Strengths Gym
An educational course for children designed to enable students and teachers to learn about, recognize, build upon, and use their strengths more. Strengths Gym draws on the latest research from what is known as Positive Psychology, that is the psychology of being happy, successful, and living life to the full.
What is a strength?
A strength is a way of thinking, feeling, or behaving that is either innate or which has developed early in life. Our strengths are our areas of greatest potential growth, the areas where we will excel. Working on your strengths is always more effective and rewarding than fixing your weaknesses and in order to fix your weaknesses effectively you need to be using your strengths.
One of the key insights of positive psychology is that we get more of what we focus on. This course looks at personal well-being from a positive perspective, providing opportunities to consider prudent and considerate behavior, a healthy lifestyle, and good relationships. It does this through a focus on the behavior we do want rather than on the behavior we don’t want. In particular it allows behavior to be looked at in the light of the strengths we already possess – and would benefit from using more.
The Course
The course provides a flexible, easy to use lesson format for ease of planning and is designed to encourage intrinsic motivation and satisfaction for students.
Each lesson explores one of 24 ubiquitous strengths of character or moral virtues. Each lesson contains Strengths Builders and Strengths Challenge exercises that have been designed for classroom, paired, and solitary work. We have adopted a menu format for the sessions so that you can choose activities that you feel will suit your class and ensure they have a variety of activities over the weeks. At the same time, all the activities will contribute towards a focus on the strength presented in a given session.
For ease of use and presentation in the classroom, several features of the course have been placed on the Strengths Gym web site and are to be used in conjunction with the Teachers Manual The course levels are delivered by teachers and are designed to make learners more aware of their strengths and encourage a positive outlook on life.
