The Alberta Teachers’ Association

SHARP-SMH stands for Strengths, Hope, and Resourcefulness Program for School Mental Health.

SHARP-SMH is a positive psychology, strengths-focused program for fostering student and teacher mental health and well-being. SHARP-SMH is an empirically supported program of interventions and practices developed at Hope Studies Central, an internationally recognized research lab in the Faculty of Education at the University of Alberta. The program’s goal is sustainable, effective mental health programming in schools.

The need

• Seventy per cent of teachers identify a need for more knowledge about mental health.
• Fifteen to twenty-five per cent of children and youth suffer at least one mental health problem.
• Seventy per cent of adult mental illness has its onset during childhood/adolescence.

The program

Hope is a vital resource for healthy development and for learning to face difficulties in life. Life’s challenges are most easily faced from a perspective of hope and strength. We all have strengths, though many of us find it difficult to name and use them to our advantage. Hope enables us to envision a positive future and gives us the motivation to work toward it. Twenty-five years of hope- and strengths-focused research have generated an extensive collection of field-informed tools that can benefit the mental health of teachers and students.

Evidence-based programming

The research supporting SHARP-SMH is robust. Hope is a strong predictor of positive outcomes including academic achievement, positive affect, resiliency, motivation, athletic performance, physical health, psychological adjustment, enriched relationships, lower substance use in youth (alcohol and cannabis), and developing career goals and moving toward these goals. Hope predicts flourishing, and research suggests that it is easier to implement than resilience. Meta-analyses underscore the benefits of positive interventions.

©SHARP-SMH (2021), https://sharp.wp.educ.ualberta.ca
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