The Strengths Companion: F is for Jenny Fox Eades

Jenny is the author of books that enable people to find and develop their strengths. She is also known for doing work that helps children, students and teachers:

* To focus on character strengths and virtues.

* To develop well-being.

* To build strengths-based educational cultures.

Based on 25 years experience in education, she has developed a whole school methodology called Celebrating Strengths.

Implemented in schools, this has enabled teachers to create an environment in which both they and the students can flourish. An independent review of this work has shown that:

* It raised morale in teachers and head teachers

* It built confidence in pupils.

* It raised the academic results of under-achieving pupils.

You can read an extract from her book Celebrating Strengths at the following link.

http://amzn.to/hCNoF9

Jenny has worked together with Carmel Proctor to produce a series of teaching materials called Strengths Gym. Here is an extract from their web site that explains the materials. It is:

An educational course for children designed to enable students and teachers to learn about, recognise, 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.

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.

This course looks at personal well-being from a positive perspective, providing opportunities to consider prudent and considerate behaviour, a healthy lifestyle, and good relationships.

It does this through a focus on the behaviour we do want rather than on the behaviour we don’t want. In particular it allows behaviour to be looked at in the light of the strengths we already possess – and would benefit from using more.

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.

For educators within the United Kingdom, each lesson has links to the new PSHE (Personal, Social and Health Education): Personal well-being curriculum.

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.

You can learn more about the superb work done by Carmel and Jenny at the following link.

http://www.strengthsgym.co.uk/index.php

Jenny has also written Classroom Tales. This provides stories that can be used in the classroom to build emotional, social and academic skills in primary schools. It also helps teachers to develop their own story TELLING skills, with the emphasis on the craft of oral story telling.

A passionate believer in encouraging pupils and teachers to flourish, Jenny continues her pioneering work in enabling people in education to achieve their picture of success.

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Posted on Wednesday, April 17th, 2013 at 3:24 pm in Companion, The Strengths Blog   |  RSS feed |  Print This Post |  Respond  |  Trackback URL