[RE]LEARN 2020 - The Learning Innovation Festival

The session is addressed to school administrator and teachers interested in including socioemotional skills as a cornerstone in their school and need a way to vertebrate objectives, methodology and assemssment of those skills.
Meaningful learning is driven by the socioemotional skills, our internal drives. Therefore, recognizing and engaging these skills are key for student-centered pedagogy.
Socioemotional skills have long been demonstrated to be a gold learning objective in our education systems, because of 3 main reasons:
• They are malleable which means they can be educated. We are born with personal traits that have a genetic influence, but the expression of these traits, our skills, can be educated.
• They are a necessary condition for academic success. Interest, perseverance, curiosity, self-management… these are all fundamental to achieve academic success.
• And finally, they predict lifelong wellbeing and explain social inequalities.
If this is so, why are schools, students, families and society still not conferring sufficient value and attention to these skills?
• Because we do not know how to assess socioemotional skills: what does it mean to show responsibility? Or autonomy and initiative? What are some evidences of these skills, and how can you demonstrate them?

Pentabilities offers tools to track socioemotional skills through developmental cycles and a methodology based on formative assessment to help educators create the right environment for the students.
THe Formative assessment, as described by Dylan Wiliam, is the number one strategy for student learning, including socioemotional skills learning. Successful formative assessment requires:

1. a clear and shared common goal
2. collection of evidence
3. providing concrete and evidence-based feedback that moves learners forward.

In the case of socioemotional skills, we need a common language and an understanding of what these skills mean so we can establish clear and shared goals. In order to do that, Pentabilities substitutes complex constructs to five basic skills that span the whole array of personality, as defined by the Big Five Personality Traits, and defines them by a small set of behaviors. Taking notes and capturing behaviors as they materialize require quick action and agility. Pentabilities offers a mobile app that facilitates quick and agile real time registration of observations, by teachers, students and peer students. Also, the pentabilities web platform facilitates making sense of the collected data, by aggregating and visualizing data so that evidence based concrete feedback sessions can be planned and organized with the student.
Besides the resgistration application and analysis platform, Pentabilities helps teachers implement strategies that allow SES to surface, to collect evidences of their development and give appropriate feedback to students to establish the SES learning cycle. How to give feedback to elicit students’ actions towards improvement is also something Pentabilities tackles.