Greg Richardson

1. ICCTE
Responding to God’s Call to Serve:
Achieving the Educational Challenges of this Decade
May 23-36, 2012
Strengths-based Education:
The Impact on Marginalized
Students with Disabilities
Greg Richardson
Azusa Pacific University

2. The Problem
• Low academic achievement
• Overrepresentation of marginalized groups
• Accountability: Placing the blame

3. Low Academic Achievement
• Traditional K-12 school systems
– High Stakes Testing
– Performance levels of Students
• Drop rates
– Secondary Institutions
– Postsecondary Institutions

4. Overrepresentation in Special Education
• Marginalized Students
• The Deficit Model
• Behavior

5. Academic Accountability
• Parents and students
• Teachers and administrators

6. Proposed Resolution
• Strengths-based education

7. Strengths-based Education
• Using students’ Strengths to enhance their
academic development

8. Strengths-based Education
Definitions:
• Strengths – “consistently providing near perfect
performance in a specific task.”
• Talents – “naturally recurring patterns of
thought, feeling or behavior:
productivity.”
• Skills – “basic ability to perform steps of specific
tasks.”
(Gallup Organization)

9. The Process
• Faculty Strength Identification
• Teachers and Teacher-candidates
• K-12 SPED student strength identification

10. Faculty Strength Identification
Knowing Skills, Talents, and Strengths
• The ability to identify and affirm students’
Strengths is to know one’s own strength.
• Special education teachers are taught to identify
students’ strengths from a strengths-based
educational perspective.
(Contrucci and Richardson, 2009)

11. Teachers & Teacher-candidates
Clifton StrengthsFinder, StrengthsQuest (2007)
• Faculty members’ top 5 Strengths were
identified by this assessment tool.
• Faculty members' own Strengths are accepted,
affirmed and developed.
• Faculty members use Strengths language,
vocabulary, and regularly discuss the broader
concept of Strengths Theory.
(Contrucci and Richardson, 2009)

12. K-12 SPED Students with Disabilities
• When using a Strengths-based Education
perspective:
– the more they teach, the more they learn,
– the more they learn, the better they teach.
• When self-generation exists teacher candidates
pick up the momentum:
– learning to affirm one another,
– learning to affirm their students.
(Contrucci and Richardson, 2009)

13. Questions & Discussion Time