When I was teaching, as I got to know to children
at the start of the year, I was always on the lookout for factors others than
academic ability. As a number of researchers have found, including Prof.
Michael Bernard author of the You Can Do It Program, children need more than a
penchant for learning to succeed at school.
There are a number of skill sets that contribute to
children’s success over the long-term. They are skills that we neglect if we
narrow our focus on numeracy, literacy, performing arts and other academic
skill sets. They are also skill sets that can be taught, or at the very least
drawn out, when we as adults know what to look for.
Following are six skill sets that contribute
massively to overall student success and contentedness at school.
1. Friendship skills
The ability to get along with others is hugely
important for children. How quickly children settle into a new school year will
be determined as much by their ability to make new friends and fit into a peer
group, as any other factor. Those children with a strong set of friendship
skills have a definite set of skills that makes them easy to like, easy to
relate to and easy to play with. These skills include the ability to win and
lose well; how to approach others to join in a group and how to lead rather
than boss. These are just three of 17 basic friendship skills that have been
identified as being essential for making and keeping friends.
2. Organising skills
You can probably recall when you went to school a
student who was really bright, but who let themselves down because they
couldn’t organise themselves or others. The ability to organise your time, your
space, your items and others is a massive plus for any student. Being organised
extends beyond school, including at home and during leisure time. The best way
to help children who are organisationally-challenged is to introduce them to
systems and processes to help them organise themselves. These processes include
the use of visual reminders; anchoring (i.e linking new behaviours to habitual
behaviours) and mapping activities out.
3. Optimism skills
It may seem strange to see optimism as skill set,
but as leading psychologist Prof. Martin Seligman discovered through his
research, optimism can be taught. Seligman found that while some children are
more inclined by nature to see a glass as half empty than half full, all
children are capable of developing an optimistic explanatory style through
exposure and direct teaching. The skills of optimism include being aware of
self-talk, reframing negative events into positive effects and the practice of
perspective-taking.
4. Coping skills
Kids will generally face a number of challenges
during the course of their school lives including overcoming disappointment of
missing being picked in a team; working their way through difficult learning
situations and meeting with rejection. How stressful these situations will
depend on their own spirit, the support they receive and their coping skills.
The good news is that coping skills can be taught, or at the very least,
encouraged, if adults know what to focus on. Coping strategies include parking
problems for a while; normalising a situation and accepting and moving on. Some
kids will use coping strategies quite naturally, while others need parental
input to help them cope with seemingly minor challenges.
5. Relaxation skills
The ability to relax and get away from it all is
vital for the maintenance of mental health, which in turn, impacts on a
student’s ability to perform. Many of today’s kids live with pressure. That
pressure needs to be released through relaxation and play, otherwise it just
continues to build and it shows itself through anxiety and other mental
illnesses. The ability to relax and unwind is paramount to your child’s school
success. Ways to unwind include getting lost in a hobby; learning how to
meditate and enjoying creative pursuits.
6. Relationship skills
Children at school are involved in hundreds of
social interactions every day ranging from working cooperatively with a peer in
class through to asking a teacher for help. Most of the interactions go well,
but there are times when there will be conflict and tension. This is when
children with a solid set of communication and relationship skills honed
through a myriad of sibling interactions come to the fore. They don’t become
flummoxed when a child won’t give them what they want, or a child tells tales
to the teacher about them. Children that come from very small families (two
children or less) often don’t have experiences of conflict to draw on so they
need to be taught how to give way graciously; to stand up for themselves
assertively rather than angrily and to see two sides to a story rather than
take things personally. There are many skills we can teach our kids to help
them maintain healthy relationships at school, as well as in their families.
These skill sets are part developmental and part
environmental. That is, kids will naturally develop many skills as they mature.
But also many of the skills need to be nurtured environmentally- that is, they
need to be recognised,encouraged, taught and modelled by adults that children
and teenagers respect and admire if children are to acquire them. That makes
parents Very Important People in the acquisition process of these skill sets in
children and young people.