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.

Inspire others

This is what social management is all about. Inspiring others. Finding the ways forward and the ways to lift others up. The good news is you do not have to wait another moment to make the world a better place. You can do it right now.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Advice to your 13 year old self

 

Experience is a great teacher and so this clip would be a good way to get students to engage with older people to get he benefit of their hindsight and life experience. It would also be a good way for them to engage with technology and work out how to present a message which would mean something to others.  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 video is a a good way of reflecting on what they learn and find out. Year 10s could make a presentation which would be suited to Year 8s. Year 8s could look at what different age groups would say to them at their age. There would then be a mulling over process and then a capacity to look at themselves as learners and as emotional beings. This clip encourages emotional intelligence in a very practical and appealing way.

A new twist on self-management

 

For 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

 

This video is about Britain’s approach to assisting self-management with health care but if you put it into an education context then it has some good suggestions and recommendations which we could use in schools. If you provide students with good quality information so they can see a range of options in terms of their behaviour and choices and then  increase their capacity to set good goals for themselves our job as teachers becomes that of mentor. We can help students to become realistic about moving forward. We can help show them what is blocking them from getting to where they want to be. We can provide some good digital resources so they can explore ideas and options for themselves. One good point the video makes is not to push people into change. It is a case of providing them with positive ideas and plentiful good quality resources which will bring bout light bulb moments. The video looks at how useful technology can be in doing this. There are so many sites, apps,  safe online resources which can help students find out things for themselves in the safe context of school with an adult who can help set a non judgemental perspective. By doing it this way we would be assisting students to become confident, show initiative and independence.