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.
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.
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:
It doesn’t matter whether you look at it from the original, social awareness, perspective and appreciate the diversity of others and say You matter or whether you look at it from the self-awareness perspective and think I matter, the truth is … we matter. Personal and social awareness relate to our feelings of self worth and the worth of others in our lives. Self respect and mutual respect. From a teacher point of view it is about being a champion for those you teach.
Forty years in the classroom shows. Rita Pierson can speak with such clarity, such honesty, such confidence and such knowledge. She is a jewel. Her talk is all inspiration because 40 years in a classroom has made her capable of understanding and knowing that it all comes down to relationships and connections. It is the stuff of the personal and social capability. Students will enable themselves when they have a champion. They will do better, try better and achieve more when they have someone who knows how to get the best out of them. The personal and social capability is about this: communication, developing leadership skills, understanding relationships, becoming confident and resilient, recognising personal qualities and achievements. Rita Pierson’s words can ring out and resound because she has spent 40 years in a classroom and she knows what she is talking about. As she speaks she is connecting with her audience and teaching them too about personal and social capability. We are educators. We can do this.
My students had overwhelmingly responded that working on their health and fitness would improve their personal capabilities. It was a clear message which came through. We should all be working on our fitness! The University of Bristol has done some studies on working on fitness and the Daily Telegraph reported the following:
The key findings were:
Seventy two per cent reported improvements in time management on exercise days compared to non-exercise days.
Seventy nine per cent said mental and interpersonal performance was better on days they exercised.
Seventy four per cent said they managed their workload better.
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Bob Doyle on the selfgrowth blog has 10 really good reasons for encouraging fitness at work. It is about energy, enthusiasm, being there and not just doing your job. Healthy people are more productive and are happier. Fitness Australia also looks at workplace health and fitness.
Schools are well placed to create happy, healthy environments since they already know how to manage and create teams and teachers are familiar with team building approaches. It is not just that, though. When my year 8s were responding to the indicators for the personal capabilities they were looking at taking responsibility for their own health and welfare. They were looking at how they could improve their eating habits and how they could improve their fitness. That’s a message we could build in schools which could be carried over into adult work environments so that the workplace could then help create workers who thrive.
The first sentence on the ACARA site says if all for me:
“This element involves students in effectively regulating, managing and monitoring their own emotional responses, and persisting in completing tasks and overcoming obstacles.”
Teenagers can often find it quite difficult to regulate their moods and need to understand them and how moods can be created before they have any hope of managing them. They can be taught steps to monitor and manage their own responses. They also often need a chance to be able to go back over things and put them right. Persistence is also something which they can learn and because they live in a world where everything is often instant or easily changed they do not necessarily get the chance of practising the skills needed to overcome adversity. I imagine there will be considerable discussions about this particular element in all the levels.
Explains it well, says it all and these are 12 things which probably would make a good difference in terms of your personal and social capability. See also previous post Making Slough Happy.
Take Action by Yossi Segelmann is inspirational. It is interviews with 50 successful Australians of different ages and backgrounds and it covers how they got there and what they did to achieve success. There is no doubt that education formal or informal played a role in that and that Australians are prepared to work extremely hard to achieve success doing what they love. Since the book is broken into small sections with an overview of techniques at regular intervals it is something which students could use to help plot their own futures.
personal and social capability 