Cultivating Strengths: Theory & Practice

Cultivating strengths in real life requires deep thinking and sustained practice to become authentic.

G. FAITH LITTLE
Initiative Director, 21st Century Learning

We work hard to meet the needs of teachers and school leaders within their own context. As they’re striving to meet ever-changing standards, we’re striving to bridge gaps between theory, research, policy, and practice. When designing professional development projects (including job-embedded coaching, workshop series, institutes, and retreats), we’re constantly examining how our promising practices can be solidified even as we support schools to manage evolving mandates. Through this examination, we’ve come to identify five principles of practice: Cycles of Inquiry, Communities of Practice, Contextualized Practice, Cultivating Strengths, and Critical Reflection.

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Theory​  
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Professional development that is anchored within a strengths-based framework results in greater teacher satisfaction and greater rates of goal completion. Supervisors that are trained to cultivate strengths with an incremental implicit theory mindset are more likely to better discern growth in an employee (Heslin & VandeWalle, 2008). Incremental implicit theory is also known as a growth mindset, which is the belief that personal attributes like ability and intelligence are improvable over time. Carol Dweck’s growth mindset work demonstrates how this understanding translates to developing ability in more than just students. This provides the space to assess, plan, and coach toward improvements. Strength-based coaching, or Positive Psychology Coaching, works with the inherent strengths that we all have and uses both general and targeted development strategies to make an impact in one’s practice.

Great! Yes! From personal coaching language to professional coaching language, in yoga class, podcasts, and article after article across the internet, we see the theory repeated. I did one quick Google search with these top returns:

• Positive language for positive outcomes…
• How to turn 11 everyday phrases from negative to positive…
• Get better results using positive language…
• Want positive behavior? Use positive language…
• How to use positive teacher language…
• Positive words go a long way…

While most of us would probably agree that positive language is . . . well . . . positive, is that really what we mean when we’re talking about cultivating strengths? When responding to student work, for instance, how does a positive comment like, “Good job!” cultivate the student’s problem-solving skills in math class or invite them to the next level of their writing craft?
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“Teachers can’t ’make’ students focus on or learn something. Teacher feedback is input that, together with students’ own internal input, will help the students decide where they are in regard to the learning goals they need or want to meet and what they will tackle next.”
Source

Practice
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Cultivating strengths in real life requires deep thinking and sustained practice to become authentic. To be useful in our classrooms, the language we use cannot merely be positive for the sake of creating a positive environment, but it must also provide students with a map so they can move from the place they are to the place we are confident they can be.

When you want to say, “Good job!” what is it that you mean? Why is it a “good job”, and what can you point out as a strength? What are the next steps for the student to cultivate this strength you’re pointing out? And how do you provide this feedback when you have 30 – 150 students to respond to in any given week?

​The good news is that since we often see similar issues in our discipline — common errors in a math problem or science experiment, typical word choice at a given writing level, similar mistakes at each stage of learning during physical education challenges, or consistent misunderstanding of historical events — once we think through the language we want to use in our feedback, we can apply it to more than one student.

​Additionally, there are some common phrases teachers use that can be transformed by using a sentence stem to support your feedback across all students.

TRY THIS	NOT THAT
Showing your work here helps me understand your thinking! or The words you’ve chosen to use here help the reader empathize with your character. or You’ve taken what we previously discussed and applied it to this section, which makes it even stronger!	Good job!
You’ve provided two reasons for your opinion. What is some evidence you could add to support your reasons?	Not enough evidence
I see some good form out there! How much faster can you go and keep your form?	Let’s go! Pick up the pace.
It’s noisy in this scene, and I know that because of your attention to sound detail. What happens if you add details that connect to sight or smell?	More details, please
I see you’ve got the correct answer here. If you were to include your work, you would get full credit for the problem.	Where is [fill in the blank]?

What about me? I use MINUS, CHECK, PLUS

• For minus: Give a quick example of what can be added/done next time to move from the minus.
• For check: Note what is there that met the requirements for a check; what needs to be done to move toward plus?
• For plus: Note what is there that warranted a plus; ask a question to entice the student toward a next step.

You’re the expert on your classroom. What ideas does this give you? What does cultivating strengths look like for you with your students? Comment below!
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