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

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.

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.

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.

Generation Z

Mark McCrindle has a brilliant infographic of generation Z. These are the students we are teaching now and if we want to get the best out of them in terms of personal and social capability then we need to understand them and we need to have a clear idea of their experiences and preferences. If we want to enable them both personally and socially we need ways of understanding how they think and operate and what means something to them. This infographic puts it all in a nutshell . Ex English teacher Adam Renfro also has an excellent and detailed look at Generation Z on his GettingSmart site. If we are looking to improve areas of personal and social capability then it is important to look at the wealth of information which helps us to understand these students better. Both Mark McCrindle and Adam Renfro have offered teachers a great service by providing us with quality information.

Put your phone away!

The personal and social capability is about enabling or blocking others. This is a very creative use of technology to help others see the error of their ways. Put your phone away. It’s not worth it.

Keeping the tech – life balance

The social capabilities are about understanding relationships and learning to communicate effectively. This video puts it all in perspective so you can keep the tech-life balance.