It’s Not Just “One More Thing”

Student well-being isn’t just one more responsibility to add to educators’ already busy schedules. Supporting students’ well-being, teaching essential life skills, and exploring college and career pathways are important parts of helping young people grow and prepare for their futures.

The challenge for school leaders and teachers is finding thoughtful ways to bring these priorities into the school day without treating them as separate tasks.

Seminole County Schools in Donalsonville, Georgia, offers an example of how schools can approach this work.

Through its Tribe Time advisory periods, the district creates opportunities for students to explore their strengths, develop life skills, and think about their futures. Thrively plays an important role in supporting these activities.

Supporting Student Well-Being Through Tribe Time

Seminole County Schools uses its Tribe Time advisory periods to address student needs beyond traditional academic instruction.

Rather than treating well-being and personal development as additional responsibilities, the district incorporates these topics into dedicated time for student reflection and learning.

Thrively is one of the tools used to support this approach, helping students better understand themselves while participating in structured activities.

Helping Students Discover Their Strengths

One of the district’s first steps is using the Thrively Strengths Assessment to help students recognize their individual strengths.

This process encourages students to reflect on what they do well and develop a more positive understanding of themselves.

It also supports a shift in school culture, encouraging both students and educators to recognize learners through their strengths rather than focusing only on challenges.

When students understand their strengths, they have another way to think about their abilities, interests, and opportunities for growth.

Developing Essential Life Skills Through Thrively

Thrively is not the only tool Seminole County Schools uses. Instead, it supports the district’s existing programs and interventions.

As the district works toward its Individual Learning Plan (ILP) goals, educators use Thrively lessons to explore important life skills, including:

• Self-management: Understanding emotions, behaviors, and personal responsibilities.
• Responsible decision-making: Thinking through choices and their possible consequences.
• Goal setting and achievement: Identifying goals and considering steps toward reaching them.

These activities help connect personal development with the district’s broader efforts to support students.

Connecting Student Interests With College and Career Readiness

Career exploration is another important part of the district’s approach.

Alongside other college and career readiness activities, students use the Thrively Interest Profiler to learn more about their interests and explore hundreds of potential career pathways available through the platform.

These experiences help students reflect on what they might want to pursue in the future.

When opportunities such as career fairs or internships arise, students can approach them with a better understanding of their interests and what they hope to gain.

By connecting self-awareness with career exploration, Seminole County Schools gives students opportunities to make more informed decisions about their next steps.

Making Student Well-Being Part of Everyday Learning

Seminole County Schools demonstrates how student well-being, strengths-based learning, life skills, and career exploration can be incorporated into existing school structures.

Through Tribe Time and its broader student support efforts, the district creates space for students to learn more about themselves and consider their future goals.

Thrively is proud to partner with a district committed to addressing the needs of its students in thoughtful and meaningful ways.

Special thanks to Assistant Superintendent Felicia Purdy for her leadership.

Understand. Support. Engage. 

Whole child education begins with understanding who students are, what makes them unique, and how educators can support their individual learning journeys.

Thrively partnered with Mendon Upton Regional School District (MURSD) and its educators to explore how student data could help connect the dots between Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS).

Through the lens of “Understand. Support. Engage.”, the partnership focused on helping all learners become expert learners by recognizing their strengths and understanding the whole child.

Rather than focusing only on what students struggle with, the approach encouraged educators to identify what is strong within each learner.

Supporting Whole Child Education Through Student Strengths

An assets-based approach to education begins with recognizing that every learner brings unique strengths, interests, and aspirations into the classroom.

By understanding these qualities, educators can develop a more complete picture of their students and consider how to better support their learning experiences.

Through Thrively, Mendon Upton educators explored how strengths-based student information could support their existing instructional frameworks.

This work emphasized the importance of knowing learners as individuals and using that understanding to inform educational decisions.

Connecting Thrively Learner Profiles With UDL and MTSS

MURSD educators took a deeper look at student Learner Profiles to explore individual strengths, interests, and aspirations.

These profiles offered educators additional context about their students beyond traditional academic information.

The goal was to connect these insights with two important educational frameworks:

• Universal Design for Learning (UDL): An approach to designing flexible learning experiences that support different learner needs.
• Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS): A framework for organizing academic, behavioral, and other student supports based on individual needs.

By connecting learner insights with UDL and MTSS, educators explored ways to better understand, support, and engage students.

Understanding Student Hope Through the Thrively Hope Index

Another important part of the partnership involved examining the Thrively Hope Index.

Developed in partnership with Cathleen Beachboard, author of The School of Hope, the Hope Index is a quarterly assessment designed to explore two important components of hope:

• Agency: The determination to work toward goals.
• Pathways: The ability to identify ways to achieve goals and overcome barriers.

Together, these components contribute to an overall Hope score.

The assessment can be used with both students and adults, providing an additional perspective on goal-directed thinking and the ways individuals approach challenges.

For MURSD educators, exploring hope alongside student strengths and interests offered another way to understand the whole learner.

Using Learner Insights to Understand, Support, and Engage

The partnership demonstrated how strengths-based data can complement existing school frameworks.

By looking at student strengths, interests, aspirations, and hope, educators can ask meaningful questions:

• What do we know about this learner beyond academic performance?
• What strengths and interests can help us engage this student?
• How might these insights inform the supports we provide?
• How can we create learning experiences that recognize individual differences?

These questions help connect the idea of whole child education with everyday teaching and student support.

Helping Every Learner Thrive With Thrively

Mendon Upton Regional School District’s work with Thrively highlights the potential of connecting strengths-based learner insights with systemic approaches such as UDL and MTSS.

When educators begin by understanding students as individuals, they can make more informed decisions about how to support and engage them.

At Thrively, we believe that every child is a genius and deserves to thrive.

We are proud to partner with Mendon Upton Regional School District in its efforts to create learning environments where every student is known, valued, and supported.

Thrively Strengths Pilot Project in Primary Grades

Strengths in primary grades can be explored through meaningful activities that help young learners recognize what makes themselves and others unique. While Thrively looks and feels different in primary classrooms compared with middle and high school settings, the goal remains the same: to know and be known by what’s strong with you, rather than what’s wrong with you.

As partner schools began the school year with a focus on strengths, Thrively partnered with a small group of Learning Experience Designers at Design 39 Campus, part of Poway Unified School District, to explore what strengths-based learning could look like for younger students.

Exploring Strengths in Primary Grades at Design 39 Campus

Together, Design 39 Campus and Thrively co-created a series of eight 30-minute lessons specifically designed for students in grades 1, 2, and 3.

The project focused on helping students develop a shared understanding of strengths through classroom experiences, discussions, and meaningful reflection.

The lessons were designed to build a collective vocabulary around strengths while encouraging learners to recognize positive qualities in themselves and others.

Through these activities, the project aimed to support an asset-based classroom culture and a community of care.

Introducing Young Learners to Strengths-Based Learning

The pilot began with students in Ms. Janette’s and Mrs. Adamson’s classrooms through an introductory lesson titled What Are Strengths?

During this activity, students worked in partnerships to read a book of their choice and identify positive qualities in one of its characters.

Rather than introducing formal strengths vocabulary immediately, the lesson encouraged learners to use their own words to describe what made each character special.

This approach gave students an opportunity to draw on prior knowledge, express their ideas, and begin developing confidence in recognizing strengths.

Discovering Strengths Through Children’s Books

Students identified positive qualities in familiar storybook characters, including:

• Gerald from Elephant & Piggie — Kind
• Bunny from Not a Box — Imaginative
• Pete the Cat — Explorer
• Paperboy — Responsible
• The Good Egg — Helpful

These examples demonstrated how young learners could recognize strengths through stories and characters they already understood.

By discussing the qualities of fictional characters, students began building connections between familiar experiences and the strengths they would explore in future lessons.

Building an Asset-Based Classroom Culture

One important part of the project was allowing students to identify and name positive qualities independently before introducing Thrively’s formal strengths vocabulary.

This approach encouraged learners to think critically, share their observations, and connect new ideas with their existing knowledge.

Through shared reading, discussion, and reflection, educators aimed to help students recognize the strengths present in their classroom community.

The project also emphasized the importance of creating an environment where every learner feels known, valued, and appreciated.

Continuing the Thrively Strengths Pilot Project

As the pilot progressed, the team planned to continue testing lessons, refining activities, collecting data, and sharing what they learned.

The goal was to use these experiences to explore how the primary grades Strengths Project could eventually become available to more Thrively classroom users.

This collaboration with Design 39 Campus reflects Thrively’s commitment to helping learners discover their strengths from an early age.

By focusing on what’s strong rather than what’s wrong, educators can create opportunities for young students to better understand themselves and celebrate the strengths of others.