Friday, July 3, 2009

Day 25 – Strengths Based Schools

Keeping to one topic is sometimes very hard. I feel like I could ramble on about a number of things but that would thwart the purpose of the discipline of writing that I am intent to develop. Yesterday I started to read Strengths Based Leadership. The authors report that an awareness of our own strengths will increase our self-confidence. Higher confidence at a young age (14-22 years old) increases career satisfaction, produces a higher salary, and decreases the likelihood of health problems. People with high self-confidence have a “cumulative advantage” that grows over a lifetime. Conversely, if you focus on people’s weakness they lose confidence.

It seems to me that this has strong implications for schooling. Much in school does not boost student confidence. Teachers mark student’s mistakes on papers and grade accordingly. There is not a focus on what is done correctly but what is done poorly. If a student’s strength is not math, reading or writing then over seventy-five percent of his or her day is spent doing work that he or she is not good at doing. What if we re-focused schools and curriculum around student’s strengths? What if at least half of the school day students could work from those strengths and gain more confidence? Would that change the dropout rate? I think it might. I know more students would be engaged in learning if they could operate out of strengths.

Taking a cue from the research on leadership, if part of school was to help students find out what they were good at and then develop curriculum, goals, and learning targets from their strengths, the results might be more than we ever hoped. I think it’s worth a try.

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