The Program is aimed at helping children build and develop their personal cognitive, creative, and negotiation skills: it teaches them to make conscious choices, set and achieve goals, be ready for changes and challenges, manage their resources, thinking, emotions, behavior, interaction with others, and take responsibility for their lives.

The Program’s methodology is built upon the concept of personality potential developed by Dmitry A. Leontiev, a professor and doctor of psychological sciences. Personality potential includes those personal characteristics that enable a person to be autonomous, not only to be guided by internal impulses or external pressures, achieve their goals and maintain efficiency of their activities.

Program Model

Transformation of the educational environment at schools and kindergartens is achieved through:

• Personality and professional development of managers (administrators) and teachers through respective advanced training programs.
• Transformation of organizational culture using the culture transformation tools and by building trust-based relationship between teachers, children, and parents.
• Changing the content and the educational process through use of unique teaching materials for children of 5 to 18 years old.
• Transformation of the subject-spatial environment using methods of engaging children into the transformation of school setting, out-of-the-box spatial solutions.

The roadmap for launching the Program in an educational institution includes the following steps:

• Building a development team, led by a manager (20% of the teaching staff, at least six people);
• Training in a special, advanced training program, using digital educational technologies;
• Designing a long-term plan for implementation of changes in the educational organization, involving at least 40 % of the teaching staff;
• Getting access to an education environment tool kit, where the relationship culture, teaching practices, and organization of space promote well-being, health, and personality development of children and adults;
• Conducting an initial diagnosis of the state of environment, teachers and children, using evidence-based education tools;
• Comprehensive organizational, scientific, and methodological support of the education provider and system diagnostics to track effects;
• Inclusion into the international network of education providers that apply an environment approach and tools for developing personality potential.

Today, 24,000 teachers from 1,845 educational organizations in three countries — Russia, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan — take part in the Program.

Learn more about Personality Potential Development Program.

Educational solutions

The Program features over 100 educational solutions in a wide variety of formats: guides – e-books, mobile applications, catalogues, board and online games, information and guidance resources, articles, podcasts, online courses, and much more. Educational materials will help to create such an environment in a kindergarten, school, family, where a child will learn to be happy and successful right here and right now, as well as in the future, will be able to develop their personality potential, social and emotional skills, gain psychological stability and optimism. These educational materials are designed for all education process stakeholders creating children's environment: teachers, education managers, school psychologists, and parents.

Educational solutions can be found in the following resources:

1. The whole range of effective educational solutions of the Program can be found at teacher.vbudushee.ru: educational and methodological kits for social-emotional and personality potential development (support for children from 5 to 18 years old, taking into account age characteristics), guides on environmental solutions and designing the space of an educational organization, My Choice mobile app, a catalogue of fiction literature helping develop personality potential, etc.
2. Leader and management teams of education providers are offered a range of methodological materials for analysis, design, creation and further development of their educational environment. In particular, the Transparency Practices digest helps build a partnership dialogue between a school and a family.
3. A Guide for the Modern Family will be useful for parents, who want to learn how to build trust-based relationships with their children, teach them how to set goals and face difficulties. One of the solutions is the Family on Emotions, an online course, which will help parents to make communication with their children resourceful, interact with them as with a person, and support them in building relationships with peers.
4. Informational and methodological resources will be helpful for researchers, wishing to implement a holistic scientific approach to recognize personality potential of all stakeholders, included into the educational process (children, adolescents, and adults, as well as personality development environment). Open-source theoretical and diagnostic materials help school psychologists, giving them valid and reliable psychodiagnostics tools.
5. Growth Workshops is a project aimed at creating an environment in education providers characterized by introducing the culture of choice, finding spatial solutions for the implementation of selected project workshops, mastering new technologies and subject areas. The project offers flexible programs of extra-curricular activities with an annual cycle of events for school and extra-school supplementary education, psychological and pedagogical classes, focused on bringing children and adolescents to the idea of mastery. In addition to extra-curricular activities, the project includes a professional development program for teachers and a support program for pedagogical classes. Any Russian public school or additional education organization, sharing the values of the personality potential development, can apply to participate in a competitive selection of the project. Educational organizations can participate in the project for 2 years. The project is organized by the School League NGO and St. Petersburg State University Institute of Pedagogy with the support of the Charitable Foundation 'Investment in the Future'.
6. A whole range of training programs was developed to successfully and efficiently use educational solutions.

Methods and longitudinal research

The program is based on a deep scientific approach with a focus on practical applicability. Since 2018, longitudinal research has been conducted in accordance with the developed model of goals.

In line with its goal — the success and psychological well-being of a child right here and right now, which are the basis for the development of a mature person, who can fulfill themselves in the modern world — the Program provides for the solution of three blocks of tasks:

1. Develop relevant skills, techniques and tactics (universal competencies, system reflection, coping strategies, etc.).
2. Promote attitudes related to oneself, others and the world (hardiness, tolerance for uncertainty, agency, etc.).
3. Create conditions that promote the well-being and satisfaction of the essential psychological needs of the educational process stakeholders.

The Program’s model of goals was reviewed and recognized by the academic community. Longitudinal research is carried out concurrently with projects on the transformation of the education provider's culture and the application of methodological resources of the Program, which makes it possible to record changes that are observed in the environment, in teachers and students.

The information on longitudinal studies of the Program, their procedures and diagnostic tools is provided in the presentation below.

Key findings and effects of the Program

The Program relies on an evidence-based approach in education and seeks to make it an integral part of educational and pedagogic practices. There are professional development programs on the use of data for making management decisions, grant support is provided to researchers — both students of the master’s program 'Personality Potential Development in Education: Personalization and Digitalization' organized at the initiative of the Charitable Foundation "Investment in the Future", and practitioners. As part of the Program, IT solutions are being developed to help select diagnostic tools and plan research for scientific and applied purposes.

Our Resources for Researchers

• Research Service Constructor is a web service useful for academic staff and practitioners alike wishing to conduct their own research in the field of personality and professional development of the education process stakeholders.
• Personality Potential Diagnostics Personality Potential Diagnostics is an information and methodological resource that contains open materials on the diagnostics of personality potential and conditions for its development.

Read more

• Positive personality resources as buffers against psychological reactions to uncertainty | Dmitry A. Leontiev, Anastasia N. Mospan, Evgeny N. Osin;
• Education as a source for transformative agency: Theoretical and practical issues | Pavel S. Sorokin, Isak D. Frumin;
• ‘Utility’ of education and the role of transformative agency: Policy challenges and agendas | Pavel S. Sorokin, Isak D. Frumin;
• Activity Theory for the De-Structuralized Modernity | Irina A. Mironenko, Pavel S. Sorokin;
• ′Fateful′ vs ′Everyday′ choices: qualitative differences in choice situations and the dimensions of choicework | Anna K. Fam, Dmitry A. Leontiev, Evgeny N. Osin;
• Happiness, Life Satisfaction and Depression in College Students: Relations with Student Behaviors and Attitudes | Irina Khramtsova, David A. Saarnio, Tamara Gordeeva, Katharine Williams;
• Optimistic Attributional Style as a Predictor of Well-Being and Performance in Different Academic Settings | Tamara O. Gordeeva, Evgeny N. Osin;
• How you choose is as important as what you choose: Subjective quality of choice predicts well-being and academic performance | Dmitry A. Leontiev, Evgeny N. Osin, Anna K. Fam, Elena Y. Ovchinnikova;
• Linking academic performance to optimistic attributional style: attributions following positive events matter most | Tamara Gordeeva, Kennon Sheldon, Oleg Sychev.

Contacts

Ekaterina Khaustova, khaustova@vbudushee.ru
Evgeny Matvienko, matvienko@vbudushee.ru

*Some links open the Russian version of the website.