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.

Practise emotional first aid

 

It’s true. We are quick to respond with physical first aid. We are learning to offer and accept mental first aid but we keep running into an emotional block with emotions. We can find them embarrassing, unacceptable, intolerable. We forget we are human and others are human so our first reaction is often to deny the emotions or tell ourselves off and put ourselves down. This video straightens the picture and gives insight into how we can help ourselves and others more appropriately and effectively.

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

The Happiness Factor

Martin Seligman is the well-known, well-respected driving force behind Authentic Happiness and the benefits of applied positive psychology. I have featured him here before in past years on this blog . Positive Psychology  and the Authentic Happiness  site can do much to help us interpret the social management and self management aspects of our national curriculum. The site has plenty to look at , to think about and there are questionnaires, current ideas and views and videos. There are plenty of resources there to educate yourself and your students.

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.

Everyone should be respected

A beautiful video with a powerful message. It tackles a big issue in society in a way we can all deal with. We can then get out the statistics if we want to and have a closer look and debate the areas of concern in a safe way. There are all sorts of things which could be discussed as a result of seeing this video or you could just show it and let it work its magic. It fits into the self-management and social awareness elements of the Personal and Social Capability.

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.

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?