The OECD Future of Education 2030 report explicitly recognises the critical importance of teaching social and emotional skills to prepare students for the future, where students will need to be adaptable to new situations and technologies. So how can we shift focus from pure academia to a more holistic approach, embedded in all aspects of the curriculum?
As a PE teacher, I believe that our subject area can be a central space for learning social and emotional skills, but I have some key questions:
- How can we teach strategies that students can use in multiple contexts?
- How can we involve families in this learning?
- What skills do we want to develop in our students?
Teaching for Transfer
A highlight of our PE program is Skateboarding. Who wouldn’t love watching students whiz around on skateboards and carve around obstacles? But guess what, before students can get comfortable on the board, there’s lots of falls, bumps, bruises, and anxiety. The students really need to demonstrate perseverance in order to master new skills. Imagine if we could explicitly teach perseverance strategies and show students how these strategies could be transferred beyond the PE space – what might the impact on themselves as learners be?
In his book, The Future of Teaching, Guy Claxton identifies the challenge for teachers and students in transferring their knowledge learned within the school environment beyond that immediate context. So, how might we demonstrate to students that the perseverance strategies learned during Skateboarding could be used in a Maths class, or beyond the walls of the school?
Crafting Connections Through Storytelling
For students to recognise and apply perseverance strategies beyond a PE learning space, there would need to be intentional collaboration between home room teachers and other specialist teachers. Kendall Haven states that storytelling fosters social and emotional skills by allowing students to explore diverse perspectives and experiences. To tap into the power of storytelling and help students make connections beyond a PE space, our librarian identified age–appropriate books, and we used ChatGPT to match these to our six identified perseverance strategies.
Source: UNIS Hanoi
Homeroom teachers would introduce the perseverance strategy during morning meetings with their students and ask them to make connections to the class book. When the students arrived at PE during our ‘opening circle’ time, they would share the story and strategies used by the characters in their book and we’d think about what this could look like within our lesson.
Skills on the Move: The Journey of a Travelling Poster
To show the transfer of these strategies beyond a defined classroom context, our curriculum coordinator, Kay Strenio, shared the idea of a ‘Travelling Poster’, something tangible that moves with students from space to space and anchors conversations around the perseverance strategies.
Source: UNIS Hanoi
The poster uses a scale template taken from Peter Liljedahl’s book, Building Thinking Classrooms. Students were given a blank scale and, as classes, defined what perseverance meant to them. We built our understanding from connections with our stories, our experiences in home room, in PE on the skateboards, and with conversations with other specialist teachers. This was a living poster that was added to as the unit progressed.
At the end of lessons, students reflect on their use of the identified perseverance strategies to help them overcome challenges. To visualise the process, students moved magnetic popsicle sticks labelled with their name along the scale. This again provided something tangible for students and a useful data point for teachers to have whole-group, small-group, or one-to-one discussions with students.
Courage Day
To make the transferability of perseverance skills explicit to students, we ran an afternoon of experiential learning activities, aligned to our school values, called ‘Courage Day’.
Using our ‘Just right’ challenge scale, students were given a broad range of activities that they would not normally do within their school day, showing how perseverance strategies can be used in multiple contexts. These included Coding, Dance, Drama, Rock Climbing and Horse Riding.
Building Bridges: Perseverance Questions for Families
Joyce L. Epstein and Steven B. Sheldon developed a framework, ‘Overlapping spheres of influence’, which highlights how family, school, and community environments intersect to support student learning and development. Their work emphasises the importance of strong partnerships across these domains, focusing on:
- Consistent Support: Students receive consistent messages and support from both home and school, reinforcing the importance of persistence.
- Resource Access: Families are better equipped with strategies and resources to help their children overcome challenges.
- Increased Motivation: Students feel motivated knowing that both their family and school are invested in their success.
In line with Epstein and Sheldon’s findings, we began sharing weekly messages with families, featuring different questions, an explanation of how asking these questions would help their child develop an understanding of perseverance, and some tips for creating a two-way discussion between adults and students.
“perseverance isn’t confined to any one subject: it’s a universal skill that empowers [students] to face challenges head-on, wherever they encounter them.”
Landing the Learnings: Our Skateboarding Reflections
Why is reflection crucial at the end of a unit? It consolidates learning and informs future practices by engaging students, teachers, and families in evaluating growth and understanding. As there were many people involved in this unit, we decided to try and capture the thoughts of teachers, students, and families through a google form.
We collected data from families to better understand how the ‘questions to support your child’ were used and how they could be made better. 81.3% of respondents thought that the questions were either very effective (43.8%) or somewhat effective (37.5%) in supporting their child’s learning, while 87.6% felt like the questions had strengthened the connection between school and home.
When asked, 85% of our students said that they had used one or more of our perseverance strategies outside of PE. Below are some more reflections from the students about how the unit has impacted them as learners.
Source: UNIS Hanoi
Integrating social and emotional skills into the curriculum, as highlighted in the OECD Future of Education 2030 report, is vital for preparing students for an unpredictable future. The Skateboarding unit, with its inherent challenges and triumphs, offered a great foundation to explore perseverance strategies. By weaving storytelling into our lessons, we created rich, memorable connections that resonated with students. The collaboration between homeroom and specialist teachers enhanced the learning experience, while family involvement extended these lessons into the home.
Through innovative strategies like the ‘Travelling Poster’ and experiential learning through ‘Courage Day,’ we show students that perseverance isn’t confined to any one subject: it’s a universal skill that empowers them to face challenges head-on, wherever they encounter them.
By Matt Magowan
With special thanks to:
Kay Strenio, whose ideas, support, and encouragement have been invaluable throughout the development of this unit.
Andy Vasily, whose work around ‘Just right’ challenge has impacted this unit and a range of others within our programme.
Matt Magowan is an Elementary School PE teacher and team lead at UNIS Hanoi (Vietnam), dedicated to empowering students to find joy in a diverse range of activities. You can connect with Matt on LinkedIn.
