Positive Education: A Way to Foster and Promote Psychological Flourishing in Schools

The increasing importance of the movement of positive psychology and consequently positive education has led scientific study to foster and promote human psychological flourishing. This research aimed to provide an educational-interventional protocol to foster and promote flourishing and evaluate its effectiveness.

With a pretest and posttest design and a control group, this study was performed on 34 teachers from two schools in Tehran, selected by multi-stage cluster sampling. After randomly allocating teachers to the test and control groups, they complete the Human Psychological Flourishing Scale and Flourishing Questionnaire. Then, the educational-interventional flourishing protocol was only presented to the test group during 14 sessions. The questionnaires were filled again by all the subjects at the end of the course.

According to the results of the univariate and multivariate covariance analyses, flourishing training significantly increased all the components of flourishing in the test group, compared to the control group.

According to the results, the application of educational-interventional flourishing protocol increased all the components of flourishing among teachers (e.g., positive emotion, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment, sense of satisfaction/happiness, individual competency and social contribution). Therefore, this protocol can be applied to promote the flourishing of teachers.