Human Flourishing

Human Flourishing in Teaching and Learning

Human flourishing is an interdisciplinary approach to well-being and human development that considers how people learn, grow, relate, find meaning, and contribute across their lives. Montclair's Human Flourishing work draws from interdisciplinary scholarship and evidence-informed practices, including research and resources from the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

A sunflower is in focus on Montclair State University campus.

Flourishing is an ongoing process of cultivating human capacities through moment-to-moment experience that help us learn, adapt, connect, grow, and find meaning across different stages of life. In education, Human Flourishing invites us to consider the whole person. Learning is not only cognitive: attention, emotions, relationships, identity, values, embodied experience, purpose, and the environments in which learning occurs all shape how students learn and develop. Recognizing the body–mind connection, a Human Flourishing approach creates opportunities for intellectual learning to be accompanied by reflection, relational development, and meaningful engagement.

Human Flourishing is also interconnected: we do not flourish alone. We develop through relationships, communities, and the environments and systems of which we are a part. Flourishing therefore involves developing greater awareness of ourselves and cultivating our inner capacities while strengthening how we relate to others and contribute to the world around us.

From this perspective, education can help create an ecosystem for flourishing in which curricular and co-curricular experiences, relationships, and the broader life of the university support whole-person development. This approach recognizes our shared responsibility to provide every student with opportunities to cultivate capacities for learning, growth, connection, resilience, and meaningful participation in the world.

Through evidence-informed practices and repeated experience, students can strengthen their capacity to be present and attentive, understand their emotions, explore identity and values, build meaningful relationships, navigate challenge and change, and engage with their lives and communities with greater curiosity, compassion, purpose, and intention.

Foundations for Flourishing

Before cultivating specific Human Flourishing capacities, it is helpful to understand how learning, adaptation, and growth develop over time. Three foundations help explain how change becomes possible:

  • Growth Mindset — approaching challenge, feedback, effort, and mistakes as opportunities for learning and development.
  • Positive Neuroplasticity — recognizing the brain's biological capacity to change and adapt in response to experience. Through repeated experiences and intentional practice, patterns of attention, learning, and response can be strengthened over time.
  • Resilience — developing the capacity to adapt, recover, and re-engage while navigating difficulty, uncertainty, setbacks, and change.

Flourishing develops within conditions that support growth, not through individual effort alone. Relationships, environments, experiences, and emotional and physiological states also influence learning and development.

Human Capacities for Flourishing

Human Flourishing capacities are not fixed traits or competencies to be mastered. They can be cultivated through intentional practice and strengthened through experience over time.

These capacities are interconnected. Awareness can create space for emotional regulation; greater emotional awareness can deepen our understanding of ourselves and others; relational presence can strengthen connection; reflection can deepen insight into identity and values; and greater clarity about what matters can support purpose and meaningful action.

Capacities and Essential Pedagogical Strategies

Awareness is often the first step toward change. When we learn to notice what is happening in our thoughts, emotions, bodies, surroundings, and attention, new choices become possible.

Awareness, mindfulness, and attention support our capacity to be present, sustain focus, and notice when the mind has moved away from the experience at hand. Rather than judging moments of distraction, mind-wandering, or preoccupation, the practice is to recognize them and gently redirect attention to what matters in the present moment.

In learning environments, strengthening this capacity can help students become more intentional about where they direct their attention and how they re-engage with learning.

Essential Pedagogical Strategies

  • Create a moment of arrival. Begin class or a learning activity with a brief pause, reflective question, or moment that helps students become present and bring their attention to the learning experience.
  • Cultivate focused attention. Create opportunities for students to engage intentionally with one task, question, conversation, or experience at a time.
  • Help students notice and redirect attention. Invite students to become aware of when their attention has shifted and practice gently returning their focus to the activity or experience at hand.
  • Slow down moments that matter. Allow additional space around difficult concepts, meaningful questions, feedback, or complex conversations so students have time to attend, reflect, and respond with greater intention.

Emotions are part of learning. They influence attention, motivation, decision-making, relationships, and our willingness to engage with challenge and uncertainty.

The goal is not to control or eliminate emotions, but to develop the capacity to notice them, recognize how they may be experienced in the body, understand what they may communicate, and respond with greater awareness and choice.

Developing awareness of our own emotional experiences can also strengthen our capacity to understand and respond to others. As we become more attentive to our emotions, bodily signals, and patterns of response, we can become more sensitive to the verbal, nonverbal, and relational cues of those around us. This growing awareness can support empathy, perspective-taking, thoughtful communication, and meaningful relationships, strengthening our capacity to move from self-awareness toward Connection and Relational Presence.

Essential Pedagogical Strategies

  • Normalize emotions as part of learning. Acknowledge that uncertainty, frustration, curiosity, excitement, disappointment, and discomfort can accompany meaningful learning.
  • Develop emotional literacy. Invite students to notice and name emotional experiences with greater specificity and curiosity, including how emotions may be experienced through bodily signals.
  • Create space between emotion and response. Build brief pauses into challenging conversations, feedback, conflict, or moments of frustration so students can notice what they are experiencing before deciding how to respond.
  • Connect self-awareness with awareness of others. Encourage students to consider how recognizing their own emotional responses can help them become more attentive to the emotions, perspectives, and cues of others.

We do not flourish alone. Human flourishing is inherently relational. We learn, develop, and find meaning through relationships with faculty, peers, mentors, families, communities, and the broader environments and systems of which we are a part.

Connection and relational presence involve cultivating our capacity to listen, practice empathy and compassion, engage across differences, and recognize our interdependence. How we show up in relationships can contribute to the conditions in which others learn, participate, belong, and flourish.

Essential Pedagogical Strategies

  • Practice intentional listening. Create opportunities for students to listen in order to understand rather than immediately prepare a response.
  • Encourage empathy and perspective-taking. Invite students to consider how experiences, identities, cultures, and circumstances can shape different perspectives and ways of understanding.
  • Create opportunities for meaningful connection. Use dialogue, collaboration, peer learning, and reflection to strengthen relationships and belonging.
  • Explore interdependence. Invite students to consider how their learning, choices, actions, and well-being are connected with other people, communities, environments, and the broader world.

Insight involves developing a deeper understanding of ourselves, including our identities, experiences, assumptions, patterns, strengths, and values. Greater insight can help us recognize how these dimensions shape the ways we understand and engage with the world, while opening us to new perspectives and more thoughtful and wise responses to challenges.

Identity does not develop in isolation. Who we understand ourselves to be is shaped through relationships, cultures, communities, experiences, and social contexts. Education can create opportunities for students to explore these influences, deepen their understanding of themselves, and encounter perspectives and experiences different from their own.

Values provide an inner compass within this process of self-understanding. Clarifying what matters to us can help guide our choices, relationships, aspirations, and actions, while strengthening our sense of agency and fostering greater coherence between our identity, values, and actions.

Essential Pedagogical Strategies

  • Invite reflection on assumptions. Encourage students to ask not only what they think, but also, “Why do I think what I think?”
  • Create opportunities for identity reflection. When relevant, invite students to consider how their experiences, identities, cultures, communities, and backgrounds influence their perspectives and ways of knowing.
  • Explore values. Create opportunities for students to identify what matters to them and reflect on how their values can serve as an inner compass for choices, relationships, learning, and future aspirations.
  • Connect insight with action. Invite students to consider how greater awareness of their identity, assumptions, and values might foster greater agency and coherence between who they are, what they value, and how they engage with the world.

Purpose and meaning help connect who we are and what we value with how we engage with learning, relationships, communities, work, and life.

Purpose does not need to be one fixed calling or destination. It can develop, deepen, and change as we move through different experiences and stages of life. Meaning can emerge through learning, relationships, creativity, care, growth, service, and contribution.

The goal is not to create a perfect life plan, but to develop greater clarity about what matters now and strengthen our capacity to live and act with greater alignment and intention.

Essential Pedagogical Strategies

  • Connect learning with meaning. Invite students to consider why particular knowledge, questions, or experiences matter to themselves, their field, their communities, or society.
  • Explore purpose in the present. Rather than asking students to identify one lifelong purpose, invite them to consider what feels meaningful during their current stage of life.
  • Consider becoming as well as achieving. Ask questions such as: What kind of person or professional do I want to become? What capacities do I want to strengthen?
  • Translate purpose into small actions. Encourage students to identify one manageable action that brings their choices into greater alignment with what matters to them. Purpose can grow, shift, and clarify over time. Alignment matters more than perfection.

Putting the Capacities Together: The P.R.E.S.E.N.T. Model

Human Flourishing capacities often work together in everyday moments of learning, challenge, uncertainty, and change.

The P.R.E.S.E.N.T. model, developed by Dr. Elenice De Souza Oliveira through her Human Flourishing work as a HEAL Fellow at Montclair, offers an integrative practice for moving from awareness toward reflection, agency, adaptability, and meaningful action:

P — Pause: Create space between reaction and response.
R — Resource: Recognize internal and external sources of support, stability, strengths, and possibility.
E — Expand: Broaden perspective and consider possibilities for learning and growth.
S — Step In: Identify one small, meaningful, and realistic action.
E — Envision: Imagine yourself engaging in that action with intention.
N — Neuro-integrate: Pause to notice and absorb what feels meaningful, encouraging, or supportive in the experience.
T — Translate: Carry insight into continued action, reflection, and practice.

Rather than a rigid sequence, P.R.E.S.E.N.T. can be understood as an iterative process of noticing, reflecting, adapting, acting, and integrating learning over time.

Start Small

Supporting Human Flourishing does not require redesigning an entire course. An ecosystem for flourishing grows through the everyday ways we teach, listen, communicate, invite participation, respond to challenge, and create opportunities for reflection and connection.

Faculty can begin with one intentional pause, one opportunity for focused attention, one reflective question, one meaningful conversation, one moment of perspective-taking, or one invitation to connect learning with identity, values, purpose, or contribution.

Small practices, repeated over time and across classrooms, mentoring, advising, and other university experiences, can contribute to a culture in which students have meaningful opportunities to develop their capacities, grow through challenge, connect with others, and engage more intentionally with their learning and communities.

Explore Human Flourishing More Deeply

The Human Flourishing Community of Practice in Canvas provides a deeper learning pathway for faculty, staff, advisors, mentors, and educators interested in exploring and applying Human Flourishing in teaching, mentoring, advising, leadership, collaboration, and everyday life. Resources include the Foundations for Flourishing, the five Human Flourishing capacities, the Human Flourishing Toolkit, guided experiential and reflective practices, the P.R.E.S.E.N.T. model, and applications across educational and relational contexts. 

The Community is designed to be flexible. Participants may follow the modules as a structured learning pathway or select practices most relevant to their current needs and contexts.

Human Flourishing Community of Practice

Building a Culture of Human Flourishing at Montclair

Human Flourishing at Montclair has grown through an interdisciplinary and collaborative process involving faculty, staff, students, peer mentors, academic coaches, campus leaders, and external scholars and practitioners.

Beginning with the Fall 2024 Human Flourishing Workshop Series, the work has expanded from faculty and staff development into student programming, mentoring and coaching, curricular development, cross-campus dialogue, and opportunities to connect the Montclair community with national and international scholarship on flourishing.

Highlights include:

  • Fall 2024 Human Flourishing Workshop Series — Five workshops exploring resilience, awareness and mindfulness, connection and interdependence, identity and values, and purpose. Guest contributors included Teri Pipe, Ph.D., RN, Core Faculty at the Center for Healthy Minds and Professor of Practice in the School of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, as well as Montclair colleagues contributing perspectives on belonging and student flourishing.
  • Human Flourishing in Graduate Education — Fall 2024 — A special workshop at Montclair's Graduate Summit engaging graduate program coordinators, department chairs, doctoral program directors, staff, and Graduate Council members in considering Human Flourishing within graduate education.
  • Human Flourishing Student Ambassador Panel — Spring 2025 — A dialogue with representatives from the University of Wisconsin–Madison's Human Flourishing Student Ambassador initiative, including Dr. Susan Huber, Nick Shaskhko, and Lamont Johnson Jr., together with Montclair campus leaders, exploring possibilities for student-led flourishing initiatives.
  • Pre-Medical Student Engagement — Spring/Fall 2025 — Human Flourishing programming expanded to Pre-Medical students and peer mentors, including work on positive neuroplasticity, resilience, well-being, mentoring, and the development of capacities relevant to future health professionals.
  • The Pillar of Connection: Human Flourishing in a Culture of Belonging — Spring 2025 — Dr. Tony Chambers, Director for Community Well-Being at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, joined the Montclair community for an interactive workshop exploring connection, belonging, and community well-being. 
Dr. Tony Chambers speaks to Montclair staff and faculty about Human Flourishing.
Dr. Tony Chambers speaks to Montclair faculty and staff.
  • Human Flourishing Course Development — 2025–2026 — Interdisciplinary collaboration supported the development of Human Flourishing curriculum focused on whole-person learning, self-discovery, resilience, emotional awareness, interdependence, purpose, and civic life.
  • Working Group on Education for Human Flourishing — Spring 2026 — Flourishing in Education: Self, Others, and Together brought faculty and staff together to explore Human Flourishing through mindset, resilience and neuroplasticity; awareness and attention; emotional and relational flourishing; purpose and meaning; global flourishing; and ecological flourishing and educational systems. The series opened with Amrita Chaturvedi, Ph.D., Chair of the Consortium for Human Flourishing at Saint Louis University.
  • Global Flourishing Study and Flourishing Education in Practice — Spring 2026 — Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at Baylor University, Director of the Flourishing Network, and Research Associate with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, joined the Montclair community for Wisdom about the Good Life from the Global Flourishing Study and a roundtable on translating flourishing research into educational practice.
  • Signature Dialogue: Creating a Flourishing Life — Spring 2026 — A student-centered dialogue with Dr. Matthew T. Lee invited students to explore flourishing, meaning, purpose, and questions about living a good life.
  • Human Flourishing for CAST Academic Coaches and Tutors — Spring 2026 — A workshop series brought Human Flourishing capacities and practices into academic coaching, tutoring, mentoring, communication, and student support.

All these initiatives reflect an evolving commitment to Human Flourishing across curricular and co-curricular life from classrooms and faculty development to mentoring, advising, coaching, student dialogue, and community engagement.

Additional Resources

Center for Healthy Minds — University of Wisconsin–Madison

Interdisciplinary research on the science of well-being and flourishing, drawing from fields including neuroscience, psychology, education, contemplative science, and the humanities. The Center studies how well-being can be cultivated in individuals and communities.

Healthy Minds Program App

A freely available well-being app developed by Healthy Minds Innovations. It combines lessons and guided practices informed by neuroscience and contemplative traditions and is organized around Awareness, Connection, Insight, and Purpose. 

Global Flourishing Study at Harvard University

The Global Flourishing Study follows more than 200,000 participants across 22 countries and examines dimensions including happiness and life satisfaction, physical and mental health, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, close social relationships, and financial and material stability.