Unlocking Student Potential: How Do I Identify and Activate Student Strengths?

What if your next faculty meeting began with this question: What are the strengths of our underachieving students?

When teachers recognize and focus on student strengths, they transform the learning environment into one of positivity and potential. Students begin to believe in themselves as capable, valued, and respected and show more willingness to invest and engage in school. They perform better. They crave and enjoy academic challenge, and they delight in outdoing themselves.

Focusing on strengths is a no-cost, highly effective, nontraditional way of addressing persistent underachievement. Drawing on authors Yvette Jackson and Veronica McDermott's experiences supporting the transformations of schools repeatedly labeled as underachieving, this book offers concrete ways to identify student strengths and then build on them in your classroom or school throughout the year. These field-tested strategies will help awaken students' belief in their own potential and put them on the path to lasting success.

Yvette Jackson currently serves as the Chief Executive Officer of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education. She is the author of the 2011 ForeWord Reviews Silver Book of the Year Award, The Pedagogy of Confidence: Inspiring High Intellectual Performance in Urban Schools, and co-author with Veronica McDermott of Aim High, Achieve More: How to Transform Urban Schools Through Fearless Leadership.

Veronica McDermott is a lifelong educator and passionate ally in the cause of social justice, whose legacy project is to eradicate the crime of squandered potential.