In 2019, Scott Pennington spearheaded a bold initiative to make Union Public Schools in Tulsa a hope centered school district. He says the effort is starting to deliver results.
When you enter Scott Pennington’s office your eyes are immediately drawn to the Latin phrase on his wall – dum spiro spero: “While I breathe, I hope.” Around his office, there are references to hope decorating the entire room. Even the official title on Pennington’s door has hope in it: “Director of Hope-Guidance-Social and Emotional Learning.” Pennington has helped to create a comprehensive hope program at Union Public Schools that aims to make hope theory a core part of the district’s curricula and culture.
Understanding hope theory
Interest in hope programs like Union’s has grown rapidly in Oklahoma in recent years. State employees in over 100 agencies are now receiving training grounded in hope theory. The Department of Human Services, Department of Corrections, and the Pardon and Parole Board are using hope theory to inform their work, and First Lady Sarah Stitt holds regular hope summits throughout the state.
But what is meant by hope theory? In everyday conversation, the word hope often implies an optimistic outlook or desire for something to be true. It can be construed as wishful thinking or even a desire to achieve an outcome without effort. However, hope programs view the term quite differently. Psychologist Rick Snyder is credited with developing hope theory, which he described as a cognitive process whereby people set goals and sustain motivation during their pursuit of a goal. For Snyder, goals, pathways to achieving goals, and the willpower to sustain pursuit of goals are the foundation of a person’s hope.
Leading hope expert Chan Hellman of the University of Oklahoma defines hope as “the belief that your future will be better than today, and that you have the power to make it so.” To Hellman, the concept of hope is not simply positive thinking or optimism. Instead, it’s a mindset. Hellman says that it is “strategic planning. It is setting goals, and identifying how to get there from here, and how to motivate people to do that work.”
How Pennington came to hope
In 2019, Hellman and his co-author Casey Gwinn’s book Hope Rising: How the Science of Hope Can Change Your Life was sitting on Union Superintendent Kirt Hartzler’s desk when Scott Pennington was summoned to the Superintendent’s office. At the time, Pennington was the Principal of Union’s 6th/7th Grade Center. Hartzler explained to Pennington that Hope Rising had convinced him that Union should become a hope-centered district. The Superintendent wanted to know if Pennington would lead a new initiative to make hope central to the curricula, culture, and daily functioning of Union’s schools. Agreeing to lead the hope initiative, Pennington elicited the services of Hope Rising’s author Chan Hellman who was based only a few miles away at the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa.
Becoming hope-centered at Union
Working with Hellman, Pennington and his Union colleague Jessica Hogaboom began the journey of attempting to bring hope to Union’s 15,000 students. They started by building over one hundred 15-20-minute lessons for teachers. Lessons incorporated the central principles of hope theory by helping children set goals, identify pathways, overcome barriers, and develop sustained motivation to pursue their goals. They also stressed self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship skills related to the district’s socioemotional learning priorities. In lessons, students might be asked to remember a time in the past when they accomplished something important. Pennington notes that this can help students create “future memories” of what success will feel like when they accomplish a new goal.
Pennington says that the hope-centered initiative was largely well received by staff, but that there were early adopters of the approach and others who resisted having to do additional work. To reduce implementation stress, he and Hogaboom developed a Hope Hub where teachers were able to access teaching guides, videos, and book summaries.
Pennington’s work was not limited to the curriculum. He combed through the district’s stated vision and values and created new language to highlight hope within official district documentation. He and Hogaboom revised policies and procedures to ensure that district policy helped to instill the tenets of hope theory among staff, students, and their families. In my interview with him, Pennington explained that these changes provided a common language that everyone in the district could rally around and work with to infuse into the school culture.
At Union, every school administrator and teacher received hope-centered training. This training included instruction on the three pillars of hope (i.e., goals, pathways, and willpower), the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on a person’s ability to be hopeful, how hope is experienced, and the nurturing power of hope. Pennington and Hogaboom worked with school principals to deliver training on professional development days. During training days, they carried out interactive sessions on “hope givers” and “hope robbers” by working through challenging scenarios and modeling how teachers can ensure that they are giving hope to students and not robbing them of it. Pennington says that being a hope giver is as simple as encouraging a student to imagine being the first person in their family to finish school or go to college. This small effort might tap into the child’s imagination and become an instrument of hope.
Research on Hope
In 2021, Union took a step to understand whether its efforts were delivering results. On a district survey (see the Children’s Hope Scale), students reported an increase in their levels of hope. While the data provided only modest evidence of success, many at Union say that they are observing positive changes on the ground. For example, Principal Shana Harris of Union’s Jefferson Elementary told me that she attributes higher test scores and a decline in behavioral incidents at her school to the district’s hope-centered curriculum and culture.
The challenge of connecting hope programs to student outcomes is not just Union’s. Nationally, research on the effects of hope is underdeveloped, and the evidence base is particularly thin in the case of school programs grounded in hope theory. Pinpointing what the effects of hope are on a person is not easy because hope likely coincides with many individual, family, and community characteristics that are also associated with student outcomes. As resources are allocated to hope programs around the state, it will be important to generate evidence that can shed light on whether hope programs are working or not. While the evidence base firms up, practitioners’ insights should not be discounted. Pennington says that the application of hope theory at Union has been life changing. His perspective appears to echo the sentiments of many across the state who are actively drawing on the tenets of hope theory to shape their work.
Author Bio
Christopher Freeze is a retired FBI special agent who is now a hope scholar at the University of Oklahoma.
