Krysan Blog: Aide-mémoire (3) Teaching Happiness

Details
Created on Thursday, 27 August 2009 19:32
Written by Marian Moore

Krysan 

THE WELLBEING CONSULTANCY

Planting Golden Seeds across Northumberland, Tyne & Wear, and Durham

_________________________

(Previous blogs are stored in the ARCHIVES)

Lorphil Love of My Life :  Matty

   Aide-mémoire - No. 3 - Saturday 4 December 2010 

Neither do men put new wine into old bottles; else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved.  Matt. 9:17 

'TEACHING HAPPINESS AT WELLINGTON COLLEGE'

 (extracted from the Learning & Teaching website) 

The happiness programme at Wellington College in Berkshire is described by Anthony Seldon, the master, and Ian Morris, head of philosophy.  Note the involvement of Dr. Nick Baylis a psychologist of Cambridge University.

Focusing on the whole child

We have schools wrong at the moment. They should be places of enchantment, wonder and joy. Instead, they are too much about testing, conformity and exams; about dividing up those who pass from those who don’t. This is not the point of education.

We tend to think that parents are only concerned with exams. However, I hardly ever meet a parent who does not want their child to be happy, to smile and even talk to them sometimes. And young people will perform better if they are calm and happy; which means they are more likely to end up doing what they want to in life.

Whole child

Our focus should be on developing the whole child. That involves understanding what it means to be a child, then helping our students to discover:

This is the goal behind our decision to offer classes in wellbeing at Wellington College.

Intelligent organisations

What we are trying to do is to create a fundamentally intelligent organisation, and to break that word ‘intelligent’ out way beyond the narrow view of intelligence into the idea of an intelligent community. This means you need teachers who are deeply centred.

Getting people on your side means overcoming that hump of cynicism which leads to them saying it is all about more work, more training and it’s all psycho-babble anyway. Our teachers at Wellington are coming on board bit by bit, as they see that it works. We have also set up a programme called Every Adult Matters which we are offering to all the schools in Wokingham, our local authority.

It is also important for the person at the top be fully on board. Every head or principal has the potential to create a negative, fearful environment, or an accepting and loving one.

An owner’s manual

Imagine giving somebody a beautiful car with a wonderful engine, body and interior, but not giving them any idea of how that car operates. The result would be that the car would run in first gear all its life, have breakdowns and cease to work. Everyone would then rush in to mend it. But it’s so much easier to stop people falling off a waterfall than to put them together at the bottom. We should give students an owner’s manual. You have this wonderful body; this is how it works. You have this wonderful mind; this is how it works. Teach people these things when they are young, and they will have them for life.

All young people

Wellington is a fee-paying independent school. But we want to use our experience to help ensure that all children and young people experience their schools as places that teach them how to live a happy life. If you can live in harmony with yourself and in harmony with others, then you will be happy.

Anthony Seldon

Skills that make lives go better: developing the happiness programme

We developed the happiness course with Dr Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University. The basic principle behind the lessons is that we can learn the skills of living well. This is not new. Aristotle wrote about it in the Nichomachean Ethics. And the discipline of positive psychology is teaching us this as well, with empirical evidence to back it up.

It should be obvious that a student will not be able to access the curriculum effectively if there are barriers to learning in their lives. We all arrive at school carrying our own emotional, psychological, social and physical issues with us. When these issues are unresolved, they cause us problems and throw up barriers to progress. If we can teach our students the skills that will enable them to start overcoming these barriers, they will be better equipped to access the curriculum.

The course is aimed at students in Years 10 and 11. It is designed to show them that life is something to be lived skilfully, and that there are certain skills which they can learn and employ to make their lives go better.

Nine modules

We have divided the course into nine areas. Each area represents a relationship that we want our students to get right. Through their coverage of these nine modules, students learn:

The lessons take place once a fortnight and last for 40 minutes.

Mindfulness

Each lesson begins with some mindfulness meditation. Research has shown that people who meditate regularly can have:

The other thing we do is something called counting blessings. Research shows that people engage more fully with life and have a generally higher level of wellbeing if they:

In this way, we teach our students to be grateful for the things that happen to them.

Biographical learning

We do a lot of biographical learning, looking at the lives of other people and seeing what the ingredients of a happy life are. We might use film clips as a stimulus. Ken Loach’s early film, Kes, for example, shows various examples of wellbeing. We use a variety of techniques to teach young people how to:

For me, the aim is to equip the young people with the skills they will need to live life successfully. We want to make them more self-aware and resilient so as to help them to flourish as human beings.

Ian Morris

HAPPINESS IN THE NEWS ...

 'Well-being for Policy and for Life on Our Planet'

By

Timothy T.C. So

(December 31, 2010)

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein

I have been thinking about writing a year-end article for PositivePsychologyNews.com about my most unforgettable personal engagement in positive psychology in 2010 and how it influenced the world. I had several options: co-chairing the first Positive Psychology & Education Conference in China, editing for a Chinese publisher the Series of Science of Wellbeing which included the 15 best positive psychology books, conducting my research on flourishing and well-being at Cambridge, founding the Global Chinese Positive Psychology Association, and participating in all the exciting projects undertaken by the Cambridge Well-being Institute.

On consideration, none of them can be more significant than being part of the UK Prime Minister’s announcement on 25 November of £2 million of funding for measuring well-being. My research work on flourishing and positive well-being in Cambridge brought me an invitation to witness the historic announcement. The UK Prime Minister argued strongly that GDP is no longer an adequate measure of the progress of a country, and that we need a new way to track the success and well-being of the nation. Here are some of my reflections on what I called ‘well-being for policy’ at the end of 2010.  

Historical Rationale for GDP

In the 1930s, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, said more than once that a nation’s welfare can scarcely be inferred from its national income. But we have created and used a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and income generation. This is probably historical, and it had its time. After the Second World War, it was a primary goal to produce a lot of tangible stuff for living to replace what was destroyed in Europe, in China, and in Japan, as stated in Maslow’s Need of Hierarchy model that we need to fulfill the need for survival and safety at the very basic level. So our national accounting system became fixated on what we could produce. 

Problems of GDP

But its simplicity has given GDP an outsized influence on many governments’ decisions. The pursuit of economic growth as defined by an ever-rising GDP has become such a political imperative that any policy threatening to slow that rise has little chance of being adopted. Robert Kennedy said it so well in his poetic speech in 1968, about 20 years after the 2nd World War:

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.’

I tried to visualize this by a table of contrasts, some of which I heard from Chip Conley recently:

GDP counts:

GDP doesn’t count:
Industries that cause air pollution
Ambulances to clear highways of damage		 The health of our children
quality of their education
joy of their play
 
Destruction of the redwoods
Loss of natural wonder in chaotic sprawl
Napalm
Nuclear weapon		 the beauty of our poetry
 
Locks for our doors
Jails for the people who break them		 Strength of our marriages
 
Armored police cars to fight riots
Guns and Knives
TV programs which glorify violence		 intelligence of our public debate
integrity of our public officials

our wit
our courage
our wisdom

our compassion

our devotion to our country.

Obviously, economic stability should remain a priority, but after a reasonable standard of living is secured, it is important that we take a broader view of the things that enrich the quality of our lives.

Well-being for Policy

“What we measure affects what we do. If we have the wrong measures, we will strive for the wrong things,” says economist Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and former Chief Economist at the World Bank. I strongly believe that if Kennedy were here today, he would have asked us psychologists to work together with economists, statisticians, and others to find ways to measure what makes life worthwhile, just as the British PM and French president Nicolas Sarkozy are currently doing. Are the French and British governments working on something brand new? Not actually.
In 1972, the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan opted to base its policies on indicators of ‘gross national happiness’, which was deemed more important than more conventional indicators such as GDP by King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. This is similar to what we are doing now, but we now have more evidence-based research and systematic data such that we could offer more advanced knowledge and comprehensive advice to the government and general public compared to 3 decades ago.

To me, as a junior scholar, there is nothing more exciting than working on research that can advise the central government and impact the whole society. On the other hand, for the government, there is also nothing better than backing up a policy with years of rigorous research and science contributed by a group of zealous scientists.

The measure of well-being is just a starting point and one example of how the science of well-being can impact life on our planet. In the future, we can rely more and more on evidence-based theories and interventions which can be applied to business, education, and community settings to establish a flourishing world – and this is the drive that keeps us striving to enhance our understanding of what contributes to well-being.

Thanks to Daniel Kahneman’s Day Reconstruction Method, to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Experience Sampling Method, and to those measures of life satisfaction, optimism, and meaning of life invented by Ed Diener, Martin Seligman and many others, we are now on the way to address Einstein’s claim that “Not everything that counts can be counted.” We can express the well-being agenda in a more precise and solid way and work toward flourishing life across our planet.

Further reading:

Bok. D. (2010) The Politics of Happiness: What Government Can Learn from the New Research on Well-Being. Princeton University Press.

Diener, E., Lucas, R., Schimmack, U., & Helliwell, J. (2009). Well-Being for Public Policy (Positive Psychology). New York: Oxford University Press.

Posner. E. A., Sunstein, C. R. (2010). Law and Happiness. University of Chicago Press.

Prime Minister’s Office. (25 November 2010). PM speech on wellbeing. Retrieved from http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/speeches-and-transcripts/2010/11/pm-speech-on-well-being-57569

This article is from Psychology News. To see the original article, click here. To comment on this article, click here.

Timothy So, Msc, is a PhD candidate in Psychology in the University of Cambridge Department of Psychiatry. He is a Research Associate of Cambridge University's Well-being Institute and a Chartered Occupational Psychologist. Timothy is also responsible for both the Traditional and the Simplified Chinese PPND sites. Full bio.

- ENDS -
 

 

788 @ 2014-09-14