Maintaining Students’ Well-being

Sustainable student well-being is seen as an outcome of the school policies, structures and practices that are organized under the PROSPER framework: Encouraging Positivity, Building Relationships, Facilitating Outcomes, Focusing on Strengths, Fostering a sense of Purpose and Teaching Resilience (Noble &McGrath, 2016).

· Positivity for students means experiencing positive emotions at school such as feeling safe, a sense of belonging, interested, content and cheerful and experiencing a sense of fun and amusement. Positivity also incorporates a gratitude and appreciation, positive mindset that includes a capacity for mindfulness and skills in optimistic thinking.

· Relationships for students means experiencing ongoing positive relationships with peers and teachers; A focus on building positive relationships also means teaching the pro-social values and the social skills that enable such relationships and on identifying and implementing school-based structures that facilitate these relationships

· Outcomes involves making progress toward goals, feeling capable to do schoolwork, understanding that accomplishment depends on hard work and effort, being persistent, and having a ‘growth mindset’, and a sense of mastery and achievement. There is a focus on teaching these attitudes and skills, using evidence-informed teaching strategies that facilitate both positive school-based outcomes (both academic and co-curricular). There is also a focus on acknowledging and celebrating the accomplishment of all members of the school community in a wide range of school-based outcomes.

· Strengths involves self-knowledge about one’s character strengths and ability strengths and understanding how to apply these strengths in different contexts; there is a focus on assisting all members of the school community to identify their strengths, develop them further and find good ways to apply their strengths.

· Purpose in the school context refers to believing that what one is learning at school is valuable and feeling connected to something greater than oneself; there is also a focus on looking for ways to be of service to the school community, to the general community and to people in need of care and support.

· Engagement refers to student’s psychological connection to learning activities and to school (e.g. feeling absorbed, connected, interested, and engaged in school learning and in school life); there is also a focus on effective and evidence-informed teaching strategies for enhancing student engagement.

PROSPER is a useful organizing framework for assisting schools and teachers to be self-reflective and act as change agents by addressing the components in the framework to enhance students’ capacity to flourish and thrive.