Why is “Youth Akro Skills" a great way to learn Life Skills?
Why is “Youth Akro Skills" a great way to learn Life Skills?
The United States of America’s National Education Association (NEA) knows that the best way to get students to learn and retain information is to have them being physically active and engaged while learning.
“Teaching that emphasizes active engagement helps students process and retain information. It leads to self-questioning, deeper thinking, and problem solving. Engagement strategies like repetition, trial and error, and posing questions move the brain into active and constructive learning. And such activities can lead to higher student achievement.”
- National Education Association
Active learning is particularly effective with material that is more abstract and subjective. Active learning also helps bridge language barriers for learners and teachers who speak different native languages from one another.
When teaching Life Skills in a 7th grade classroom in Fiji, I get a lot of blank stares from my students. Life Skills are subjective, not straightforward like mathematics.
If I ask my students what 8 times 2 is, they tell me, “Madam, it is 16.”
But when I asked my class of seventh graders to give me some examples of their emotions, even after 20 minutes of discussing what the word “emotions” means and giving examples like “happy” and “sad”, the entire room came up with only 3 words that they thought qualified as emotions: “angry”, “cry”, and “fight”. To their credit, these youngsters are already fluent in 2 Fijian dialects and some are also functional in English, but trying to learn abstract concepts centered around new words can be frustrating and mentally exhausting. How can students be taught to manage their emotions when they can’t recognize or identify their own emotions?
When these same students were engaged in the Youth Akro Skills program, they learned and implemented new life skills in seconds. For example, kids in Fiji have a tendency to use their bodies rather than their voices to get things done. When we first started, students would shove a friend out of the way to have a turn at trying a new pose. After just a few times of stopping play to ask them to explain what they wanted from the other person, they became more patient with one another and began to ask the other person to either move or wait their turn. Within the first Youth Akro Skills practice, they had already learned more about how to communicate and to manage their emotions of frustration, eagerness and impatience than they did in several classroom sessions. They also had a lot more fun learning that than they did in trying to understand while sitting still in class, which means they are more likely to remember what they learned and to keep using it.
