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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Corny as it may sound, it was a major concept breakthrough for us as a group to work out our purpose and what we reacted to so wholeheartedly was the notion we could “share the love”. We decided our job would be to be the unblockers, the enablers and the ones who would be able to trigger thinking about personal and social capabilities. We did not think it was our job to tell people how to do it because teachers are professionals with a lot of experience and different ways of approaching their classes and students. We warmed to the notion that we could be facilitators of this and spent quite a long, animated, productive time thinking of all the ways we could spark insight into personal and social capability and whom we could target and how. We isolated our target groups, the resources which would be appropriate and the scaffolding we needed to enable ourselves and our group. We have reached the end of our school year being able to tick all the boxes on the personal and social capabilities ourselves! Great feeling. In fact, if I have time I may well get those capabilities out and chart what we have done to match them.
personal and social capability 