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.

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

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.

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.

Be a success

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.

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.

How to make hard choices

 

In  area of social management students have to be able to:

 

• communicate effectively

• work collaboratively

• make decisions

• negotiate and resolve conflict

• develop leadership skills

 

Making hard decisions is something we can learn . If we are not able to make those sorts of decisions then we can neither further ourselves nor others. A lack of capacity to make hard decisions might also lead to conflict and poor communication. Any leader has to have a real competency in being able to deal with hard decisions and a capacity to find the solutions and work arounds. Making hard decisions means you can further yourself, others, your team or organisation but it also reinforces your own sense of self and your self confidence. Ruth Chang very carefully explains how this all works and even though her talk is more suited to an older audience, the substance of it and the arguments and ideas upon which it is predicated are things which we can pass on to  secondary students. The foundation belief of reasoning and reasons are what will enable someone to make those tougher decisions which always need to be made in order to change their life in a big way.

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.