Vibrant Schools and Vibrant Workplaces
In a sentence, vibrant means “full of life or energy.” It can also refer to a person’s personality, especially if they have an energetic or enthusiastic nature. A vibrant personality is often described as charming, enticing, or attractive.
To live a vibrant life is to be fully alive in all of your experiences, to be completely present in each moment. It is a life that is free from the stresses, worries, and concerns that are created by repeating negative thoughts in your mind. This type of living is a choice that you can make for yourself and it doesn’t have to involve an extreme lifestyle change or even a lot of physical activity. Instead, it is a choice to love who you are and to give yourself permission to be your best self at any age or stage in life.
When it comes to creating a vibrant workplace, the goal is to cultivate healthy internal processes and a positive energy in order to thrive in the face of challenges and obstacles. A vibrant culture doesn’t have to be a perfect or utopian organization, but it is a place where people feel empowered and encouraged to do their best work. It’s a place where people are comfortable expressing their opinions, ideas, and needs. It’s a place where people feel like their voices are heard and that they have a strong support system to lean on in times of stress or uncertainty.
A vibrant school is open and responsive, where decisions are made based on the perspectives of all stakeholders, including teachers, students, parents, and community members. School leaders and staff are able to take risks, experiment with new initiatives, and support each other as they build a learning environment that is responsive and empowering for all.
Vibrant schools are based on a set of principles, including enlivened minds, emboldened voice, and playful learning. Education leaders use the Vibrant School Scale, a strengths-based instrument that asks school communities to assess how well their schools are doing in each of these areas. They then host conversations with key members of their school community to explore and build upon these areas of vibrancy.
Unlike other virus identification programs, VIBRANT is not reliant on reference-based similarity to guide the removal of non-viral scaffolds. Therefore, it is better able to detect viral proteins and to identify integrated provirus sequences. It is also able to recover RNA viruses and archaeal viruses that are underrepresented in culture systems and viral genomic datasets. When compared to VirSorter, MARVEL, and PHASTER for identifying viruses in real metagenomes, VIBRANT recovered more total and integrated provirus sequences and had lower false positive rates than all other programs. This improved performance is a result of its more sophisticated approach to identifying virus-like sequences. These findings demonstrate the potential of VIBRANT to expand our understanding of virus diversity and ecology. The VIBRANT program is freely available for research purposes on GitHub.