UNIT 4: Introduction
UNIT 4: Social Skills
|
Key Words/Phrases |
Definitions |
|---|---|
|
Emotional Intelligence / EQ |
The ability to understand, use, and manage your own emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively, empathise with others, overcome challenges and avoid conflict. |
|
Empathy |
The ability to understand another person’s thoughts and feelings from their point of view, rather than your own; empathy is feeling with the other person. Empathy comes from the heart and involves putting yourself in the other person’s position, feeling what they are feeling. |
|
Influence |
Have an impact on someone's behaviour and character development. |
|
Motivation |
A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way. |
|
Optimism |
Hopefulness and confidence about the future or the success of something. |
|
Resilience |
The ability to go through and to recover quickly from, difficulties |
|
Respect |
A way of treating or thinking about someone or something that is based on being polite, kind and showing admiration. |
|
Self-awareness |
Knowing and understanding your own character, strengths, weaknesses and feelings. |
|
Self-regulation |
The ability to understand and manage your behaviour and your reactions to your feelings and the things happening around you. It includes being able to control your reactions to strong feelings like frustration, excitement, anger and embarrassment. |
|
Sympathy |
A feeling of concern for someone who is experiencing something difficult or painful; feeling sorry for someone for what they are going through. |
|
Trustworthy |
Can be relied on; is honest and truthful. |
Introduction
This unit introduces the concepts of social skills and Emotional Intelligence (EQ). It looks at how social skills of the week can be used as both a visual and practical teaching tool. The unit looks at how social skills are linked to Peace and Values Education (PVE), gives examples of social skills and suggests how to use the social skills of the week teaching aid in the classroom. It also looks at why Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is very important in helping your learners to develop their social skills, and in particular the skill of Empathy.
How this unit links to the Competence Based Curriculum:
Positive virtues and values, promoted in the school community, lead to the development of positive social skills. The Competence Based Curriculum (CBC) states that learners should progress from “showing an understanding of and start(ing) to put into practice some basic virtues” at the pre-primary level to “practic(ing) cardinal virtues in his/her daily life” at the secondary level. The cardinal virtues are considered to include wisdom, justice, temperance and fortitude.
PVE is explained as “the process of acquiring values and knowledge, and developing attitudes, skills and behaviour to live in harmony with oneself, with others and with the natural environment”.
Ultimately, the CBC states that learners are expected to be able to “demonstrate respect for the cultural identity, heritage and values of themselves and others”; and “practice appropriate civic, moral and/or religious norms and values”.
Focusing on the development of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and social skills in the classroom is essential for PVE in order to help develop and grow ‘active citizenship’ and collaborative working in our learners.
At Umubano Academy, the teachers learn about Emotional Intelligence (EQ) in Continuous Professional Development time and they continuously work on developing their own, and their learners', EQ competencies. They actively teach social skills by choosing one social skill to focus on, and to develop in their learners, every week. This photograph shows learners practising the social skill chosen by teachers in Nursery 1 – Primary 6 in one week at Umubano Academy. Here the social skill of the week was “taking turns”.