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.

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.

Kid President

Kid President was such a good pep talk for us as teachers today and the bit I liked the best was when he said teachers should be teaching and students should be studenting. We started our meeting with the pep talk and it lightened us all up and we were ready to work and share ideas. That ought to teach us something about how to engage learners in a positive way. It is about being positive and cutting through the blocks and barriers to learning. It is about attitude. From that point onwards we shared ideas, showed each other other videos and our ideas for the personal and social capability and it meant we could see our way through to having more positive action with regard to this capability.

You matter

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.

The value of student self-review Year 8

Now I have been through the self review of the personal capabilities of self-management and self-awareness I can already see the time was well spent. Yes, already. From the time we looked at self-awareness there was a culture change in the class to that of being more focussed and particular. Having also done the self-management and then the goal setting I can see the benefits already. I now have ways of expressing how to improve. It’s consistent because we have all done that exercise. I can now ask all students to be on the same page with regard to blocking and enabling, with regard to how they can make the most of their learning time, with regard to how the are helping or not helping each other and themselves. What they liked was having some clear messages as a whole class about how they can help themselves and what appropriate behaviour is. I need to keep pursuing this. It’s a strength of what we have just achieved. I am wondering if they will deal with their sleep issues and their health and fitness. What they really liked was being able to give themselves a mark out of 10. In fact, they told me that is how they should assess themselves! They also like being able to say if they needed help or not and who would help them. The time frame was something that annoyed them. they didn’t want to have to say when so frequently they responded “as soon as possible.” I maybe need to look at that part of the self review to come up with something better. I now have to decide when to do the social capabilities. Probably next term. Ideally it should be personal capabilities in the first semester and social capabilities in the second semester. Next year I can start with this. If you click on the link, you can download a copy of the self review I made and use it for your own purposes.

Teenagers need their sleep

Image: Helping teens make peace with sleep

After I had worked on the self-awareness and self-management capabilities with my students they had worked out for themselves that getting enough sleep would help them perform better in both of those elements. It was a frequent response in their self-reviews that they needed to get more sleep. It certainly ties in with the research that is available.
Dr Blunden explains that insufficient sleep can contribute to problems such as:

• Poor behaviour – at school, home and work
• More extreme moodiness– irritability and low tolerance for frustration
• More conflict in social interactions
• Difficulty problem-solving
• Decreased attention span
• Reduced creativity
• Less effective memory

Source:How much sleep does a teenager need?

The happy child site is worth visiting since it gives a great deal of practical and sensible information about teenagers and their need for sleep and the reasons why it might be difficult for them to sleep and how to address those. The other site , more directed at students themselves,which is well worth a visit for the useful and down to earth information is kidshealth.

Self – Management Year 8

Image : my e-coach

forecast the consequences of expressing emotions inappropriately and devise measures to regulate behaviour

select, use and analyse strategies that assist in regulating behaviour and achieving personal and learning goals

critique their effectiveness in working independently by identifying enablers and barriers to achieving goals

assess, adapt and modify personal and safety strategies and plans, and revisit tasks with renewed confidence

Now that I have looked at self-awareness and self-management I think I need to work with self-management with all of my year 8 class but  self-management only applies to about 4 students and it would be a useful thing to explore with them. it shows where their difficulties are as students and what really are barriers to success. I still this that

“examine influences on and consequences of their emotional responses in learning, social and work related context”

from self-awareness belongs with these ones in self-management.  Now I have to work out how I will apply these to individuals and a whole class in terms of lesson routines and protocols.  Self-management is more about limitations and how some people limit themselves and so never achieve their potential.  Self-awareness is more about taking yourself from strength to strength and means you are already on a positive course. maybe not. maybe it can apply to any state of being. Something to explore.