Good afternoon, all,
I was reading an interesting article by Lija Farnham, Gihani Fernando, Mike Perigo, & Colleen Brosman, with Paul Tough called "Rethinking how students succeed." The article posits that it is not the classroom learning skills that make students successful, but rather the "soft skills" like self-control, persistence, social awareness, relationship development and others are what actually enhance a students' capabilities when partnered with the coginitive skills being taught. According to the article, research has shown that students who develop Social-Emotional learning and academic mindsets (such as the idea that if they try harder, they would succeed more in their subjects) are more likely to succeed in school.
My question is this: we are all committed to providing our students with the most rigorous and highly academic curricula in the sciences and math that we can find, and work hard at catalyzing the success of their mastery in such complex skills. However, is there something to the idea that we should somehow also be instilling in our students a work ethic? Or an understanding of the cause and effects of taking their responsibilities seriously? How about teaching them to be responsible citizens of the world? Is there something to this idea that we are also responsible for their social-emotional learning?
For those of you who are interested, the article can be found here: [
ssir.org]
Thank you,
Na'ama Y. Rosenberg
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/07/2016 07:46PM by mlb.
