Positive Psychology as a Tool for Moderating the Socialization Process of School-Age Children

Abstract

Today Russian schools face the need of involving the upbringing process as controlled socialization in their educational program, in order to both increase psychological well-being of students and invest in building a prosocial model of future adults' behavior. This article examines the possibilities of practical application for the concepts of positive psychology as a tool for controlled socialization of school-age children. The problem field of challenges is viewed in general, as educational process in school and within the framework of direct educational communication between teacher and student. The main goal of the article is to outline the challenges related with socialization during educational process of school-aged children in Russia and show the efficiency of positive psychology approach and tools. We managed to perform a brief review of positive psychological interventions (PPI), in form of educational programs implemented all over the world with empirically proven effectiveness, such as “The Penn Resiliency Program” (PRP), “The SPARK Resiliency Program”, “Bounce Back!”, “Going for the goal”, “Personal Synthesis Program” (PSP), etc. Furthermore, we try to outline main strategic concepts of implementing positive psychology as a tool for controlled socialization of school-age children in Russia, as well as state the efficiency of using PPI in schools, matching their outcome effects with the challenges of socialization process of students in schools. We suppose that practical implementation of PPI will effectively influence not only psychological well-being and social skills of students, but professional skills of teachers too. We call scientists working in a field of education and psychology in Russia to put more attention on developing PPI methodological materials for schools. Keeping in mind, that the form of these practical materials should be done in a way, which will allow teacher, even with no special expertise in psychology, to be able to perform positive psychological intervention in a classroom. Moreover, we do believe that well-constructed PPI presented in a form of methodological materials for teachers and school administration will have the positive multiplication effect on every significant aspect, which we outline as main strategic concepts of implementing positive psychology as a tool for controlled socialization of school-age children.