âWhy do people go to school?â This is one of my favorite questions to ask my students.
âBecause we have to,â is usually the first thing I hear.
But they know my response to what I call âhave-to-ism:â You donât have to do anything, except make choices. You donât have to follow the law â as evidenced by the many students who choose not to come to school. So, my students go deeper.
âSo I donât get grounded.â
âOkay, why do you care about getting grounded?â
âUm, because itâs terrible and no fun?â
âOkay. Hold on to that answer. Letâs hear some other reasons.â
âSo I can go to college.â
âWhy do people go to college?â
âTo get a good job.â
âWhy do people work hard to get good jobs?â
âSo they can make good money.â
âWhy do people want to make money?â
âSo they can buy stuff and do stuff they like.â
âWhy do people care so much about buying stuff and doing stuff?â
âBecause it makes them happy.â
Ding ding ding! Weâve arrived at an end point. Happiness. Most students spend hours and years in school in the hopes of this end goal. We invest tremendous amounts of time and energy throughout our entire lives into this one major goal: To live a life of happiness and purpose.
We dive deeper, discussing various other things humans do, putting those things to the happiness test. Why do we go on social media? To connect with people or laugh or engage in conversation because . . . it should make us happy.
Almost everything humans do has this same end goal: To live a life of happiness and purpose. One could even argue that behaviors that limit or avoid pain are also about achieving happiness. We want to avoid being grounded because this punishment restricts happy and meaningful opportunities.
Apply this to your own life. Why do you teach? Happiness and meaning. Even filling out annoying paperwork or attending monotonous meetings is our way of avoiding punishment that prohibits our happiness and sense of purpose.
If happiness is so important to all of us, why arenât we practicing and teaching happiness and meaning directly?
Consider this a call-to-action. Letâs teach the qualities, habits, and practices that create a happy, meaningful life. Â Sound nebulous?Itâs not.
I think we can teach happiness and purpose the way we teach any other subject or skill: We identify best practices, teach conceptual ideas to students, and coach and provide feedback on student experience and understanding.
Here are 23 practices for a thriving life, concepts that I have pulled from research and taught directly to hundreds of students. Each of these practices can be interwoven into our classrooms periodically, or taught directly as a class.
Each practice is grouped around renowned psychology professor Martin Seligmanâs Well-being Theory, which he breaks up into five elements: PERMA, or Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Seligman, who many credit with increasing our understanding and interest in concepts of positive psychology, considers these five components to be the building blocks to overall well-being.
Positive Emotion
2. Vary your positive emotions.
3. Look for good things in life.
5. Improve your positive/negative ratio.
Engagement
6. Find flow states.
9. Savor positive experiences.
Relationships
10. Do kind acts.
11. Have deeper conversations.
12. Develop empathy.
13. Forgive.
14. Show compassion.
Meaning
15. Practice altruism.
16. Find and apply your calling.
17. Explore and practice spirituality.
Accomplishment
18. Achieve a bucket list goal.
19. Set self-concordant goals.
20. Cultivate a growth mindset.
21. Make progress on a gritty goal.
22. Develop an optimistic explanatory style.
Click on any of the links above to learn more. You can even take a survey to better understand the extent to which you experience concepts of PERMA in your life.
This is part one in a series on nurturing thriving learners from AffectiveLiving and WeAreTeachers. Stay tuned as we dive deeper into each of these 23 practices and outline lessons to teach them. By teaching these concepts directly, we can propel our students â and ourselves â toward lives of happiness and purpose.