A typical well-being lesson begins with 'awareness, something to bring the lesson topic to life for the students; this could be anything from a short video clip to a game or even just a question or a picture; something to capture the interest of the students and that will provoke discussion and the sharing of ideas and the asking of questions. Once the students are on board with the topic, the awareness continues by enhancing their understanding of a particular aspect of being human. This may involve looking at (or perhaps rehearsing) a psychological experiment that reveals aspects of human nature or looking at somebody else's experiences and comparing them with our own. One of our students' favourite lessons involves re-enacting Walter Mischel's famous delayed gratification experiment where they have to employ strategies to resist jelly babies for the lesson.

We then move into the 'intervention part of the lesson, where the students learn a specific skill that might help them to maximise their happiness: for example, in the lessons on physical health (described below), students learn techniques to help them sleep, advice on how to maximise learning or ways of managing stress. It is important that students have the opportunity to try the interventions out together and learn through experience. It is all too easy to just tell students "if you want to achieve X, then do Y" but unless students have an opportunity to try these ideas out with guidance when needed, the interventions simply won't get used by them.

The third section of the lesson, 'evaluation', is where we encourage the students to evaluate the intervention they have just learned and they do this in between the lessons. All students are provided with a happiness journal where they write down their reflections on the usefulness of the interventions we teach, or keep notes on how what they are learning in the lessons is impacting upon their subjective well-being. This element of the methodology is vital, because it offers the students the opportunity to provide reasons why they accept or reject what they have learned. Happiness is ultimately subjective and the activities that we choose to engage in to promote our own happiness have to have subjective value based on individual reasoning. The more prescriptive and dictatorial we become about happiness the more we undermine the validity of what we are doing.

Teaching methodology notes.