Growing Pathways to Success for ALL Students

Faculty members who transform lives understand not only how to teach subjects, but also how students develop into proper, caring, and engaged adults. They see beyond traditional metrics of success to the core competencies that help students live healthy, productive lives.

The world has changed dramatically, scaffolding children toward self-sufficiency is the ultimate goal though. How does this take place currently, especially when test results often seem more important than the development of a student ready to tackle career-life challenges?

Long story short, it takes place when we understand how students successfully mature to adulthood and how teachers impact their growth in key developmental areas. Based on decades of research in student development, neuroscience, education, and psychology, we know that networking with teachers, parents, and other supportive adults determine how students acquire their personal guidance systems, full of interconnected abilities and pathways to success. When we imagine those abilities as an internal compass, it’s easy to observe how education and development go hand in hand — how children navigate successfully through school and life.

Just like anything, success and its pathways need structure. Any approach that does not have a structure will always fall down. A framework can help in understanding why students need these interconnected abilities and how they’re nurtured in different contexts, it’s also a call to act on behalf of students who deserve to live full, meaningful lives beyond external measures of success. Guided Pathways to Success consist if the following elements:

Curiosity

Curiosity is the ability to search and acquire new knowledge, skills, and new ways of comprehending the world. It is at the core of what motivates students to educate and what keeps them learning throughout their time on earth. Curiosity facilitates engagement, critical thinking, and reasoning.

Nurturing a student’s curiosity and other life-long learning skills by encouraging them to identify and seek answers to questions that top their list of interests. When we guide them to recognize failure as an opportunity for seeking out new solutions, we encourage experimentation and exploration. We help them understand the tenets of learning when we recognize the different ways they explore — feeling both physically and emotionally through their intuition, tasting, climbing, smelling, etc. — and praise them for their perseverance in finding answers. When educators show them how interconnected society is as a whole, they discover that curiosity improves relationships, fuels innovation, and drives social change.

Sociability

Sociability is the overall ability od students to connect with one another and their society. It should be viewed as a joyful, cooperative ability to engage with others. It derives from a collection of social-emotional skills that help students understand and express feelings and behaviours in ways that facilitate positive relationships, including active listening, self-regulation, and effective communication.

Teachers impact student’s sociability when they guide them to understand that the words they choose make a difference to the relationships they create. Communication becomes an essential part of their persona, when they are taught that every social interaction is tied to an emotional reaction. Helping them understand this, helps them avoid impulsive behaviour and think through difficult situations before acting. We also build their capacity for collaborative teamwork.

Resilience

The ability to face problems and challenges with strength. It is usually linked with a student’s ability to cut down barriers.  Resilience is the ability to overcome challenges in ways that promote well-being. It includes attributes like grit, persistence, initiative, and determination.

Resilience is developed, when we push students gently to the edges of their intellectual, emotional, social, and physical comfort zones. Support and encouragement is important, as they take risks, overcome challenges, and grow from failure helps them learn to bounce back from life’s ups and downs.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is the innate ability to analyse and comprehend who we are compared to the world around us. A sort of method where we place ourselves in the world. It’s developed through skills like self-reflection, adding meaning to things, and concentrating core values and beliefs. Self-awareness impacts student’s capacity to see themselves as uniquely different from other people.

Pathways to success need to stimulate students’ self-awareness. They need to engage them in reflective conversations about values, beliefs, attitudes, and moral dilemmas. Pathways to success can do this by encouraging them to understand and attend to their intellectual, emotional, social, and physical selves, we let them know that we value their full human potential.

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