The Center for Positive Education (formerly PositiveEducator.org) was founded by Emiliya Zhivtoyovska (The Flourishing Center) and Renee Jain (GoZen!). Both of these entrepreneurial psychology pioneers have their Masters in Applied Positive Psychology from UPenn. Emiliya was part of the team who, under Martin Seligman, innovated the science of Positive Education at Geelong Grammar School (GGS). In 2017, after seeing a need to help educators and students be more proactive about their wellbeing,  they began certifying educators. Tamara was the inaugural Canadian Regional director for GGS's Institute of Positive Education and has spent the past few years working with schools and teachers across Canada, USA and Australia.

When the three of us came together we recognized that there was a need to create policy and standards for the science and application of Positive Education. With that in mind we have recently launched the Center for Positive Education whose mission will be to educate and certify teachers but on a grander scale, we will offer a designation of “Positive Education Certified School” to schools who meet a standard. This standard in a work in progress- we are creating an advisory board of researchers, experts in each domain of Positive Education as well as flagship schools. Together we will attempt to wrap a North American standard around the recommendations from the World Government Summit on how to implement Positive Education. Their recommendations include:

1. Contextual and cultural immersion an understanding
2. Multi-stakeholder engagement
3. Needs and goals assessment
4. Quantitative baseline measurement
5. Curricular development and adaptation
6. Training of educators
7. Curriculum implementation
8. Ongoing training and embedding
9. Post-intervention measurement and ongoing impact evaluation
10. Evidence-based policy design and legal institutional embeddedness
11. Large scale policy implementation
12. Ongoing evidence-based evaluation adaptation and evolution

Our certifications are one of many ways to meet the 6th criterion. The differentiating factor between our certification and most others is the action plan that answers the question “now what?”.  We have heard from many educators who complete a training that they still don’t understand what to do in their classroom. Our goal is to ensure our grads have all the training and tools they need accessible online as well as a tribe of like-minded educators sharing similar goals. We don’t want grads to “reinvent the wheel”. We have worksheets, books and a video library as well as extensive bonus material designed to help a teacher make sure the work is unique for their context and school.