ABSTRACT
This chapter covers the importance of setting goals and creating positive expectancies for success as well as cultivating positive emotions with at-risk adolescents within solution focused alternative high schools. It shows how goals, positive expectancies for success, and positive emotions can be strategically created with students at the admissions stage of attending an alternative high school and carried on in daily interactions with students in the classrooms. At a solution focused alternative high school, the integration of positive expectancies and positive emotions for success into a student's experience begins even before the first day. Goals, positive expectancies for success, and the cultivation of positive emotions, such as hope, are integral to the success of a solution focused alternative high school program. It is important for staff to help students create a success story that can be shared with others in the alternative high school.
