21st Century Learning & Development
PERSONALITY AND SOCIO-EMOTIONAL LEARNING
Educators recognize that in order to know how your students learn best and how to
differentiate instruction to meet these needs, teachers must have a clearer picture of the
whole child than simply what they produce on tests and class work. A person is often
described by there personality. Although there is so much more than this, knowing a
student’s personality and some reasons they have particular traits can help an educator
recognize what teaching strategies they will be most responsive to. There are many theories
of personality that address how they develop and how they present themselves.
Taken together these theories point out that there are many contributing factors to one’s
personality and consequently each personality is unique. Teachers then must determine
their students’ personality types and learning styles in order to differentiate instruction
and assessment to engage and best serve their students (Laffier, 2015a).
Socio-emotional development can refer to a child’s self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making (Laffier, 2015b). Childrens’ social-emotional development encompasses so much of who they are and can greatly impact their behaviour and ability to learn in the classroom. It is not only necessary to gain an understanding of where your students are in their socio-emotional development, but it is also a teacher’s job to promote this development through instruction. Students who have poor self-awareness and self-regulation are often unable to recognize what sets them off or reflect on how they are presently feeling and have limited coping skills. These students are at risk of depression, anxiety, eating disorders and adjustment issues (“Adolescent”, 2002). Any of these things seriously hinders one’s ability to pay attention in class, work or get along with others, and appropriately react when they are upset. It can also leads into problems with relationship skills and puts students at risk for dropping out. (“Adolescent”, 2002).
Self-regulated learning theory considers the learner responsible for controlling their own learning process. In order to be able to do this, students must have developed healthy socio-emotional skills. These students are able to express themselves, display empathy, regulate their feelings and employ coping mechanisms, make and hold onto friendships all on a foundation of self-confidence (Laffier, 2015b). In teaching students awareness, self-management skills and relationsip-skills, you will improve not only their performance in your class but their overall well-being and future development.
Teaching
Strategies
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Differentiate instruction. With a class full of varying personalities and learning preferences, ensure that the methods of instruction and opportunities for assessment vary as well. By having different lessons throughout a unit incorporate individual work, group work, lecture-based teaching, discovery/hands-on learning, research based learning, multimedia presentations, reading and writing, you can appeal to many different students’ preferences. This means each student is given opportunities to succeed, while also being exposed to other styles in which they can work to improve.
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Praise self-awareness and self-regulatory practices. If a student removes themselves from a situation in which they are getting frustrated or upset, or communicates how they are feeling and what they need to do, acknowledge this effort to reinforce the behaviour.
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When discussing a specific event with your class, touch on how those involved may have been feeling. This could be incorporated into many subject areas including discussion of natural disasters in Biology, novel characters in English, historical figures in History, or inventors and scientific discoveries in Science. One example of an assignment would be to have students choose a specific person or character during some event and put themselves in their characters’ shoes. While making specific reference to the details and consequences of the event, they would also be forced to consider how their character may have been feeling, what they were going through and how they coped.
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Encourage positive self-talk and discourage any put-downs whether they are directed at anyone else or the student themselves. A large part of being socio-emotionally healthy involves having a foundation of positive self-esteem and relationship skills. By discouraging any negative self-talk you are breaking the students’ habits of being hard on themselves and instead directing their focus to how they can improve. If a student communicated that they are bad at something you could get them to reword the statement to identify where it is they would like to improve and what steps they can take to do that. This also promotes a supportive community within the classroom if students begin to practice this themselves and help each other to do the same.
Getting to know what makes your students tick and how to guide them in their socio-emotional development can be difficult. Here are some tools that might help!
Technology Tools
1. Survey Monkey: This is a great site for giving your class online surveys. You can use this at the beginning of the year or throughout the year to gain a clearer understanding of your students’ personalities, likes and interests. This can be used to create or add to the student profiles. By asking students questions about their birth order, temperament, and key personality traits, you will get a clearer image of who they are as a person and how this might affect their behaviour inside the classroom. Survey Monkey is helpful because it creates graphic representations of the data you collect. Therefore you can see where the class as a whole stands with regards to each question.
2. The Social Express: This is an app that addresses the areas of social awareness and pro-social behaviour. The app shows a series of animated episodes, during which users must interact with the scene, making choices that influence what will happen next. These choices may include making sense of social cues and choosing how to respond, how to participate in common social interactions, etc. Social and Emotional Learning and Bullying Prevention acknowledges the importance of learning effective social problem solving skills, especially as it relates to addressing the problem of bullying. This app aids in teaching this skill specifically by giving users practice in evaluating likely and unlikely outcomes, recognizing social cues and understanding others’ emotions.