Strengthening Socio-Emotional Skills is a series of videos that are part of the Educational Quality Program of the Wiese Foundation. This series is developed in close collaboration with the Ministry of Education through the Directorate for the Promotion of Teacher Welfare and Recognition. Since its launch in 2020, it has had four successful seasons. Its main objective is to identify and address the needs of teachers in issues related to teacher well-being, providing support and guidance to teachers and principals throughout Peru.
We are pleased to announce the upcoming release of the fifth season of “Strengthening Emotional Skills” in May of this year. This new season will offer teachers and administrators access to new free resources, including videos, podcasts and infographics. Through real situations and recommendations from specialists from the “Community of Learning with Well-being”, we seek to encourage reflection and offer concrete strategies for managing emotions in the educational context.
In this 5th season, we will talk about the following topics:
- Knowing our emotions
In the maelstrom of our daily lives, we get caught up in a whirlwind of activities that often causes us to lose sight of our emotions. This video addresses the Yale University Emotional Meter, a tool for understanding these complexities.
Divided into four quadrants, from anger in red to serenity in green, you will be able to identify and label your emotions, which will help you make more conscious and healthy choices in your life.
- Validating our emotions to better accompany
Validating our emotions and those of others is crucial for a positive emotional health. Invalidating them with phrases such as “it’s not that bad” can cause damage, leading to repression and overflowing reactions. In the school setting, validating the emotions of students builds trust and strengthens bonds. In this video, you can find concrete strategies to support the emotional well-being and the learning of your students.
- Actively listening in order to communicate among us effectively
Active listening is a crucial skill in interpersonal communication. It implies being truly present to the person who is speaking, not only listening to their words, but also feeling their emotions. It is important because the lack of it can make the other person feel ignored or misunderstood. In this video, you will learn how to practice active listening to communicate effectively and to strengthen your relationships with your students.
- Vital strategies for classroom climate and well-being
In order to maintain a classroom climate that is positive and propitious to learning, it is essential to implement strategies that promote mutual respect and emotional well-being. In this episode, we explore how to promote them, how to motivate empathetic and assertive communication, encourage everyone’s participation in educational activities and establish clear norms of coexistence from the first day of school.
- Managing limits with small children in the classroom
In the educational context, setting effective limits in the classroom is crucial to promoting a productive and respectful learning environment. Containing limits are clear rules and structures that define expectations and acceptable behaviors. In this episode, we explore how to set containing limits with the younger ones, from opening dialog with them to create understandable norms, to reaching mutual agreements that promote self-discipline and academic achievement.
- Experiencing and respecting linguistic diversity in the classroom
The school is celebrated as a space for encounters among cultures, but it can also be a source of discrimination, exclusion or invisibilization. Hence, the importance of self-knowledge of one’s own cultural identity and self-acceptance in order to be able to accompany and strengthen that of my students: respect, eliminating prejudice, racism and discrimination (empathy) and promoting a sense of community.
- Committing ourselves against bullying: the role of the active observer
The importance of the issue of bullying, about which there tends to be growing awareness in schools, should be underscored. However, a gap that has been little worked on has to do with the role of the observer. There are still weak monitoring and accompaniment strategies that involve teachers, but at the same time there is a tendency to make bullying situations invisible or minimized. The emphasis of the video will be on prevention, on giving a twist to the term observer as a passive entity to turn it into an active spectator who participates actively or takes action in the situation. We are linking this issue with citizen training and the participation and the sense of community.
- Strategies to accompany conflict resolution
As a closing of the season, this video aims to integrate everything that has been worked on in the previous videos. We will define what a conflict situation consists in and how it challenges and affects us. The skills discussed in the previous videos will be highlighted, indicating how listening, self-knowledge, respectful language, etc. operate in conflict resolution. Mediation and negotiation will be presented more specifically as strategies to resolve conflicts by applying them to the established situation.
We invite you to look out for the release of each episode and watch them on our website and our pages on social media: click here
