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Focusing tightly using the framework

Watch the video on leadership. Does it give you any ideas about how you could teach step 3 of leadership to your students?
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Leadership means supporting, encouraging, and developing others to achieve a shared goal.
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It is about recognising feelings, managing tasks, recognising strengths and weaknesses, supporting others, and reflecting on leadership styles. This skill is relevant not only for individuals in positions of management, but also for individuals working with peers in teams.
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At the earliest stages, the focus is on basic empathy: understanding your own feelings, being able to share them, and recognising the feelings of others.
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The focus then shifts to managing: dividing up tasks, managing time, and sharing resources, managing group discussions, and dealing with disagreements. Beyond that, it is about building an awareness of your own strengths and weaknesses and those of others in the team. This enables you to allocate tasks effectively. The focus becomes about building techniques to mentor, coach, and motivate others. At the highest steps, this is about reflecting on your own leadership style and understanding its effect on others. Ultimately, you should be able to build on your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses and adapt your leadership style to the situation.

The Skills Builder framework is a way of linking these experiences together by using a standardised language. Using the framework, you can:

  • assess which step your student or students are working on
  • decide what their next step should be.

So you can work out what level your students are at, and then what they need to do to get to the next step. Once you know this, you can focus on specifically teaching this gap in their skills.

For example, imagine that you want to teach step 3 of ‘leadership’:

‘I manage dividing up tasks between others in a fair way.’

What would students need to know before you can explicitly teach this step?

Before you go to the next activity, watch this video giving an overview of leadership. Does it give you any ideas about how you could teach leadership step 3 to your students?

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Teaching and Assessing Core Skills

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FutureLearn - Learning For Life

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