positive education

The International Positive Education Network, known to friends as IPEN, held its second annual festival in Ft. Worth Texas from June 25 to June 28. The conference was jointly sponsored by the David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry, so you won’t be surprised that the conference title was .

This article tries to answer some of the most burning questions about positive education with the strongest evidence currently available to support our proposition. These are the questions we tend to experience when discussing positive education with an interested but skeptical audience.

The main message of this book is that it doesn’t work to focus only on the cognitive aspects of psychological well-being if you want to increase human flourishing. There are many processes involving the physical body that contribute to psychological well-being. If you have a serious interest in positive psychology and mental health, then reading Positive Psychology and the Body is a must.

During last week’s Positive Education Summit in the UK, I was exceedingly fortunate to be invited by Martin Seligman to a dinner where the general topic of conversation was the future of positive psychology and positive education. At Seligman’s request, we stuck to the one-conversation rule which meant that everyone could hear and respond to everyone else’s contributions.

Sha-en Yeo is a 2011 MAPP graduate who lives in Singapore. To bring a perspective from another part of the world, I interviewed Sha-en on her work in positive education, where she has been inspired to think of innovative ways of delivering the research in digestible pieces as well as ways to make people experience positive psychology, rather than just learn the textbook definition.