Spotlighting the Strengths of Every Single Student

Why U.S. Schools Need a New, Strengths-Based Approach

Elsie Jones-Smith

• Publisher: Praeger
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780313391538
• eBook ISBN: 9780313391545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

This book explains how a teaching system focused on identifying and stoking each student's strengths—rather than concentrating on deficits—can bring remarkable academic improvement and achievement. It's a familiar and seemingly logical model: to improve performance, identify weaknesses and target these problem areas. Could doing the opposite be a better way? Licensed clinical psychologist Elsie Jones-Smith argues that strengths-based systems are indeed more effective—not just in social work, where the philosophy became popular; or in the business world, where the concept is increasingly being embraced—but in the academic setting as well. Spotlighting the Strengths of Every Single Student: Why U.S. Schools Need a New, Strengths-Based Approach explains how and why a system that focuses on students' strengths enables kids to be self-confident, goal-directed, and to possess a stronger sense of self-efficacy, self-control, and academic achievement. Jones-Smith also explains how such a system spurs appreciation and advancement of multiple intelligences, which in turn gives students the ability to address weaknesses—on their own. Another plus: this approach has also been shown to generally reduce school disciplinary actions and increase class attendance time.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Emergence, Growth, and Current Uses of Strengths-Based Educational Systems
• 2: The Strengths Mindset: Understanding the Nature of Strengths
• 3: Brain Development, Emotion, and Learning
• 4: The Strengths-Based School’s Component 1: A Strengths-Building Pyramid
• 5: Component 2: Improving Instruction—The Academic Curriculum
• 6: Component 3: Caring and Empathic Classrooms
• 7: Component 4: Preventing Failure
• 8: Component 5: Increasing Home, School, and Community Partnerships
• 9: Assuring Teachers Understand Their Own Strengths
• 10: Creating and Communicating a Strengths-Based School Vision: Getting Involved
• Notes
• Index