Message from the Executive Director
A strengths-based approach to teaching, learning, and leading represents a paradigm shift for higher education. For years, colleges and universities have focused on a “deficit-remediation” model of student success, based on the belief that students can achieve success most effectively by identifying their weaknesses and spending most of their time on areas in need of improvement. A strengths-based approach, in contrast, is based on the belief that the key to student success is already within the student, in the talents that the student brings to the learning environment. By identifying, nurturing, and developing these talents through acquiring the necessary knowledge and skills to hone them into strengths, students can achieve excellence.
So what are “strengths?” And what is “strengths-based teaching?” Strengths begin with talents, those “naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior that can be productively applied” (Clifton & Harter, 2003, p. 111). These may include ways of processing information, ways of interacting with people, ways of perceiving the world, or ways of communicating. When combined with knowledge and skills these natural talents can be developed into strengths. Strengths thus are “the ability to provide consistent, near-perfect performance in a given activity” (Clifton & Anderson, 2002, p. 8). Strengths start as talents; they are developed when those talents are refined with knowledge and skill.
Strengths-based teaching, then, is an approach that capitalizes on the instructor’s strengths and deliberately connects students’ strengths to strategies for mastering the course content, so that students are more motivated and engaged in the course. The content of the course does not change substantively, but the instructor’s approach to the students changes dramatically.
It is our conviction that a strengths-based approach to teaching, learning, and leading has the potential to transform educational practice. When students are encouraged to become the persons they were created to be, then discovering their calling and becoming engaged in the learning process are far more likely.
Eileen Hulme, Ph.D.
Executive Director
