Teaching the Social Skills of Academic Interaction, Grades 4-12. Harvey "Smokey" Daniels

      Third, groups must work together in order to refine their interaction skills. These are the skills that you've explicitly taught and are now reminding them to use.

Reflection and Celebration

      At the end of a discussion, students need to stop and assess their interactions. When groups are first meeting, we like to emphasize what went well. We ask, “What were three things your group did that got the job done and enabled you to get along?” Groups that explicitly and regularly highlight their successes look forward to the next meeting and bond more quickly because this celebration enhances friendship and the common desire to work well as a team. After a couple of meetings, we continue to inventory the positives, but we also begin asking, “What's something you could do better the next time?"

      At first, when you have just added a new skill to their repertoire, you might direct the goal setting. “As I watched your discussions today, I noticed that most members are still forgetting to ask follow-up questions. Turn back to your group and think of three ways your group can remember to include more of those the next time.” When you ask each group to report its plan to the rest of the class, you have built in yet another layer of positive interdependence that continues into the next meeting, when members review their plan and execute it in their discussion. Later on, as students become more familiar with the skills necessary for a good meeting, they can begin discussing what skills their particular group needs in order to fine-tune it. For example, our lesson on Table Cards (page 143) teaches students how to do this.

The Bottom Line

      It's rare in teaching that so many factors coalesce into the kind of opportunity we enjoy today. We have a clear national mandate to reengineer our classrooms into more friendly, supportive, and productive places. We have the research, the knowledge, and the tools to make it happen. If we accept this challenge, we can make even bigger contributions to students' college, career, and community lives. And here's what is really cool: creating a sociable, supportive, hardworking community makes our classroom an even better place to spend an hour, or a day—or a career. What's not to love?

       We have a clear national mandate to reengineer our classrooms into more friendly, supportive, and productive places.

       Chapter 3

       How to Use This Resource

Overview

      There are two parts to this resource. One, which you will grab from the book's companion website (www.corwin.com/teachingsocialskills), is a set of thirty-five projectable skill lessons, ranging from 6 to 25 slides each (468 slides in all, just for the record). Each of these lessons is a classroom-ready slideshow with which you can teach your kids a specific social-academic skill, like being a good partner, asking follow-up questions, or arguing both sides of a controversial topic. While we created these slides in PowerPoint, they are delivered as PDFs, so you can play them on any platform.

      Here, in the book, we offer systematic guidance to support you through each lesson. This includes tips, variations, and warnings about any predictable problems for each slide. Thumbnails of the slides adjacent to the step-by-step tips help you keep your place. And, in italics, we offer specific teaching language that you can try out, guiding kids through the more complex steps in a lesson.

       We envision you teaching a lesson with this lay-flat book on your lap (or your desk) and a clicker in the other hand as you advance the slides.

      In our minds' eye, we envision you teaching a lesson with this lay-flat book on your lap (or your desk) and a clicker in the other hand as you advance the slides. By keeping the book open to the corresponding page, you can see what's coming next and quickly spot the guidance we've offered.

      So, before teaching a lesson, we suggest that you read through the book's notes, rehearse your teaching a bit, learn of any potential pitfalls, and grab some grace notes. For what it's worth, we think that all school lessons should be offered to kids this way: with oral, written, and illustrated instructions. We already know that projecting instructions is a vital accommodation for language learners and for many kids with IEPs (not to mention our visual/auditory learners). But now we realize that providing lesson instructions in multiple modalities enhances success for everyone in the room (including the teacher, who gets useful prompts from the screen).

A Guide to the Slides

       Meet the Kids

      With the wonderful cartooning skills of our partner Satya Moses, we created a cast of students who represent the lovable range of young people we have worked with over the years. These kids appear in the lessons to illustrate different steps, and to model effective social skills. We hope you enjoy getting to know their distinct personalities, and suspect you'll eventually have a favorite student.

Structure of the Lessons

      Each of the thirty-five slide presentations offers a complete lesson that helps kids learn and practice a particular social-academic subskill. The lessons take from five to forty-five minutes, averaging around twenty. A couple of the more sophisticated ones stretch over two class periods. But these lessons are not time stolen from your curriculum. They don't assign your kids to interact about nothing. Instead, the content of the lessons—the topics discussed, articles read, or controversies addressed—come directly from your subject matter.

       The content of the lessons—the topics discussed, articles read, or controversies addressed—come directly from your subject matter.