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Power 4: Overview

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Prayer and a positive mindset are great, but one needs the skill to keep essential things running. Powerful educators should go beyond relationships and mindsets to build skills in their students. Powerful educators make great personal sacrifices to build skills in students. This is done through educators evaluating the student’s current situation and recommending moving forward.  In addition to that, educators should challenge their students enough so that they can pass. Mawi Asgedom says powerful educators should push students because skill development requires hard work. He says that educators should encourage their students not to back off their long-term skill development.

The action wheel created by Mawi Asgedom gives educators a simple way to implement building character for their students. Exploring, planning, acting, and reflecting are the four qualities of the action wheel when educators are instilling skills in the learners. In addition, the leading skills in character education are responsible decision-making, self-management, relationship skills, social awareness, and self-awareness. Mawi Asgedom encourages educators to get their students around the Action Wheel since it is most appropriate for resolution and relationship skills. Push for skill does not mean educators should make enormous demands. Instead, they should push for incremental growth to see progress in academic areas such as math, literacy, and character development.

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In order to implement the action Power 4: Push for skill, students need to be introduced to the idea that they are able to complete challenging tasks. The idea is not that students need to be overwhelmed with work, but be given tasks in increments. To implement this in class, we can introduce students to the idea of the growth mindset. The growth mindset focuses on: embracing challenges, persisting in the face of challenges, learning from criticism, and viewing effort as the process of mastering skils.

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"Confidence is not a stairway that we build for students and ask them to climb. Confidence is a stairway that students must construct for themselves one skill at a time." Dr. Seligman The Optimistic Child
To build confidence in our students we must build skills, both academic and character building. We can start with our conversation, are they victim or turbo conversations? To ensure we are Pushing for Skill, the class can create Can Do and Not Yet Circles, making sure the conversation around it remains turbo. We can Be Proactive by creating our learning goals together and developing the routines for the relentless practice required in skill-building. This may involve daily drills in math for example, or daily practice in polite conversation with our classmates. We can Begin With the End in Mind by deciding as a class what our principles are and what we want to accomplish. We can create our class skill goals and a class mission statement and hang it on the wall to remind us of our commitments. Finally, we can Put First Things First and prioritize the skills we want most to accomplish. We can plan our skill building with notes and checklists during the school day and a class calendar to plan and schedule for future skills practice.

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As teachers we want to focus on incremental student growth. We want our learners to  improve little by little everyday. Just as Pat Riley challenged his players to get just 1% better over the course of the year, so should teachers challenge their students.
When comparing the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I found habits 1-3 most helpful in Pushing for Skill.

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In order to Push for Skill, teachers will need to challenge students to grow academically and in character development. This will require students realizing their power to be proactive and choose their response. They will realize that they have control over their efforts at developing their skills. They can set goals, make commitments, and follow through on them. They can take initiative to practice relentlessly as skill development requires. They can acknowledge and fix mistakes, if necessary, to regain empowerment.

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When we Push for Skill it is important to keep the goal in mind. We must begin with a clear picture of where we want to go. This will enable students to focus on the task at hand and not get distracted by topics of less importance. The class must decide on what is to be accomplished and the steps necessary to get there. If old methods are inadequate, the class may rescript the plan and design it according to class values and ideas.

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When we Push for Skill, it is imperative that we prioritize what is most important. We must schedule our drills and practice accordingly. Careful planning will prevent emergencies from happening. Teachers can guide students in the skill of time management or self-management. Students must learn to say "no" to activities that take time away from practicing their skill or add no value to their life. This, in turn, will create efficient learners that are better equipped for success.

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Students will need to be able to use critical thinking in order to make adjustments to anything failures they may experience while skill building.

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Humility is learning when pushing for skill when students face failure and challenges- it is important for them to learn how to be able to move forward despite these difficulties.

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Newly learned skills can be incorporated daily through Bell Ringers or skill building games including Kahoot and Quizizz, PBLs, STEM activities, or other in class assessments. Formative assessments are great ways for checking for understanding on a new skill.

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Skill building requires determination, perserverance, and confidence to push past any potential setbacks and challenges students may encounter along the way.