Browsing by Subject "luonteenkasvatus"

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the fact that school may concentrate too much on pupils’ flaws and weaknesses, and that the school may not prepare pupils well enough for the life outside of the school. Due to increased mental health problems, the school's responsibility and role as teaching well-being skills have been emphasized. The purpose of the literature review was to challenge the problem-oriented approach of the school and to explore alternative teaching methods that emphasize resources and strengths. My goal is to present what positive education is, how character strength based education is defined and how positive education and character strength based education have been applied to schools in Finland and internationally. With this study, I hope to find ways to promote the well-being of the pupils and to support their learning so that I can use the research results in my future profession. This thesis was carried out as a descriptive literature review, and is based on both Finnish and foreign sources. In addition to answering to the research problems, the review introduced also the origin of positive education, in other words positive psychology, to get a wider picture of the backgrounds of positive education. According to the literature review, positive education can be identified as a pedagogical application of positive psychology, which emphasizes the active role, experiences, positive emotions, strengths and abilities of the pupils, and the partnership between the parents and the teacher. Character strength based education was defined as the emphasis of the identification and the use of the strengths. The essential cornerstones are growth thinking and making strengths visible. According to the results of this review, there haven’t been much of a research of positive education nor character strength based education in Finland yet. The only study that was carried out in Finland showed that the methods of positive education can have a positive influence to the school satisfaction among the pupils. Internationally positive education and character strength based education had been studied more than in Finland. International researches have mainly focused on the programs that emphasize resilience and character strength based interventions.