Social and emotional skills

You could do worse than listen to an Olympian to improve your personal and social capabilities. Olympians are resilient and they become experts in resilience. It’s good to hear from them and know that they are sharing these life lessons in a very productive way.

Nurturing self-awareness

Metacognition: Nurturing self- awareness in the classroom is  a very thorough and well formulated article about how to help students reflect on their learning so that they gain insight and self-awareness. It introduces you to the concept of the Compass Advantage which is a very handy way of looking at how you deliver content and then get some good outcomes for the students. Dr. Marilyn Price-Mitchell argues a strong case for metacognition to aid self-awareness and learning:

Metacognition plays an important role in all learning and life experiences. Beyond academic learning, when students gain awareness of their own mental states, they begin to answer important questions:

• How do I live a happy life?
• How do I become a respected human being?
• How do I feel good about myself?

The article offers a number of strategies for building self-awareness in students and so is well worth reading and considering.

Emotional intelligence and e-learning

Image: Free Management Books

I am not going to replicate what is in the article I am giving you a link to. You are quite capable of reading it for yourself. What is interesting is Christopher Pappas has linked emotional intelligence to e-learning and what we can do as teachers to acknowledge and build in the personal and social capabilities as we work with technology in our classrooms. ACARA supplies indicators and elements for us so it is a matter of ensuring we are addressing those as we implement tasks and content via technology.

The Impact of Emotional Intelligence in eLearning

If I can, can – you can, can

Maysoon Zayid. What a powerful performance.  Watch this talk. She is someone who can cover the all the indicators of the personal and social capability in one talk. Her leadership in this area is extraordinary.

Be a success

This video has had over 4 million views on You Tube. The construction of the video, so that it has an impact, is worth paying attention to. This man is a teacher. He knows how to take a piece of information and plant it right into another human being so that it grows. He has very good social management skills which is why the video has had so many views. The message addresses the criteria/ indicators for self-awareness but by the end of the video he is addressing the criteria for self- management. We have to take a positive view of ourselves and push through on it so we become confident, resilient and adaptable.

Personal and social capability

                                                                                                                                                  To cut a long story short, I am tired of looking up what each of the capabilities are. I have a broad idea and broad knowledge but cannot spout them out accurately. There is a lot we have to know for the general competencies , so anything to make it easier.  I have just made myself an image of the four areas for the personal and social capability. This way I can see it in one glance.

Multiple intelligences test

According to the ACARA indicators, for self-awareness students need to be able to :

recognise emotions

recognise personal qualities and achievements

understand themselves as learners

develop reflective practice

The multiple intelligences test ( in English, Bengali, Urdu , Arabic, Chinese and Somali) gives you a chance to have a look at what your multiple intelligences look like according to the test. This test is as a written version in English or aural version in all the languages.  This is the second time I have done it. I first did it a couple of years ago and what this second test result shows is that I have changed and grown. I have had an opportunity to strengthen some of the areas which were not so good.  I have worked on my fitness, I have made an effort to know myself better. I am not sure why that has come at the expense of interpersonal skills but I shall think about it. The test is not the answer and it is not necessarily completely accurate. My linguistic score ought to be the best because that is my real strength and is widely acknowledged as such. Were you to do this with students you would be able to have some easy conversations with them about their personal qualities and achievements. You would be able to discuss whether they agreed with the results or not and you would be able to show them it could help them learn better if they knew how they learned and what  their learning strengths are. It also means they can do the test again and have a look again and reflect like I have. The multiple intelligence test then becomes a tool for promoting good conversations about who you are and where you are headed and what you need to do to get here.

Let a person be themselves

 

This video has had over 4 million views and it is doing the rounds on Facebook as well. If you read the comments under the video then you may well be as surprised as I was at the level of swearing and disparaging comment. If you filter that out you can see there is a bit of a discussion as to whether a boy like MattyB should promote himself in such an obvious way because he has a sister with Down’s Syndrome. That adds a whole new level of discussion to the video which has been made in order to address what are the social capabilities in our Australian National Curriculum. It uses real people. It creates a scenario which highlights some important issues when it comes to accepting others, how to deal with that and how to improve relationships with all people . For Matty to make the video it is about developing his leadership skills and helping him to use the tools and networks he has to resolve conflict and develop leadership skills. So, there are so many discussions to be had around this video which relate to the social capabilities. Were I to show it in class I’d be doing a cut and paste on the comments so I could block out the undesirable material for class. With older students I’d look at why that would occur with a video like this and that is also relevant to the social capabilities.

For Social Awareness students at all the levels have to be able to :

appreciate diverse perspectives

contribute to civil society

understand relationships.

For Social Management students have to look at being able to:

communicate effectively

work collaboratively

make decisions

negotiate and resolve conflict

develop leadership skills.

Emotional Abuse

What constitutes emotional abuse?

When managing your own and the behaviour of others it can be very hard to pinpoint what constitutes emotional abuse. Trying to have rational, logical discussions can be difficult because people are not really clear about emotional abuse. When we look at self management , students need to be able to:

express emotions appropriately
develop self-discipline and set goals
work independently and show initiative
become confident, resilient and adaptable

For social management they have to be able to:

communicate effectively
work collaboratively
make decisions
negotiate and resolve conflict
develop leadership skills

The personal and social capabilities are about emotional intelligence and so students need to have a clear idea of what constitutes emotional abuse. Reach Out has explained it all very clearly so there can be sensible and reasonable discussions about such behaviours and then strategies for managing them.

You can do this

This video is getting towards the 2 million  in 4 years views on You Tube so it holds meaning for people. The Personal and Social Capability is about enabling or blocking yourself and enabling or blocking others. Could you do any of the things shown in this video? Would you want to? Would you want to encourage others to do any of the things in this video? Would you want to be the one who stops them? I don’t want to jump into the Grand Canyon or anything like it. I would not encourage anyone else to do it. This video has made me think about where my boundaries are and where they are for me as a teacher. There is no doubt when you watch the video that these people are truly amazing in what they can do and what they have achieved. It really is about how high we can fly as human beings. I was thinking about the risk assessment for some of the things. What would it be and how would you put it in place? This is why we need the Personal and Social Capability. We do need to enable ourselves and others. We shouldn’t block ourselves and certainly not others…but where would you put the boundaries?