Teacher of the Year Rasťo Očenáš from Sliač: Soft Skills Are the Child’s Operating System

Rasťo Očenáš teaches the first graders at elementary school and is not afraid to try new things with children. Together with his pupils, he constructed a machine for irregular words, which they then lent to their older classmates for a review. Like us in the Open Future, he emphasizes developing soft skills, cooperation in groups, and developing communication.

During the interview, he stressed that in addition to multiplication tables, children should also take life skills from school: “They may be successful in the school environment, but they often burn out in relationships. They break up marriages, friendships, they can’t find lasting relationships. I would rather raise a child who has lower grades, but will be a happy person because they will have healthy relationships. They’ll be confident, flexible and find their way in life.”

We are meeting on your home ground, at the Sliač Elementary School, where the Erasmus+ event is currently taking place. In practice, this means that in addition to Slovak, you can hear Spanish, English and other languages in the classrooms and corridors. What kind of event this is?

The school runs a week-long program with our Erasmus+ partners from abroad. It is not the first time we have met them, we are involved in a project on the issue of fires. Spain is troubled by the forest fires a lot. They see it as a problem, but also as part of the natural cycle. It was interesting when they told us during our visit to Spain how some trees don’t even release their seeds without going through a fire. They explained us that this is not something terrible that we necessarily have to fight against, but rather something that we have to learn to live with.

With climate change slowly affecting us as well, we are wondering whether we too will be in such trouble in perhaps 5, 10, 20 years’ time. With our children, we are also thinking about how to prepare for that.

That is why we do these activities. We go from the very simplest things – our fourth graders have made different games where firefighters catch people who need to evacuate from a burning building to activities where they make a real fire extinguisher as part of biology and physics. The spirit of the program is that they bring the experience they have in other countries here and we share it with each other.

What do you see as the greatest added value of these types of events for an ordinary pupil, let’s say even from Sliač?

Erasmus mainly gives us the contact with reality. These are not activities where we learn by watching a presentation about what is happening in the world. It is the contact with real people. We were able to experience this during our visit to Spain. In this project, our pupils see that they have fires much more often there and they had to learn to live with them.

We may be yet to see it. It may not be the forest fires, but at least it is an opportunity to talk about climate change. The kids understand why we need to talk about it. They have a chance to meet people who are already dealing with these problems. It’s a completely different learning than from a textbook, presentation or the Internet.

School Should Teach Children to Respond to Change

Boys and girls from our Open Future centre in Zvolen are also part of today’s “Erasmus” day in Sliač. We also emphasize the contact of children with reality, with their community, with real problems. In 2022, you won the Teacher of the Year award. To what extent do you consider, for example, the development of soft skills in elementary school children or just contact with the real world around them to be important?

I think it is crucial. We also have some life skills on the bulletin board here and we have been adding them since the first grade. I always say that life skills make up a person’s operating system. Kids can learn things here by being in a group, having a social environment. We are hardly going to teach them this if they are at home on a tablet.

School is the perfect environment to learn how to treat each other, how to ask for things, how to maybe even assert your own opinion or how to learn to listen to the opinion of others. We work on friendship, active listening, cooperation, caring, developing a sense of humour and thus developing the life skill of the common sense.

At the Open Future, we also work with children on flexibility, on being able to respond to unexpected changes. We feel they will need that in their lives. Do you agree?

Yes, and there are many more of those life skills. I believe that it should all lead to life flexibility. I can see that in myself. I have done everything from work at heights to wedding photography and then I returned back to teaching.

There have been multiple times in my life when I have had to turn on my heel and adapt to a completely different environment. I can see that there is a great advantage in preparing children for this. That is why I like your program and the activities you do with the kids. You are uploading their operating system, which allows them to develop a certain resilience to what the life brings.

Children with that experience can, in my opinion, respond much better than children who are academically educated. They can be perfect, they can be successful in a school environment, but they often burn out in relationships. They break up marriages, friendships, they cannot find lasting relationships. That is what it’s all about. I would rather raise a child who has lover grades, but will be a happy person because they will have healthy relationships. They will be confident, flexible, and find their way in life.

As a teacher, you are among the elementary school children on daily basis. How do pupils at this age respond to these topics? How are they able to adapt their mind and attention during the educational process if they suddenly switch from multiplication tables to such topics?

I am trying to mix it in with the other stuff. There are many ways to teach the Slovak language, but we often get to life skills in the course of it.

The project-based learning is also great. For example, we have a model of a machine for irregular words. We use it to learn the irregular words, but the children developed cooperation skills during the process of making it, they had to solve problems together. They had to communicate with each other before they could get it to work. Together with communication, there was also care and responsibility. We have already lent the machine to our third graders, who received the finished product and were able to use it to review the irregular words or compare whether they had learned the same words as we had.

My pupils saw that and went “Oh, we made this, but other people can use it too.” I say that even life doesn’t happen in a way that I plan: now I’m going to cook, now I’m going to watch the TV, now I’m going to take a shower and go to sleep. We deal with things as they come.

I often prepare for school while stirring the scrambled eggs with one hand and wondering what will happen in the class tomorrow. This kind of environment, where we are working on a project, is much more natural for the kids. It is more similar to life than just picking out a subject, like multiplication tables, and working on that only. I think it is also more natural.

Today’s Erasmus+ event also puts you in contact with colleagues from abroad. Do you discuss these topics in debates with them? Do they have a similar opinion? Has any country surpassed us in these matters?

It’s perfect to see other countries and meet teachers from other countries. For example, I was very surprised by Lithuania. I was expecting that since it is also a post-socialist country, they would be like us, give or take. However, you can really feel how much they value education. They understand that education is a tremendous asset for the future.

We had the opportunity to see the school in Vilnius, where they were really very ahead technologically and we could learn a lot from them. The great thing is that now they are here and they came to see what we are doing. So it is never condescending like “we are further along”. Even our partners are happy to come here and learn from us. In Lithuania, I was impressed that they already see the value of education and I feel that we are not so aware of it yet.

We are still stagnating and wasting time learning the old way instead of reflecting and adapting the curriculum to what is happening around us.

If Parents See That the Child Does Not Feel Stressed About School, They Trust the Teacher as Well

Have you encountered mistrust from the parents? Do not they think: “This teacher works with our children in a completely different way than the teachers worked with us. We learned the old way and here we are…”

They certainly do, I felt that especially the first year. I was someone they had never seen before. When I got the first-graders at this school, I was an unknown person to them. That was probably the reason. I think that the trust came right after.

The children have shown that they like going to school. Parents felt that there was no stress. On the contrary, it motivated them because they were curious to see what would happen at school again. It was confirmed to me that parents are more likely to trust a teacher who creates a good classroom climate and who invests in life skills.

I always say that if I do not learn something in the fourth grade, I can still come back to it in the fifth grade or some other time in my life, but if I do not learn how to live with other people, I will never catch up on it later in life, because that is always happening around us.

So far, the parents have been a great support for me. They have always stood by me. Even if they had some doubts, they trusted me. They were convinced by the children’s response and trust, the classroom climate always drew them in and accepted them.

How do you perceive the future? Do you have such excellent examples in your area also from other schools? I assume that the colleagues you met in the final round of the Teacher of the Year event have a similar view on education. Is it going in a good direction?

I am excited about the setup of the curricular reform. I am also pleased that the Ministry is supporting the curricular reform and is explaining things to teachers, through various organizations under its administration, through the National Institute of Education and Youth, but also through various non-profit organizations or the regional teacher support centers. I think that this reform is not fundamentally revolutionary, but it can help the teachers to liberate themselves.

Teachers lack trust. There have been reforms before, but they had negative experiences with them. I like the fact that many organizations, such as Živica from Zvolen or the Comenius Institute, are trying to explain, provide support and do actions so that teachers can see that teaching can look differently thanks to the reform.

I think it is very important for people to be a little bit more open that this is communicated as an option, not as a necessity. I feel this throughout our community. On the other hand, I also understand it, because the teachers I know are incredibly overworked. The reasons can be the administration, the school settings, or even the different jobs they have to do besides teaching for financial reasons to somehow be able to make it through.

These are people who will hardly take on something new. The other option is that they get will excited about exploring the unknown and say: “Hurray, we’re going to reform.” We need to take baby steps. I still believe that this is a good way to go.