Background
Some thirty years ago a teacher took on the challenge of helping kids at school who didn't want to be there. He refused to believe a common assumption about kids not doing well being an intellectual problem, instead, he believed it was an emotional one - once they feel better they will succeed.
He developed strategies for engaging them, activities that excited them, and offered goals that were almost impossible, like international and interstate travel, snow skiing, yacht charters, working on remote indigenous communities, and Australia's first and only offshore sailing excursion.
The teacher believed the success could be attributed to the young people:
- thinking about their thinking (awareness)
- picturing themselves as successful (visualisation)
- getting control over how they feel (emotion management)
- being prepared to try new ways of thinking (creativity)
These four skills became the avec quartet, and a program that formalised the skills and provided a research-based foundation for developing them was selected as one of ten New Practices in Flexible Learning Projects in 2003. Called avec esprit (Fr. 'with spirit'), the program was given the Award of Excellence for Innovation Development by the Australian National Training Authority in February 2004.
The program is now being made available to a much wider audience, and you may be one of the first to share in its success: developing skills for life like awareness, visualisation, emotion management and creativity.
