1. All Students Are Talented:
Exploiting The Strengths Potential Via A New
Lens For Learning And Teaching
PGCertHE
Gary Pritchard PhD
University of Wales, Newport
All materials copyright Gary Pritchard 2010

2. What Are Strengths?
‘Strengths’ in a nutshell
A strengths approach assumes that people already
have within them a group of talents and that these are
the key to reaching high levels of personal
achievement.
My role as teacher then, is to:
 help students identify or confirm their own strengths
 help students discover how they operate
 help students to use them to achieve potential
 help students to draw upon their strengths to assist
in areas they normally would view as weaknesses

3. Where does this originate?
 Martin Seligman critiques the pathological
tendency of psychology
(Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi (2000)
Also - see Seligman reading is this pack)

4. Research
* 1955 Glock - Nebraska school study of ‘rapid
reading’ project. Surprise results - students
already with a capability to be gifted in this
area, thrived in whatever context they were
taught.
* Social Welfare and strengths:
individuals are able to call on personal assets
and resources to help in addressing issues or
problems.
(Weick, Rapp, Sullivan and Kishardt (1989) Cohen (1999))

5. * Clifton & Buckingham (2001 Gallup) study of
“best of The best”
The Highest Achievers
• Spend most of their time in their areas of strength
• Have learned to delegate or partner with someone to
tackle areas that are not strengths
• Use their strengths to overcome obstacles
• Invent ways of capitalising on their strengths in new
situations

6. Strengths and HE
* Higher education in the US - remediation
programmes dominate approach for its
undergraduate starters.
* Buckingham and Clifton (2001) (develop
psychometric test ‘StrengthsFinder’ for Gallup)
* Clifton and Anderson (2002) make a strategic
link between student motivation and the
“awareness, development and application of
…strengths”

7. Traditional learning philosophy:
1- Each person can learn to be competent in
almost anything: “If at first you don’t succeed …”
2 - Each person’s greatest room for growth is his or
her areas of greatest weakness

8. Strengths philosophy:
1- Each person’s talents are enduring and unique
2 - Each person’s greatest room for growth (or capacity)
Is his or her areas of greatest strength

9.  Talent: ‘naturally’ recurring patterns of
thought feeling or behaviour
 Knowledge (elements you can change)
 Skills (elements you can change)
Combine to become:
A Strength
Talent + Knowledge + Skills = a Strength
(Clifton & Harter, 2003)
Anatomy of a Strength:

10. But What About Weaknesses?
• The beauty of the strengths approach is that by
developing your strengths, you have a new
approach for managing your weaknesses
• Apply your strengths to challenging tasks or areas
in need of improvement
• “Managing your weaknesses” includes:
– Partnering with others
– Delegating to others

11. Methods to Identify Strengths
• Questions to ask yourself:
– What did you learn with the greatest ease in school?
– What did your teachers compliment you about?
– What do your friends say they like best about you?
– What was your favorite assignment?
– What subjects do you enjoy studying the most?
– What fascinates you?
– Talk about a time in your life when you accomplished
something you were proud of.
• Previous successes, things that seem to come naturally,
learning that occurs with little effort
• Instruments specifically designed to measure strengths
(EG StrengthsFinder)

12. Methods to Identify Strengths
Clifton and Nelson (1992) propose that strengths can be identified by
becoming attuned to four clues that confirm their existence.
1 - Specifically, these authors note that individuals are instinctively drawn to
activities that will facilitate strengths utilisation, and so they advocate for
people to cultivate an awareness of these types of “yearnings”
(instinctive deep sense of desire to get involved)
2 - When an individual derives great satisfaction and energy from investment
in an activity, experiencing a sense of engagement and timelessness
called ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).
3 - ‘Rapid learning’ is another sign that a strength may be at work (recall
events where one learned with ease and quickly)
4 - That ‘glimpses of excellence’ (Clifton & Anderson, 1992, p. 52) are
demonstrated when an individual attempts an activity that requires the
use of a particular strength

13. Achiever
Activator
Adaptability
Analytical
Arranger
Belief
Command
Communication
Competition
Connectedness
Consistency
Context
Deliberative
Developer
Discipline
Empathy
Focus
Futuristic
Clifton StrengthsFinder 34 Themes
Harmony
Ideation
Includer
Individualization
Input
Intellection
Learner
Maximizer
Positivity
Relator
Responsibility
Restorative
Self-Assurance
Significance
Strategic
Woo

14. Results of Intervention Study
What is the effect of a strengths-based
intervention? (Read full study by Pritchard, 2009 as part of this pack)
Self awareness
-Confidence
-Self concept
-Self efficacy
Other awareness
-Perspective taking
-Tolerance
“Learning epiphany”

15. Student Comments
“I don’t feel crazy anymore, yeah … and I kind of
brought that up over the couple of days as well. I’ve
considered (these attributes) very much to be
weaknesses ... (in the past). I think out of all of them
that (Intellection) is the one that is going to have the
most impact on me, because it is quite personal. It
sounds really dramatic actually this does, but it is kind
of like life changing in a sense, because it has been like
a burden, I feel like a burden has been lifted from my
shoulders” (Olivia).

16. Student Comments
“When you are going through this two day course you do
feel like someone’s handing you the keys to your
superpowers … And I kept thinking to myself at the
time, they should rename this - it shouldn’t be now find
your strengths it should be something like ‘we are all
superheroes who just need to find out what your powers
are’ … It is like having X ray vision because you can see
things in people that perhaps they can’t see in
themselves.” (Andy)

17. Student Comments
“The confidence was just oozing and I was just smiling,
and it was just really, really wonderful. Confidence, I
have got even more confidence about my strengths and
I have started to push myself even more with regards to
what I can achieve …”
“The (me) that has gone through the strengths class is
more aware of what she is about and wanting to
achieve, with a formation, with a definite chance to
achievement.” (Issey)