Strengths

This page includes links for information on strengths-based practice, and several tools for the identification of strengths, including my Strengths Card Sort (at the end of the page).

What is Strength-based?

“Raising children is vastly more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can live out these strengths.”

Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000, p6)

Kathy Cox’s Chapter 2.3 A Road Map for Building on Youth Strengths. In A Resource Guide to Wraparound. National Wraparound Initiative

My absolute favorite resource on strengths is not the newest. Kathy Cox’s Chapter 2.3 A Road Map for Building on Youth Strengths in the Resource Guide to Wraparound is practical and to the point. https://nwi.pdx.edu/NWI-book/Chapters/Cox-2.3-(youth-strengths).pdf

Her strengths grid is an elegant tool and I love her focus on the importance of using identified strengths to ground intervention by creating enabling niches and then using engagement in activity that broadens their strengths and helps them progress behaviorally. When the wraparound process is used with fidelity, it is focused on identifying and building youth strengths, and our capacity to enable those.

Identifying Youth Strengths

Here are 5 established frameworks for identifying strengths plus my Strengths Card Sort (at the end).

VIA Youth Character Strengths

https://www.viacharacter.org/character-strengths The VIA Youth Report ranks individual strengths, identifies five signature strengths and provides suggestions for activities to broaden those. Their full list of strengths is as follows: appreciation of beauty, bravery, creativity, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, honesty, hope, humility, humor, judgment, kindness, leadership, love, love of learning, perseverance, perspective, prudence, self-control, sense of meaning, social intelligence, teamwork, and zest. However, having used it with a number of youth in a series of pilot studies to apply strength-based strategies to positive youth development activity groups, many of the strengths were hard for youth to understand. Plan to spend some time helping explore what their signature strengths mean. I personally am also troubled by the word character before strengths. Yet, VIA Me is a pretty well established strengths frame.

Clifton StrengthsExplorer

https://www.gallupstrengthscenter.com/home/en-us/strengthsexplorer is by the Gallup poll folks and has 10 talent themes. Its results will highlight three areas of talent and there are activities suggested to lean into those. The Gallup classification of the talents of youth includes achieving, caring, competing, confidence, dependability, discoverer, future thinker, organizer, presence, and relating. Their classification is somewhat more concrete and so more easily understood but they could miss some very specific areas of strength that might be key for individual youth.

Y4Y. The 5Cs of Positive Youth Development

https://y4y.ed.gov/tools/the-5cs-of-positive-youth-development Positive Youth Development is another framework for building on youth strengths that features focus on supporting the development of traits within the 5Cs; competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring.

Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

http://infed.org/mobi/howard-gardner-multiple-intelligences-and-education/ have been around a while and have now expanded to 9 intelligences. His categories are verbal-linguistic, mathematical-logical, musical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalist, and existential intelligences. There are a number of surveys out there but here is a short one for children https://www.rcsdk12.org/cms/lib/NY01001156/Centricity/Domain/9842/Multiple%20Intelligence%20Survey.pdf . This seems to have been the easiest for youth to understand and apply and it translates pretty well into actionable strengths.

The Developmental Assets Framework by the Search Institute

https://www.search-institute.org/our-research/development-assets/developmental-assets-framework/ The Search Institute frames their 40 Developmental Assets within four areas of external assets (support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations), and internal assets (commitment to learning, positive values, social competencies, and positive identity) that they put forth as the building blocks to healthy development and they have recommendations targeted to specific age ranges.

Strengths Card Sort in English

Sorte-de-fuerzas link for Spanish translation

© Claudette Fette

I have used all of these strengths frameworks and have found each useful for different youth, but none captured strengths for all, and some youth had a really hard time with the language in some of the tools. I created a card sort with pretty straight forward language and images for 36 personal qualities that span a broad range of strengths, and is quick and painless to administer. I have used them with youth from 10 to about 18 years old … although I also have had my graduate students try them out.

You are welcome to print and use these with your children or in your practice, but you do not have permission to produce them for resale or in any other way use these strengths cards for financial gain. Your downloading and printing them constitutes your agreement to only use them as stated.

How to prepare the Strengths Card Sort: First download the cards from https://www.dropbox.com/s/we2w2q0sa7pq8v8/Strength%20Cards%201.7.21.pdf?dl=0 and print a two sided copy of the PDF on cardstock. For the deck in the photo, I cut a heavier scrapbook paper into a standard 8.5 x 11 size, which just enables an attractive back side for the cards. Cut the cards along the very light grey lines on the side with the images. You should end up with a deck of 36 Strengths Cards.

Administration: Give youth a full deck, image side up. Have them sort the cards into 3 stacks 1) Not at all like me, 2) Somewhat like me, and 3) Very much like me! Once they have done this, I take away stacks 1 & 2. I then have them select 3 - 5 of the “Very much like me” cards and those are the strengths I start with. The MOST important part of identifying strengths is what you do afterward.

*notice that the cards are numbered, that is just to make it easy to replace cards that you might give away

What to do with strengths they have identified? Create opportunities for them to explore and apply those strengths.

In group work, I start with having them tell me what those strengths mean to them, then we generally identify heros that exemplify their signature strengths. I develop activities that demand their strengths and we explore them. I may create smaller subgroups that cater to specific clusters of strengths (engineers, creatives, linguists etc) and tailor activities for each. Here it is about creating identity related to their strengths, but it is also important to do so with more encouragement than praise … which just means notice their effort and what they are doing more than relying solely on their strengths as a fixed identity (for example “I love how creatively you are painting that” vs just “you are such an artist”). Finally, I give homework and practice setting goals with their strengths and have them report back. At the end of the series of groups they write their last goals to plan how they will live their strengths beyond the group.

If you are lucky enough to be embedded in a child’s actual life, on a wraparound team, at school, in another community capacity, or as a parent, you can follow the same general course. First, explore what those strengths mean to the youth. Then start encouraging them to think about how and where they can use their strengths. Notice when they do things that use their strengths (also called strengths spotting). Create opportunities based on their strengths (Cox’s enabling niches). Then work with them to set goals regarding living/using their strengths. I like Goal Attainment Scaling and have used versions of that graded to fit the abilities of specific children. I have also tried CO OP style goals to help with metacognition and generalization from individual work together to their real world.