Effectiveness of a Positive Education Workshop for Chinese Teachers: Building Resilience, Optimism, and PERMA

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Graduate group
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resilience
positive education
workshop
training
middle school teachers
China
ZengCheng
Chinese
curriculum
course design
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Zeng, Guang
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Positive education workshops aim to equip teachers with positive psychological skills, as well as cultivate the ability to teach their students the skills of building resilience, character strength, optimism, and flourishing. However, there are no positive education programs for China, especially with empirical evidence of effectiveness. Our team led a systematic positive education workshop in China, occurring across five on-sites and five months. The current project first describes reasoning for implementing such a program, describes the details of the program, and provides an evaluation of program effectiveness. We implemented the current workshop by cooperating with the Chinese local government to train 83 high-position middle school teachers in ZengCheng City in South China. To examine the effectiveness of the workshop, participants completed a questionnaire across three time points. For comparison, a control group consisting of 141 middles school teachers in the same city also completed the measures, without participating in the workshop. A repeated measures analysis of variance, which compared 51 teachers in the experiment group and 45 teachers in the control group who completed all three measures, showed a statistically significant increase in resilience for workshop participants. Trend analyses also suggested increases in optimism, relationship, meaning, achievement, and disengagement, but could not be detect given the small sample size. Strengths, limitations, and implications of the positive education workshop and evaluation are discussed.

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2014-01-01
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