See the Good!

We help students to discover and develop their strengths together with learning socio-emotional skills. 

One of the Octava Social Innovation Challenge destination countries' big problems is inequities in learning results. Underachieving students are in danger of continuing the over-generational spiral of life without proper education and economic opportunities. Pressure to quit the studies and instead provide income for the family is high. There is an urgent need to place well-being and learning of socio-emotional skills at the forefront of education.
1) There are large inter-student variances in well-being and learning results 2) The current education systems are not focused on what is well in every student. In particular, we fail in supporting those in need of extra help and at-risk of dropping out 3) The traditional way of teaching and assessing does not promote socio-emotional skills and versatile, individual growth.

See The Good! is an award-winning, research-based education (University of Helsinki) program for developing socio-emotional skills and strengths. 
See The Good! has 3 major objectives: 1) School teachers utilize See The Good!'s pragmatic methods, materials and tools to instruct socio-emotional skills. See The Good!'s digital system is a teacher’s daily companion guiding her through the lessons. In short, we help teachers to teach socio-emotional skills. 2) We engage students thru joy using digital activities, which help them learn to recognize their various skills and strengths. 3) The digital engagements also provide individual measurements of progress in socio-emotional skills. The evidence of skills used in different environments, such as at school, at home, within hobbies, and among friends, is documented on students’ individual See The Good! -portfolios.

Learning is a complex and multidimensional challenge with various factors contributing to whether it is successful or not. Studies show that outdated teacher-centric pedagogical methods are no longer providing the skills children need to survive in the challenges they find ahead.

In many of the countries within the area, the pedagogical strategies are still based on the traditional lecture-style approach instead of active student centred methods. Whilst the developing economies demand a mix of high-quality cognitive, behavioral, and technical skills, the learning is still mostly passive and based on one-way lecturing and textbooks. Also assessment is mainly done by teachers focusing only on academic learning.  "We measure what we value."

As long as schools are not providing teachers and students with tools for screening and progress monitoring of SEL, the real change will not happen

New methods require training and tools. See The Good! -program is build to help educators on all levels to achieve better results by the idea of actively seeing the good in students. The more challenges there are in a student's life, the stronger their need for encouragement and positive feedback. 

The outdated pedagogic practices affect millions of children and adolescents in the region by not allowing them to reach the literacy, numeracy, and social-emotional learning milestones at their own pace and style.

Strengthening the understanding of pedagogical successes and providing new skills and tools for teachers would provide a solid base for building strong self-esteem and 21st-century skills for all students.

See the Good! -program is aimed to help all students, but it has been especially efficient in supporting the underachieving students with low self-esteem, feelings of loneliness, and hard pressure for success in studies by parents or having special needs. A very competitive environment and teacher-centric pedagogic methods drive the negative curve and enhance the risk of quitting the studies - especially in those students who come from low-income families.

Our aim is to target self-esteem and socio-emotional skillsets by enhancing the experience of finding strengths in every student. We know that better results in studies follow when the learning environment allows seeing the good in everyone. We are scientists too and we have researched our tools and know their impact on students' well-being and happiness. 

Positive pedagogy is a research-based method in achieving individual and class (group) level success through encouragement by educators. See The Good! -program is aimed to be part of the everyday life between the teacher and students. 

It is known that students come to the classroom with three basic psychological needs — competence, autonomy, and relatedness. Satisfaction of these needs promotes intrinsic motivation and well-being and enhances engagement and effort. By teaching educators with positive pedagogy methods, we give the students a chance to find motivation and success in studies as well as in social life in general. By cultivating positive teacher-student relationships, building a caring relationship, fostering positive social interactions within their classrooms, knowing students' strengths, teachers can support students to meet these needs.

One of the Octava Social Innovation Challenge destination countries' big problems is inequities in learning results. It is essential to understand that education is no longer just about teaching students academic skills assessed with traditional teacher-centered methods. Success in education today globally builds not just cognitive but character fortitude and skills of heart. Education should be about curiosity – opening minds; it is about compassion – opening hearts; and it is about courage – mobilizing our cognitive, social and emotional resources to take action. However, schools and education systems do not target these skills in the target countries in the Challenge.  

Originally, our solution was created for special needs teaching to solve the problems of the most vulnerable children. Our founder Kaisa: "As a teacher, I started working with the most challenging kids with special needs. I realised the hard way that the traditional school approach focused on problems did not work for them: they struggled with emotional and behavioural problems, they did not succeed in the school work and they did not trust the school nor teachers. Using positive pedagogy as my start point was a game-changer not only for me and my students but for their parents and the school community: they started to enjoy school, to learn and to trust us." 

With this experience from teaching and studying our solution for years, we believe we have a solution that has a lot to offer for the Challenge and especially for the students in the target countries. 

Kaisa Vuorinen, CEO, and Founder of Positive Learning is the team leader for our solution.

SEL skills are the bedrock of students' well-being and academic achievement. However, the question arises of whether we can make them visible, comparable, and equally important in the same way traditional tests do with academic knowledge and skills. Over the last decade, the team with researchers from the University of Helsinki has been exploring various ways to do this! Now See the Good! -tools provide innovative, comprehensive, and visual ways to collect data and the evidence of socio-emotional skills used in different environments, such as at school, at home, within hobbies, and among friends. 

See the Good! has been evaluated for its effectiveness, innovativeness, and feasibility to tackle the problems of youth's unawareness of their capabilities. The data collected during school years will help the students in critical transition periods and have a more comprehensive understanding of their strengths and SEL. 

See the Good! is easy to use with pre-made lesson plans to discover students' strengths and develop them in the long run. Attractive materials to encourage students' enthusiasm for learning. To relieve tension in children and teachers, we use the Finnish method "teach-learn-play." 

We have witnessed how the Positive Pedagogy mission has changed the lives of hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in Finland and in Europe. We have successfully piloted the program and tools in Thailand and Indonesia. Begin by collaborating with a few schools and sharing their success stories with other schools, gradually building a larger community will ultimately result in more significant spill-over effects.

The impact of using See the Good! is being reported in our studies. First, social participation of students with special needs was improved. Second, our model evidenced a clear link between usage of strengths, study engagement, and general happiness.  The qualitative data collected from teachers and students confirm the positive impact. Teacher testimonials evidence a change in students’ attitudes, teamwork, and mutual support. Students reported improved self-awareness, self-efficacy and love of learning. 
 Usage of See the Good, both the pedagogy and materials, has shown in the change in students’ perceptions of self and others, motivation, and socio-emotional well-being. The quality of implementation has been monitored in over 10s of countries, including Indonesia and Thailand. 

Theory of change and solution: 

All students benefit from learning how to excel. 

None of us develops into our best solely by having our weaknesses corrected. Making an issue of people’s shortcomings is easy. Concentrating on what is positive on what works requires a change in our way of thinking and a new pedagogical method. One of the main goals of education is to develop each child’s talents and abilities to the fullest (Convention on the Rights of the Child, 1990), but schools lack knowledge, teacher training, and easy to apply materials to reach these goals. Thus, young people graduate from school with a high level of theoretical knowledge but lack in essential 21st century skills, such as perseverance and trustworthiness. 

SEE THE GOOD! creates a virtuous cycle of of positivity through seeing each student through their strengths and skills and teaching the students themselves to notice their peers similarly. Our research shows our pedagogical method to increase students’ school well-being, which in turn improves academic results. The digital SEE THE GOOD! service provides teachers with training and materials to easily apply our pedagogical method in any classroom embedded in the normal curriculum. The learning of 21st century skills is assessed through SEE THE GOOD! service and used to produce the students’ “Strenghts portfolios” which documents their SEL and character strengths alongside traditional academic report cards. 

SEE THE GOOD! is an awarded social innovation and simple solution which identifies hidden strengths in young people and allows for a more effective identification and utilisation of expertise in an increasingly international world. SEE THE GOOD! is developed by Finnish special education teachers in collaboration with professionals of early childhood education, teachers, and Finnish universities providing teacher education. SEE THE GOOD! is backed by peer-reviewed research and the results of SEE THE GOOD!’s application with heterogenous student groups will be reported in both professional and scientific publications.  

To scale See the Good!'s impact on individuals, school communities and societies at large, we have drawn an impact model based on a) our experience on implementing the solution, b) our academic research described above and c) the research on 21st century skills. We work with specialists in impact measuring in University of Helsinki and education exporting agencies (Business Finland). This collaboration helps us carefully design our evaluation processes and make reporting of them non-complicated.  

Usage of See the Good!, both the pedagogy and materials, will show in the change in students’ perceptions of self and others, motivation, and socio-emotional well-being. We have experience using art-of-state measurement tools, including psychometrically valid scales and e.g. social media visual methods. Importantly, the change is measured both on individual and population level. Students report on their usage of strengths by randomly timed data collection (experience sampling method). Selected students give more detailed data in visual and verbal narratives documented on See the Good!. Peer feedback is an in-built part of our tools. Achievements resulting from usage of strength (e.g. courage) are being stored on See the Good! accumulating data constantly. Longitudinal big data is used to evaluate pupils’ learning trajectories and success in terms of finding a study place and entering the labor market. The impact of See the Good! in teachers is measured by the enjoyment to deliver classes, less stress, and burnout (quantitative and qualitative measurements). The quality of implementation is monitored across teachers and schools.

Our long-term goal is a world in which youth are aware of their strengths and will have improved opportunities in finding their place in the labor market and in life generally.  

H1/2022: Product development See the Good! digital service is ready to be adopted in target countries. Rapid, iterative co-creation of the digital tools with first schools in Vietnam, Thailand and others is ongoing. Piloting and co-creating agreements signed with the international schools. H2 / 2022: Rapid, iterative co-creation of the See the Good! digital service with selected early adopter schools including on-site workshops and teacher training. Piloting and co-creation with early adopter schools to ensure suitability of service to global market. H2 / 2022: Expanded early adopter program in the target countries Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia to engage more teachers. Late 2022/early 2023: Full launch of See the Good! -service open to all interested teachers and schools in Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

In the next five years See the Good! has a full featured, free service for individual teachers and classrooms designed to impact over 1 million teachers and 10s millions of students. See the Good! provides for effective identification of expertise and makes the potential in each learner visible. 

SEE THE GOOD! is not a complicated system to adopt. However, it takes time to convince teachers of a new way to think of learning. Teaching 21st-century skills does not compromise teaching traditional academic skills. Nor does it ask for more time. Learning how to teach academics and skills in character simultaneously asks for teacher training. We are experts in it. Compelling evidence needs to be displayed to confirm the benefits of SEE THE GOOD!. Our pilots and interventions always include rigorous pre-and post-testing and continuous monitoring of the impact. Octava’s support is highly appreciated in building a robust social impact chain in the target countries. Also, we need Octava’s help in implementing the SEE THE GOOD! in schools and in modifying the measurement system for local needs. 

From Kaisa, the CEO and Founder:
"As a teacher, I started working with the most challenging kids with special needs. I realized the hard way that the traditional school approach focused on problems that did not work for them: they struggled with emotional and behavioural problems, they did not succeed in the school work and they did not trust the school

Using positive pedagogy as my start point, but lacking systematic and
practical tools to find and develop their strengths and socioemotional skills, I
researched and developed a method that surfaced their strengths and mine as a teacher. This was a game-changer not only for me and my students but for their parents.

I realized that I had not received much training on teaching from "what is right in you?" and on students' strengths. I needed knowledge on how to support my students' socio-emotional development.

When I was asked to become a trainer of positive education courses, my knowledge of the topic deepened. After training hundreds of teachers, this also convinced me that educators truly benefited from the more positive and human-centered approach in teaching.

I traveled every inch of Finland to deliver the message. First to special needs
teachers and then to regular ones. I wrote books and created printed
materials. The feedback I got repeated consistently: the problem resonated
and the method and tools in practice worked. A community and movement of
positive Finnish teachers flourished. For that reason, See the Good! was born. 

The time was ripe for the next challenge: scaling the movement."

11 people.

8 full-time and 3 part-time. 

More info here: https://www.seethegood.app/abo...

Kaisa Vuorinen, is Founder and CEO of Positive. Her company Positive is also a finalist in EIB Social Innovation Tournament and NESTA Future Ready Fund in 2019.. Kaisa is also Master of Education, Special education teacher and she is currently finishing her PhD on character strength interventions among mainstream and SEN students in the University of Helsinki. She is a famous and widely acknowledged speaker in Finland and many other countries. She is one of the greatest innovators in the Finnish education field at the moment. Her expertise lies in strengths-based education and positive team building. Kaisa has travelled across Finland and also other countries to give hundreds of talks and seminars on "See the good in children"! Her work on positive education has inspired thousands of kindergartens and school teachers as well as principals. Together with Lotta Uusitalo-Malmivaara she has published two books and strengths cards called "See the good", trained more than 20 000 educators worldwide to use the See the Good! pedagogy. The highly popular books (Focus on the positives, publisher PS-kustannus) have sold more than 46.000 copies in Finnish, Swedish and will be soon available in English, Chinese and Japanese.

 Other key team members include, Elina Paatsila, MA, teacher trainer, Pasi Kotilainen, an experienced teacher and Edutech expert, Mike Arvela, CTO, Seasoned engineer in start-ups, Sergio Palomo, Head of design, Timo Koro and Thomas Whiting, UX Developer, Louis Bui, originally from Vietnam responsible of the localization and Junko Tanaka from Japan to help teacher to get onboarded and  Jussi Laakkonen, member of the board, a serial entrepreneur who led his most recent venture to over €200 million run rate and exited it to a US company at 9 figure euro valuation. 

Positive Ltd is an EdTech start-up company with exceptional education and research expertise, strong entrepreneurial & product development experience. We have signed agreements with paying customers in Finland and with international schools in Asia too. We have a highly potent board backing us and extensive networks to work with globally. The solution is born global and ready to take off in Malaysia, Thailand among a few!

Positive team has trained more than 15 000 educators worldwide to use the See the Good! pedagogy. Our highly popular books (Focus on the positives, publisher PS-kustannus) have sold more than 36.000 copies in Finnish, Swedish and will be soon available in English, Chinese and Japanese. The paper-and-pen version of PCV has already been successfully used by more than 10 000 Finnish students over the past five years. The Finnish National Board of Education is currently in process of training over 6 800 teachers countrywide in our pedagogy, which lays the ground for the rollout of the digital See the Good! service to every Finnish comprehensive school, for the use of every student (approximately 500 000 pupils) by the year 2022. The biggest cities in Finland, namely Vantaa, Espoo and Helsinki, are co-creating the digital See the Good! service with us. We’ve also signed piloting and co-creation agreements with international schools starting in second half of 2021. These pilot schools will assist in internationalizing the service for European and global markets. Over the next 3 years, we expect to reach 500 000 beneficiaries and customers. 
Here you may find more validation of our abilities to create solutions:

https://www.sitra.fi/en/news/a...

Business Finland is funding our work and advise go to scale globally.

Finnish Innovation House (Sitra) has funded our work and is advising the team on how to build innovations with great impact.

EIB (European Investment Bank) has awarded Positive LTD with impact Bootcamp prize. 

Helsinki Education Hub is helping us to scale globally. 

Impact fund Illusian is helping us to scale by funding our work. 

Helsinki University is our home base where our studies are done. 

 Citra Berkat Foundation (Ciputra) Indonesia teacher training. 

Severlas schools and other smaller organizations to training teachers globally and to scale our digital tools.

We want to pilot and scale in Malaysia, Indonesia, and at least in Thailand in the following years. 

Positive wants to impact the lives of the students in these countries. 

We need to understand better the current education and curricula in those countries in order to develop our tools to fit the education systems.

We need the from Challenge in order to be able to raise the awareness of teaching students with compassion and positivity. To support also SEL in the countries and to train more and more teachers in our pedagogy. 

The Challenge and prize will be used to support intensive co-creation & implementation of the See the Good! digital service in the selected countries. This is accomplished by 1) Scanning the most suitable early adopter teachers and schools. 2) Training the teachers on-site and online. 3) Iterating the service by cycles of piloting, feedback & modifying the implementation of See the Good!. 4) Launching the commercial version of See the Good! for Malesia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Thailand. 

We need help:

First in the business model. How can Positive have a sustainable business model in the target countries and at the same time offer freemium tools for teachers?

Second, network, how to find the right schools and teachers to pilot with.

Third, how to make Positive's brand well-known and trusted in the target countries.