IIT Madras Newsletters

To encourage journaling outside of class, invite students to talk to a mentor, family member, or close friend about what makes them emotionally resilient and able to handle the ups and downs of life. Students can then journal about what they learned and how it might influence the way they tackle challenges in the future.

2. Share Personal Experiences and Encourage Students to Learn from Others

To the extent you are comfortable, share your own struggles and triumphs with students. One of the common anxieties that most students face is that of exam pressures and grades. We instructors can share how we have gone through ups and downs in our own academic life and how we were able to overcome the setbacks.

If you are less comfortable sharing about yourself, use the experiences of well-known personalities in your discipline and have students discuss the various ways these figures handled the challenges they faced, keeping the discussion relevant to the topic at hand.

You can also share inspiring videos and movie clips or articles that are related to topics around peer pressure, habits and rituals, self-worth, etc., allowing students to learn from experts.

We also encourage our Life Skills students to connect with each other. We create groups of 15-20 students using WhatsApp so they can further examine topics and themes together outside of class. This practice ensures that conversations, reflections, and sharing continue and it reinforces classroom learning. Given the vast size of the classroom cohort, the smaller discussion groups allow more students to participate, interact, and receive individual attention.

3. Introduce Case Studies and Role Plays to Discuss and Demonstrate Life Skills in Class

Using case studies is another way to bring outside perspectives and experiences to class discussions. Choose a case that deals with conflict management, for example, and divide your students into groups of five or six to work through and discuss the case before class. This provides a safe space for them to work together, analyze the events, and hone their communication, social, creative, and leadership skills.

During the full class discussion that follows, have students think through various approaches to solving the problem. Sometimes specific stories—involving self-management or interpersonal skills, for example—can evoke intense discussions among students drawing from their own experiences and learning from each other’s unique perspectives.

“Had we learned key life skills during our time in school, we would have been much better equipped to step confidently into our careers and successfully lead our lives.”

In addition to class discussions, consider having students or teaching assistants demonstrate another aspect of the case through role play—in the case of conflict management, students can act out a parental conflict, conflict with power or authority, or conflict between friends. After they’re done, come together as a class and analyze the conflict, inviting individuals to share how they would have handled it and why. You can also use polling to get student responses to the role play.

As students navigate through life, they can use the tools and tips they learn from these discussions to better manage conflict with peers or superiors in the workplace or home. They also develop a growth mindset, persistence, and the ability to overcome anxieties when a job interview doesn’t go their way or they don’t get the promotion they try for.

4. Use Online Games to Teach and Reinforce Key Concepts and Skills

We’ve found games to be great way to capture students’ attention—they are quick and feature motivational point systems. They also help build interpersonal skills in a fun-filled environment and help free up students’ cognitively overloaded minds.

Spending just five minutes on these activities can promote self-learning and significantly improve students’ skill building. Here are three examples of games we like to use in class. Yes, they’re elementary, but we’re consistently impressed by how engaged our students are while playing them—they’re a light, fun way to teach the basics.

• Active Listening 2 (Whac-A-Mole) is an active listening game in which moles pop up on the screen with various listening traits. Students must identify which are active listening traits and whack them back into the hole.

• Strengths, Inter-Dependency and Gratitude (Maze Chase) is a game in which a question is posed and each player must navigate to the right answer box while avoiding enemy creatures.

• Bowling Rush is a time-management game that offers students multiple choice questions. When they answer correctly, each player gets to roll the ball and knock down all the pins. If they answer incorrectly, only a few pins are knocked down.

Giving Students the Tools They Need to Succeed

Life-skill-building activities like these enrich students’ academic experiences and equip them with the tools and training they will need to face life’s rigors.

The pandemic taught unprecedented life lessons and underscored the necessity of introducing students to these essential skills and allowing them the space to practice and develop them.

We’ve had former students tell us that these activities helped them in their professional careers by honing their leadership skills, giving them the awareness and confidence to deal with real-life problems, and encouraging them to be team players.

By incorporating even one of these activities in your classroom—no matter your course topic—your students will learn more about self-expression, self-esteem, communication, and the ability to manage change. They will also begin to cultivate a holistic and balanced approach to life, leaving academia better prepared for what’s ahead.