- Mr. Novak's 4th grade class. Students combine their knowledge of social skills with their response to literature: "Which character in the novel would you want for a best friend? What social skills does he or she have that you admire?"Mr. Novak also offers an extra-credit homework assignment to help students analyze the social skills modeled on television: "With your parents, watch a 30-minute TV program and keep a record of the put-downs and put-ups."
- Ms. Bonney's 3rd grade class. Students identify the qualities of a good friend from the characters in Charlotte's Web by creating a large web and placing the characters with the qualities of a good friend at the center of the web.
- Ms. Manger's 4th grade class. Students hold a class meeting that begins by giving compliments to classmates before going on to solve a class problem.
- Ms. Stingley's 6th grade class. Students listen intently to a story about a young girl who learns to read with the help of a friend. Later she learns to write on her own. The class discusses the message together— "Perseverance—you have to work hard," suggests one student. "You don't need a teacher to teach you," another boy reports, to the laughter of the class.
What do these classrooms have in common? They are all examples of teachers collaborating with the Raising Healthy Children project to integrate social and emotional learning into the classroom environment.
Have you heard teachers say that kids today aren't like they used to be? Today's youth need social and emotional learning opportunities. Both the education and the business sectors have identified this need.
A U.S. Department of Labor report (1991) lists interpersonal skills as essential for high school graduates if they are to succeed in finding meaningful work. Daniel Goleman, in Emotional Intelligence (1995), argues that a high IQ is not a major predictor of success in life. Rather, he says, emotional intelligence (self-awareness, mood management, self-motivation, impulse control, and people skills) is more important. The W.T. Grant Consortium on the School-Based Promotion of Social Competence (1992) notes that teachers who use social skills curriculums are more satisfied with their classes and with teaching in general than are teachers who do not.
A Long-Term Effect
We know that teaching social and emotional skills can have a long-term positive effect on academic achievement (Elias et al. 1991). We also know that single-focused skills training programs are not enough. Our research is designed to evaluate whether the integrated, broad-based teaching of social and emotional skills reduces children's risk of developing problems in adolescence. The goal of our project—Raising Healthy Children—is to provide interventions that bond students to family and school and consequently reduce this risk.
We began the study in 1993, with 1,040 first- and second-grade students from 10 elementary schools. We intend to follow this group through high school. The project, conducted by the Social Development Research Group of the University of Washington in cooperation with Edmonds (Washington) School District 15, is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
- increased positive attachment to family and school;
- decreased aggression in boys;
- decreased suspensions and expulsions;
- decreased drug use and delinquency;
- increased scores on standardized achievement tests.
Preliminary analysis of data collected from teachers in this project over a two-year period reveals statistically significant differences between program and comparison students in the areas of age-appropriate behavior, school commitment, and antisocial behavior. In addition, observers noted that program teachers reinforced social skills in the classroom at a significantly higher level than did comparison teachers.
Project teachers helped select the social/emotional skills taught in this program. We asked them to rank 40 skills in terms of their importance for student success both in and out of school. The teachers listed the following skills as most important: listening, giving compliments, problem solving, anger management, sharing, recognizing feelings, reporting versus tattling, and good manners.
We developed units to help teachers with direct instruction, practice, reinforcement, and generalization of skills and presented them at staff development workshops. The units are designed to be used with The Get-Alongs (Cummings 1996), a series of interpersonal and problem-solving skill books for children in the primary grades. Teachers use The Get-Alongs curriculum guides with students in the upper grades. Each unit takes approximately one month to teach. A sample lesson might include introducing the social skill to the class using a book or literature selection (see fig. 1), developing charts where children describe what a particular social skill looks and sounds like, short filler activities, journal writing, and role plays.
Figure 1. Social Skills Stories
Stories in The Get-Alongs series are written in rhyme. They are designed to be integrated with the reading instruction. Each book includes a short poem to capture the critical attributes of the skill. For example:
When you're mad, about to fightControl your anger with all your might.
Take deep breaths and count to tenbefore you try to talk again.
If you can't use a cool, calm voice To walk away is a better choice.
Each book identifies additional literature selections that are appropriate for middle-level students.
Source:The Get-Alongs, by C. Cummings (Edmonds, Wash.: Teaching, Inc. 1996)
Staff Development
- Proactive classroom management. Teachers learn how to help students become self-managers. One way to assess transfer of the training is to observe the entry routines in the classrooms. For example, students in one 5th-6th grade class take their own attendance by voting on social issues as they enter the classroom. One entry poll question was "Should all students wear uniforms to school?" This device also provides students with an opportunity to disagree in an appropriate way.
- Motivating at-risk learners. This session also focuses on self-motivation. Teachers learn how to help students develop internal qualities that promote success. Students set weekly goals and do a daily report on the progress made toward those goals. Providing students more choices enhances their efforts to complete project work. For example, teachers may ask students to choose their projects from a menu of "entrees."
- Teaching social skills. Teachers learn strategies for direct instruction of both intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. Students become better mood managers when they learn concrete ways to handle their emotions. For example, when students role-play difficult situations, they increase their repertoire of appropriate responses until these responses become almost automatic. Students polish their interpersonal skills when they use "put-up" trees posted on the bulletin board to help them learn how to give and receive compliments. They place notes to their classmates on the trees.
- Teaching strategies. Teachers learn strategies for maximizing student involvement. These include cooperative learning exercises where students practice social/emotional skills by working together. After students work with a partner on a project, they evaluate both the quality of their product and how well they worked together.
- Reading instruction. Teachers learn how to integrate social/emotional learning with literature instruction (for example, teaching self-awareness and empathy through character trait analysis). Some teachers use journal writing to help students focus on the feelings of the characters in the books they are reading.
Other Opportunities
Students also have opportunities to practice skills in natural settings. For example, some teachers use a "solution table" as a problem-solving mechanism. The teacher asks students who have a problem to go to a table in the back of the room, where they must peacefully collaborate on alternative solutions. This helps students learn to take responsibility for their behavior and allows teachers to continue with instruction.
Several project schools promote schoolwide skills by selecting a theme for each month. In one school, for example, the theme for October was listening. Teachers received a packet of information containing skill steps and practice activities designed to reinforce listening skills.
Does This Approach Work?
The Raising Healthy Children system is not a universal cure-all—but teachers who are using this approach report long-term improvements in their students' behavior. One project staff member tells of a 4th grader who had experienced many difficulties with fighting and stealing. This system helped him learn to control his behavior. He moved to another city, and in a letter to this staff member, he wrote, "I still remember about perseverance, and stop-choose, and move-on."
Another student left his cooperative learning group, picked up a social skills book, and said, "I have to remember to use my head and not my hands."
A 5th grader, reflecting on how he had changed, said, "I guess it's better to attack the problem, not the person."
Students have a better chance to learn social and emotional skills when teachers give these skills the same intense instructional focus that they give academic subjects. Teachers enhance student motivation to learn social skills, present skills in manageable components, model successful performance of skills, give students opportunities to practice, and provide specific feedback and reinforcement. So the good news is that when students acquire these skills, they are likely to experience fewer problems in the future.
