Just like traditional on-campus classes, Penn LPS Online courses emphasize communication and connection with instructors as well as peers. Our courses are designed and delivered by Penn faculty who bring years of teaching experience as well as professional expertise to the classroom. The Faculty Spotlight series aims to introduce you to some of the outstanding instructors who make our courses so immersive and effective. This interview has been edited and condensed.
Meet Virginia Millar
Virginia Millar is a lifelong learner and educator, who recently concluded a 25-year public school teaching career working with students with special needs in diverse, low-income communities. She holds a Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania and has served as an assistant instructor in the MAPP program since 2012. She created and taught in the Girl Power Club, an afterschool program for middle school girls from low-income families that cultivates well-being and resilience skills, and has presented her research on the strong correlation between well-being and academic achievement at the International Positive Education Network and International Positive Psychology Association conferences and in her Penn courses.
In 2024, Millar was awarded Penn’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies Award for Distinguished Teaching in Undergraduate and Post-Baccalaureate Programs. She teaches two courses for Penn LPS Online, APOP 1000: Introduction to Positive Psychology and APOP 1200: Human Flourishing: Strengths and Resilience, which are both core courses within the Certificate in Applied Positive Psychology
Congratulations on your teaching award!
Thank you! It meant everything. I know esteemed friends and colleagues in positive psychology at Penn who have received this award, and I have incredible respect and admiration for those people. I love what I do, and I always try to do the best I can, but to have that recognized from a student nomination and beloved colleague nomination just meant the world to me.
Tell me about your involvement at Penn.
At Penn LPS Online, I teach Introduction to Positive Psychology and another course called Human Flourishing, which is a deep dive into character strengths and resilience, which are essential building blocks within positive psychology. I work with the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program as an assistant instructor in two of the courses, and I'm also the student services liaison who connects students to any support services they might need, like writing support or planning and organization support, and supporting overall group connectivity.
What drew you to positive psychology?
I was a public school teacher in Atlantic City, New Jersey for 25 years. I worked with special needs students, and some of them were just such incredible young people. They had these incredible challenges—learning disabilities, poverty, a lot of them had really bad family situations—but despite all that, many of them were successful and happy. So I was really digging deeply to try and understand what it was about those students that allowed them to be successful, so I could bring it to more students. That led me to explore resilience on my own—that is still one of my very favorite topics within positive psychology!—and led me to MAPP.
I'm very passionate about education and bringing positive psychology to education. I also work with a coaching company called Burn-in Mindset that was actually started by one of the MAPP students. We work with educators, administrators, teachers, and groups of core personnel in school systems to teach them about positive psychology and coach them about well-being and resilience—and how to make them part of school culture. If I present at a conference, it's usually about bringing positive psychology into the school setting. It's a really nice alignment with what I teach at Penn. To be able to teach this and share these principles with other people and see it again through their eyes and help them to understand it… it's my passion. And I get to do that in both programs!
What can a new student expect from a positive psychology course?
It’s virtual, so there’s a lot of flexibility built in the asynchronous work. We also have synchronous live sessions, which is a required open discussion; we always offer different options to try and accommodate different time zones. Each week we have an experiential activity where we apply a positive psychology concept that we're learning about, and students try it out in their own lives and discuss it in small groups to get to know their classmates. This is typically one of the most impactful components of the program. We use a tool called Harmonize, which allows the small groups to interact asynchronously. They can communicate with each other using video recordings, audio recordings, documents, and pictures on their own time and in their own time zone.
In both MAPP and Penn LPS Online, our students are coming literally from all over the world. We have students of all ages. We have young undergraduates who might be taking their first college course, and we have PhD professors at Penn who are just interested in understanding positive psychology. They come from all different professions: we've had professional athletes, we had a player from the Union soccer team, we have professional ballet dancers. We have educators, coaches, traditional psychologists. We've had police and fire people, and folks in the military. They're from all walks of life, all different levels of professional and educational experience. So it's this incredibly rich community, which is really wonderful because we have all these different perspectives and diverse ways of thinking. And we have the chance to see how they're each applying it in their particular profession or culture.
How do you approach teaching such a diverse group of students?
My teaching philosophy is: Number one, love your students. That might sound cliché or overly simplistic, but I think if you love your students, then you have high expectations for them. You have respect for them. You want to see them learn, learn from them, and you're willing to be adaptive because people learn in different ways.
Aside from that, I think the subject matter itself lends to building community because we are exploring universal human attributes. Not only that—it's what's best about humans. Who doesn't want to explore what's best about themselves and humanity, and have the chance to share that with another person who's also interested in exploring the same thing? The subject matter and the questions that are asked require some degree of sharing and openness, but we set the expectation that this is a safe space where everybody is welcome to share whatever their comfort level allows. My assistant instructors and I make sure that we invite every person to speak and that we recognize and honor every person's contribution and perspective.
What’s one assignment in your upcoming courses that you’re really excited for students to experience for the first time?
The first assignment in both classes involves taking the VIA character strengths survey and digging deeply into your own signature strengths, how you use them, and how they show up in your life. And that's very, very powerful for almost everybody, to be made aware of their own superpowers and how they've used them in the past and how they might use them moving forward.
Can I answer more than one? In the introductory class, we use the PERMA framework, which is Dr. Martin Seligman’s proposed framework of well-being: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments. We explore one element each week, and there's an experiential activity that goes with each. But when we get to accomplishments, the students have to reflect on their own accomplishments and share with us how they were able to achieve them. It's amazing, the things these students have accomplished at different points in their lives. And it’s just so insightful for them to understand how much they already have within them.
How can a new positive psychology student set themselves up for success?
Universal best practices: planning ahead, being really familiar with the schedule. We try to provide the syllabus well in advance so they can see what the whole schedule looks like and when everything's due. We try to keep a really consistent pattern with the way that materials are introduced and assignments are submitted, because eight weeks goes by really, really quickly. It also helps to attend optional office hours and discussion sessions for greater understanding and building rapport, and also to meet with your academic advisor. Overall, be familiar with the cadence of the program, explore the virtual classroom ahead of time…. And, importantly, take advantage of the opportunity to build relationships and feel free to reach out at any time to instructors and ask questions.
Learn more about the 2024 faculty awards in the LPS News article LPS faculty honored as 2024 distinguished teaching award winners.
Visit our Faculty Spotlight page to meet more of the outstanding instructors who make our courses so immersive and effective.
