Positive professional practice: A strength-based reflective practice teaching model

Abstract

While positive education research has grown over the past decade, making strides in measurement, interventions, and applications, it has also been criticised for lacking consistent guiding theoretical frameworks, heavily emphasising psychology over education, and being driven by unacknowledged pedagogical assumptions. This chapter argues that a particular stumbling block has been ignoring the professional practice of positive education; that is, what positive education teachers do and how they know they are having an impact. To addresses this gap, this chapter introduces a strength-based reflective practice model for teachers that integrates the Values in Action classification of character strengths with Brookfield's four lenses for reflective practice, which consists of: (1) the students' eyes, (2) colleagues' perceptions, (3) personal experience, and (4) theory. The model aims to provide a method for critical self-reflection, thereby helping to enable effective professional practice. Through this model, perhaps positive education can become a pedagogy that has found its practice.