The Hope Practice Framework

The Hope Practice Framework has been designed to help teachers think about hope embedded activities in their classrooms. It is largely based on the following two documents:

  • The Counsellors’ Introduction to Hope Tools  – by Edey, Larsen, and Lemay
  • Nurturing Hopeful Souls: Practices and Activities for Working With Children and Youth (Hardcopy) – by Lemay, Edey, and Larsen

There are ten categories that make up the Hope Practice Framework. Each category involves a list of activities and practices, which will be posted in the corresponding categories in the Hope Lessons menu. The ten categories are:

  1. Setting the Tone for a Hopeful Year Together
  2. Searching for Hope
  3. Learning About Hope
  4. Examining Situations in the Context of Hope
  5. Sparking the Experience of Hope
  6. Using Hope to Approach Hopelessness: Exploring Hopeful Behaviours
  7. Conveying Hope
  8. Deepening Understanding of Self and Hope
  9. Preparing for Hopeful Futures
  10. Ending the Year with Hope

To start, we encourage teachers to think about how they plan to set a hopeful tone with students as they begin working with them (i.e., beginning of the year or beginning of a new semester). Once the hopeful tone is set, teachers can choose and modify various activities placed within the eight middle categories to use in their classrooms. Some activities are small and can be completed in a short amount of time. At times, it may be suitable to combine two or three activities in new ways. Other activities have several parts and may span many activities over a period of several lessons (e.g., Hope-Focused Service Learning). At the end of the year, we encourage teachers to engage in activities that will allow the students to end their school year with hope.



The Hope Practice Framework is in a way similar to going on a hike. When going on a hike, people go from a starting point to a destination, but there are several trails that people can take in-between. Similarly, teachers can all start the year with hope and end the year with hope, but they can engage in various combinations of activities throughout the year.