organizations.
As a result of her 2007 capstone study at University of Pennsylvania — where she identified gifts in adolescents who are not good students — she has been increasingly in demand by parents, educators and business people to speak about The Myths of Education™ — her groundbreaking findings of unappreciated value in the next generation of leaders. Christine’s work uncovers exciting opportunities and damaging myths in our approach to educating both low and high performers. She founded Positive Leaders, Inc. to bring these findings to the public.
Christine has inspired audiences with her messages of hope for today’s teens — based on her 2007 study, which showed that adolescents in the bottom 80% are perfectly suited for future world, scientific, and corporate leadership — if we change our approach to capitalize on their strengths and gifts. In response to persistent requests, she has offered a series of presentations and workshops.
Christine is a dynamic presenter and has been a keynote speaker for Microsoft East Region Women’s Conference, parent and youth organizations, and featured speaker for many groups including the Institute of International Research, Executive Enterprises, Toastmasters, and Women in Technology International. She holds an MBA in addition to her Master’s degree in Positive Psychology.
With her husband, David, Christine has raised two daughters, Katherine and Lauren, in Wellesley, Massachusetts — and along the way she coached youth basketball, led Girl Scout programs and volunteered in her community.
And thanks for the thumbs up!
Christine,
I have been reading your articles and find them quite thought provoking. I have a few questions about what I’ve read. First, what do you do as a teacher to draw out intrinsic motivation for a project or assignment for which a student lacks interest? I do try my very best to differentiate for my students as do all the teachers that I work with regularly. Sometimes it works. For the most challenging cases it often fails.
Second, I have observed teens that seem on the surface to be interested in a very narrow scope of interests. It seems that they like dirt biking, food and the opposite sex. How would you go about teaching them literacy and numeracy? I would like these kids to be able to read articles like yours and to critically think about major issues like education reform. They seem not to have the depth of life experience to understand why these issues are important and worth the hard and often unpleasant work of learning to read. That’s the rub. Its not always fun and flow for them, but it certainly can be meaningful and an achievement upon which they look back with pride.
I guess to clarify, I would like to ask you about your experiences teaching adolescents in a public school setting. I’m finding applying theory and school reform challenging in my daily practice. What sounds idyllic on paper often goes to pieces in the classroom. It is hard to tailor curriculum to every student’s exact interests every time.