Building a Community, One Lesson at a Time: How to Teach Social Skills with Strategies and Steps

November 14, 2017 by 

Christine Hertz and Kristi Mraz

This fall, Kristi Mraz (https://kinderconfidential.wordpress.com/) and I are taking on a blog series about holding strong to your beliefs through these first hectic months. (You can see the first two  posts here and here.) Last week, Kristi posted on The Educator Collaborative Blog about rethinking how we build community. We were just blown away by the response that that post received. We also heard loud and clear that you’d like more information on not necessarily the why, but on the how to teach social skills.

Belief: Social skills can be taught and a learning community should be built, not just managed.

Reality Strikes: YIKES! Where do I begin? The clip chart is down. What’s next? Will chaos reign?

At the end of Kristi’s post, she listed five things we could do tomorrow:

1. Get rid of the clip chart, stickers, marble jar. If you have it you will be tempted to use it.
2. Expect things to be rocky at first, this doesn’t mean it’s not working, it is just a big change. STAY THE COURSE.
3. Tackle one thing at a time. List the behaviors you see your community needs to build: listening, sharing, problem solving. Choose the one that has the most bang and make a plan to teach into it
4. Think about building a toolkit for that skill: what are the steps? What are the options?
5. Practice and role play with your class, make a supportive visual

We write at length all about each of these things in our forthcoming book, Kids First From Day One: A Teacher’s Guide to Today’s Classroom. But we also know that many of you share our fierce sense of urgency about making a change and doing what is best for your students. So, we’re going to try our best to address some of your questions and share what we’ve learned as we’ve grappled with this challenge. In this post, we’re going focus on the fourth item:

Building toolkits for social skills.

So let’s imagine that you’ve taken down the clip chart and you’ve jotted down a list of some skills your students might need to develop (sharing, solving problems, stopping when asked, listening, self-regulation). What’s next?

Now we do what we do best- we teach!

We lean on all we know about growth mindset and practice reframing social skills as something that children develop over time with our thoughtful guidance and carefully planned instruction. Just like in reading, math or writing, we can teach our students steps to help them use a strategy to build a social skill.

First and foremost, when we decide on a skill to teach toward (social, academic, anything!) we want to make sure it passes the longevity and relevance test. Is it worth teaching this skill? To do this we ask:

• Do people of the world use this skill?
• Do I use it regularly?
• Is it something my students will need long after they’ve left the school setting?
• What do we (my students and I) understand about this skill?
• What is hard about this skill?
• What is reasonable for children of this age when it comes to this skill?

Once you mull these questions over a bit, you’re ready to start.

For many of us, breaking down our teaching and ours students’ learning like this is much more familiar in more “academic” realms, so let’s look at an example from reading before we delve into the social.

Skill: Decoding unknown words (Is it worth it? Yep. I still have to decode and make sense of names and new-to-me words. Hello subitizing, I’m looking at you.)

Strategy: Skip the word and think about what makes sense.

Steps:

1. When you run into an unknown word, skip it and read the rest of the sentence or part.
2. Think about what might make sense.
3. Reread the sentence with a word that makes sense.
4. See if the word matches the letters.
5. If it matches- keep going! If it doesn’t, try a different word.

(Interested in learning MUCH more about reading and writing strategies? Our friend Jennifer Serravallo has laid out hundreds of reading and writing of strategies in this way in her books.)  

So far so good! And If you teach primary grades, you’re probably well versed in the idea that there are many different strategies for solving unknown words. This is where our students’ toolkits comes in– as reading teachers, we want to arm our readers with many different tools or strategies to decode words.

What does this have to do with teaching social skills? It is the exact same idea. Identify the skill, break it into real actionable steps and teach how to use it. And as community teachers, we want to arm our students with many different tools or strategies to solve problems, negotiate, compromise, share, self-regulate, etc.

So let’s imagine you’ve noticed that your students could work on the skill of sharing. Perhaps there are heated arguments over the stapler at writing or five children clamber to get a coveted book in the class library or you hear story after story about the soccer ball at recess. Children do not arrive on our doorsteps with innate abilities to share things– especially things that are very important to them. Time and time again I would say, “Just share it.” or “Just take turns,” (or on less than glamorous days: “I am putting this away until you learn to share this!!!!!”) without teaching children to do either. We develop sharing as a skill, just as we develop decoding.

Step one:

Is sharing a skill that’s worth teaching? Yes– today I shared a book with a colleague, a googledoc template, a highlighter, an apple, my chocolate bar (ooph, that one was hard).

Step two:

What does this skill look like? What are some of the strategies people use to share?

• Splitting the object (chocolate bar)
• Turn taking (book with a colleague- she’ll get it back to me next week)
• Using something together (googledoc template)
• Finding another (apple)
• Give something up & let it go (highlighter)
• Others?

Step three:

What would be the steps to the strategy of taking turns?

1. See if there is another thing that’s the same.
2. If not, figure out who will go first and who goes next (rock, paper, scissors).
3. Make a plan: How much time? How much of it?

As with any scaffold, our hopes as teachers is that reliance on these steps fade away and that children are left with a toolkit of different strategies to pull out when they are trying to share, self-regulate, compromise, give feedback, etc.

So now, give it a try:

• Name a social skill you think your students (or a group of your students) might need
• Ask, “Is this skill worth teaching?”  
• Think about what this skill looks like.
• Name the steps that you use for a specific strategy.

I wish I could tell you that you will be able to introduce these steps, make a lovely visual, snap your fingers, and then miraculously have a class that can solve problems and self-regulate without any hiccups.  As we mention in our book Mindset for Learning, it can take as many as 264 days to build a habit! As with all learning, these skills take practice. Whole-class conversations, storytelling, read alouds and discussions, role-playing and visualization all give our students ample opportunities to try out strategies, build independence, and develop lifelong skills.

((This blog post by Christine Hertz and Kristi Mraz is reprinted with permission.  

Check out Christine Hertz's blog here!) 

Five Tips for More Productive and Positive Self Talk

November 1, 2017

|

Christine Hertz

Like it or not, we all have voices inside of our heads. These voices are a combination of all the voices we have heard through the years, the good ones and the bad. We often tune out our self talk to a steady hum in the background until moments of stress when we turn it up.

Think of a time recently when you were under stress, not necessarily bad stress,
just a time when you working harder
than usual.

What was your inner dialogue? Did you
give useful tips and encouraging advice? Were your actions accompanied by
nagging doubt and fear? In her book
Daring Greatly, Brené Brown (author, professor and researcher
extraordinaire) calls these not-so-
helpful voices Gremlins. How fitting is
                                                                      that analogy? 

The shocking thing is that we are in charge of those little voice, and when we
discover we have the power to change our self talk, we can change our lives.
We can also help our students develop internal voices that help them instead of
holding them back. Here are five self talk tips for children and adults alike! 

1. Notice superhighways of self-talk:

Critical to our understanding of self-talk is the understanding that we build neural pathways that promote the self talk we use the most. Much like highways are built on ancient paths that have been used for hundreds of years, our brains create high speed connections around our most common types of thinking. In her book, How to Stay Sane, psychoanalyst Philippa Perry references self observation as a way to change patterns of thought, stating, “...the neural pathways that promote toxicity will be used less and will gradually shrink, while those that promote empathy and awareness will grow,” (p 36). Luckily for us as teachers, the children we teach are in the process of constructing these neural pathways, and it is much less about unlearning and shrinking and much more about helping children lay down the highway in the most productive and positive place.

2. Deconstructing negative neural pathways takes time:

When we do develop negative internal chatter, and that internal chatter has become a fast moving highway, we have to first deconstruct the negative neural pathway and reroute through spoken self talk, then private speech, a more positive pathway. Only once the new positive pathway has been intentionally set, and the person repeatedly guides him or herself down it multiple multiple times, can it then become a new, better superhighway.Consider unlearning a bad habit and relearning a new one. It is never too late to make your self talk your greatest ally, and the source of the productivity and happiness in your life, it just takes plenty of practice and plenty of time. 

3. Change the pronoun:

Eric Kross of the University of Michigan studied the pronouns people use when engaging in self talk. He found that when they used the pronoun “I” it often added additional stress, but that “a subtle linguistic shift — shifting from 'I' to your own name — can have really powerful self-regulatory effects.” Kross conducted a study where he gave people only five minutes to prepare for a speech. He asked some people to address themselves as “I” and some in the third person. He found that people who addressed themselves by their name were more likely to engage in positive, support inner dialogue. By using the third person, participants were more likely to talk to themselves as a rational, caring friend, and that small distance left no voice for an emotional spiral of negativity.

4. Mantras work:

Runners have known the power of mantras for years. Often runners adopt a mantra to repeat as they run, especially when the running gets tough. In the Runner’s World article “The Magic of Mantras” sports psychologist, Stephen Walker, explains that he teaches mantras to help athletes “direct [their] mind away from negative thoughts and toward a positive experience.” The article goes on to quote David K Ambuel, a philosophy professor saying, “Indeed, the Sanskrit word "mantra" literally means "instrument for thinking." As such, these short words or phrases have long been used to focus the mind in meditation.” If runners are being taught mantras to overcome mental challenge on the course, can we not do the same in our classrooms? As with running, sometimes the biggest obstacle is our own minds.

5. Create a tool to help maintain positive self talk:

These tools can include post-it notes with quick sketches and key phrases, bookmarks, photographs with captions, checklists and tally cards. Vygotsky calls such tools mediators, something that stands as an intermediary between a stimulus (My first try did not work)  and an individual response to the stimulus (Switch it up!)- we create mediators to prompt a specific response (Tools of the Mind pg 51). By sending children off from a small group or conference with a tool, we are helping them to engage and learn independently in situations that previously needed adult guidance.

This post has been adapted from A Mindset for Learning. To find out more about self talk and the book, click here.

(This blog post by Christine Hertz is reprinted with permission.  
Check out Christine Hertz's blog here!) 

Getting Teens Wondering Before Trying to Teach Them Something

            In this article in Knowledge Quest, Ellen McNair (Fairfax County Schools, Virginia) says the best secondary-school librarians learn with their students, orchestrate inquiry projects, foster a growth mindset, get students discovering worthwhile content, take full advantage of available technology, and spur students to become critical, information-literate thinkers. These librarians have transitioned from being the “sage on the stage” to the “guide on the side,” says McNair, “creating a crosswalk between content standards and what it feels like to be a teenager inside a classroom in this, the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century – a time when information is ubiquitous and students need high-level problem-solving and collaboration skills to prepare for the future.”

            To create library lessons that don’t look and feel “old-school” to students, librarians need to consider two things:

-   There are always seven students in the room who know what you are about to tell them.

-   There are always a dozen students who have misconceptions about the information you are preparing to share with them.

Keeping these two hard truths in mind is the key to designing units and lessons that stand a chance of connecting with young adolescents.

McNair recommends kicking off with open-ended questions that connect the content being studied with students’ lives and families; then immersing them in compelling visual images and asking them to jot impressions; then getting students answering the question, “What are you wondering about this issue?” and exploring by looking for resources and asking questions. The most compelling sequence of questions is: What do you see? What are you wondering? and Why do you say that? Students then need to be provided with “multiple opportunities to think about how to most effectively convey their new ideas and then design, write, create, or perform an impactful communication,” says McNair. “The learning ecosystem in a middle- or high-school library is a perfect place to foster students’ communication skills.”

“By inviting teens to discuss and make personal connections to the content,” she says, “the students in the room who already know about the content and those who have misconceptions about the content are provided with opportunities to share and grow… Letting teens express opinions, imagine possibilities, and exchange ideas and experiences before educators deliver content yields a classroom of engaged learners and creative thinkers… Learning doesn’t occur when students listen. Learning happens when they talk, think, share, and reflect.”

McNair believes that think-like-a-teenager questions (quite different from standards-based questions) are an essential element in effective units and lessons. Here are some examples from civics, astronomy, chemistry, and history:

-   Standards-based question: What are the basic tenets of democracy?

-   Think-like-a-teenager questions: Who has authority over me? Who really has any authority?

-   Standards-based question: What are the core values of democracy?

-   Think-like-a-teenager questions: Do the people serve the government or does the government serve the people? In what ways do restrictive laws allow us to have freedom?

-   Standards-based question: What were the causes of the Civil War?

-   Think-like-a-teenager question: Is anything worth fighting for?

-   Standards-based question: What is microgravity?

-   Think-like-a-teenager questions: What would you like about being weightless? What opportunities would it afford? Is being weightless in space an “altered” state? Where would you rather live: in a world that is unpredictable or predictable? What might be challenging?

-   Standards-based question: What are the factors that influence solubility?

-   Think-like-a-teenager question: What is the difference between magic or mystery and science?

-   Standards-based question: What is the significance of cell specialization?

-   Think-like-a-teenager questions: When is being different an advantage? What differences between you and your siblings or cousins are significant?

-   Standards-based question: Who were the most important leaders in the ancient world?

-   Think-like-a-teenager question: What makes someone worth remembering?

When McNair made the mindshift from doing content delivery to first getting students thinking, she launched a unit on ancient civilizations by putting print and digital resources related to seven civilizations on different tables and asking students to stop at four of the tables and respond to the book covers, pictures, captions, and text and jot down what they were wondering. A biology teacher happened to be in the library and, seeing the productive chaos, asked McNair what was going on. She was so taken with the idea that she launched the next year’s biology curriculum by putting materials for each of the year’s units on tables in the library and having students peruse the resources and jot their “wonderings” about each topic on sticky notes. The teacher posted the notes around the perimeter of the classroom and at the beginning of each new unit put the pertinent questions on a whiteboard and Google doc and let students know that they would be answering their own questions over the next six weeks. “Brilliant!” says McNair.

The standard teacher prompt, Do you have any questions? “is loaded with social constraints and challenges,” says McNair. “Hearing this prompt, their inner narrative defaults to, ‘I should know this. What will others think when I ask a question? Maybe I should have heard or read this already.’” Instead, she suggests that teachers ask, What do you wonder? and listen carefully to what students say or write. Wondering opens students’ minds to new learning.

“Personalized Learning: Think Like a Teenager” by Ellen McNair in Knowledge Quest, November/December 2017 (Vol. 46, #2, p. 28-35), http://knowledgequest.aasl.org; McNair can be reached at ejones5@me.com. 
(The summary above is reprinted by permission from issue #712 of The Marshall Memo - a FABULOUS resource for educators.)

Award-winning Student Speeches

As part of the American Soapbox Initiative, students from around the U.S. recorded speeches on topics of their own choosing. A selection:

• Maya Branch on race and gender – 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc4YHklKgho

• LaShawn Massenberg on homicide – 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1RD3s9vLwM

• Ben Domus on segregation – 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NP1SZO7xIU

Spotted in “Screen Grab Soapbox Speakers” in Educational Leadership, November 2017 (Vol. 75, #3, p. 8).  (Summary spotted in the Marshall Memo #711 - a fabulous resource for educators!)

November 14, 2017