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Because it increases positive behaviors and decreases negative behaviors, Positive Action works for many different purposes.
| How Positive Action Works for Academic Performance: |
The Positive Action program contributes to an increase in academic achievement levels by focusing the entire school on the importance of positive behavior, enhancing the core curriculum and creating an optimum learning environment. Intellectual positive actions, including thinking skills, are addressed at each grade level in the second unit. Subsequent units build upon the intellectual positive actions and develop the skills necessary for effective, lifelong learning.
| How Positive Action Works for Career Education: |
The Positive Action program teaches the skills necessary for success throughout life, both on the job and beyond. It recognizes that all people are motivated by a desire to feel good about themselves. The Positive Action program teaches students in grades K-8 that they will feel good about themselves only by doing positive actions.
| How Positive Action Works for Children and Youth Education: |
The Positive Action program's underlying premise and its unit concepts offer children and youth a framework of positive behavior that can be successfully applied to all of life's challenges and opportunities. Positive Action students learn that a positive thought followed by a positive action will result in a good feeling about themselves and that positive behavior is the only way to develop what they all want: a positive self-concept.
| How Positive Action Works for Community Involvement: |
When the Positive Action program is fully implemented, school, home, and community are united in practicing and reinforcing the positive behaviors students learn in the classroom.
| How Positive Action Works for Compensatory Education: |
The Positive Action program is especially important for students involved in compensatory education because it teaches the skills they need to build strong self-concepts and a successful life. All students quickly come to understand the good feeling that results from positive behavior. All students learn that they, as individuals, can succeed in school. They learn to value themselves, their opportunities, and the hope for the future that positive actions bring. Achievement improves. Susceptibility to negative messages, which lead to negative behavior, decreases.
| How Positive Action Works for Dropout Prevention: |
The Positive Action program creates a school climate where students can succeed. The positive school environment draws each student into a positive learning cycle. School becomes a place where students and teachers enjoy spending time. One of the central purposes of the Positive Action program is to help students strengthen their self-concept and recognize that positive behaviors apply to all the challenges and opportunities the experience in school, at home, and throughout life. This encourages involvement in all that school has to offer.
| How Positive Action Works for Drug Prevention Education: |
Instead of scare tactics, short-term strategies, or information-only approaches, the Positive Action program teaches students daily how and why they can be strong and live without drugs. The Positive Action philosophy explains that the good feeling we all want about ourselves (a positive self-concept) is developed only by doing positive actions. The Positive Action philosophy and unit concepts that focus on specific positive actions for intellectual, physical, and emotional well-being provide a consistent framework for positive problem solving and decision making.
| How Positive Action Works for Health Education: |
The Positive Action program helps students see health concepts in a new light as they learn that they will feel good about themselves when they take care of their bodies and minds. Because the Positive Action program teaches students the skills to be healthy physically, intellectually, and emotionally, it is total wellness approach to health education.
| How Positive Action Works for Multicultural Education: |
The Positive Action program teaches basic principles that are common to all peoples. It recognizes that all people want to feel good about themselves. It teaches that we feel good about ourselves only when we do positive actions. Students are taught and encouraged to practice specific positive actions such as kindness, compassion, honesty, self-improvement, and wise management of resources. The principles overcome cultural ethnic, and language differences. lessons tap a variety of cultural and ethnic experiences and integrate literature and social studies from a spectrum of sources. They are sequenced to develop logically strong self-concepts through positive intellectual, physical, and emotional actions. Unit 4 focuses on everyone's desire to be treated with kindness, compassion, and empathy by teaching the emotional positive action of "treating others the way you like to be treated."
| How Positive Action Works for Parental Involvement: |
The Positive Action program is a vehicle to unite school, home, and community. The Positive Action lessons learned in the classroom are practiced and reinforced all day long. To get the most from program parents, teachers, and staff members must al play a role in encouraging students' positive actions. Parents are informed and involved in the program throughout the school year. A Parents' Manual presents the Positive Action philosophy and concepts, and a calendar keeps parents on schedule with unit concepts and supporting Words of the Week. Parents are encouraged to reinforce unit concepts and positive behaviors in the home. Positive Action News, a school newsletter prepared under the direction of the Positive Action Committee, also keeps parents informed of Positive Action activities and achievements.
| How Positive Action Works for School Innovation and Reform: |
The Positive Action program initiates reform at its roots. It achieves many of the major goals and objectives of the Blueprint 2000 reform movement. The Positive Action program creates a positive, school wide environment through the continuous application of Positive Action principles. It has built-in strategies for the improvement of the individual and for positive changes in the entire schooling process. This framework prompts better student academic performance, better attendance, fewer disciplinary referrals, and an enhanced learning climate. The premise that "you feel good about yourself when you do positive actions" applies to all of life's challenges and opportunities and provides a framework for a successful future.
| How Positive Action Works for Teacher Training and Morale: |
The Positive Action program is taught by classroom teachers. As teachers teach the Positive Action lessons, the value of positive actions is reinforced for them, also. Every Positive Action lesson is like a mini in-service for teachers and places them in the role of modeling the positive actions they teach--which builds their own self-concept.
| How Positive Action Works for Violence Prevention: |
Many school counseling programs focus on the results of poor self-concepts. Discipline problems, vandalism, abusive situations, and other negative actions are far more common among children who do not feel good about themselves. The Positive Action program takes a positive approach, teaching students that they will feel good about themselves if they do positive actions.
The Positive Action program has been used in over 7,000 schools in all U. S. States, in Puerto Rico, and in many other countries, including Canada, Russia, and Germany.
