Social
and Emotional Practices at Holiday Park
As always, we start the year with much promise and
excitement. Without fail, the new members of our organization often have so much to
learn it can become overwhelming. The veterans of our organization often
tend to rely on old habits and revert back to what we “used” to do
when overwhelmed and tired. So ultimately, as we move forward toward
our continuous improvement, we are all in this together. New and veteran staff
alike can benefit from the same reminders, models, and opportunities to
practice application of new learning, and peer coaching for refinement.
Taking us back to the end of last year, we knew,
as a community, we needed to learn more and do different. We agreed to the First Six Weeks of School as the way to ensure first best practice for social and
emotional practices at Holiday Park. As a reminder, I looked through all of the
summer work and beginning of this school year emails and documents and found some “nuggets”
that reminded me how important this part of our work is. Let’s start with the
seven beliefs that are specific to the First Six Weeks of School:
The
Seven Beliefs –
1. The
social curriculum is as important as the academic curriculum.
2. How
children learn is as important as what they learn.
3. The
greatest cognitive growth occurs through social interaction.
4. There
is a set of social skills that children need in order to be successful
academically and socially: cooperation, assertion,
responsibility, empathy, and self-control
5. Knowing
the children we teach is as important as knowing the content we teach.
6. Knowing
the parents of the children we teach is as important as knowing the children.
7.
Teachers and administrators must model the social skills they wish to
teach their students.
Where
do we stand on these seven beliefs as an organization?
1. Social curriculum
– We have implemented Boys Town and MindUp to help ensure that a successful social
curriculum is being taught. If taught with fidelity, these programs are proven
to positively impact students’ social and emotional growth. Are your Boys Town
lessons each day purposeful and well planned? Are you teaching the mini-lessons
throughout the MindUp curriculum? Are you ensuring the morning and end of day
brain break as a minimum?
2. How Children Learn
– We know that children learn best when lessons have been purposefully created
with a clear end-goal in mind. When the teacher has a clear end goal in mind,
the lesson can be modified depending on what the teacher hears the children
saying. Feeling safe is very important for children as they are learning. Some
activities we have done for years can be emotionally unsafe for kids. Example –
switching papers and having students grade each others work. Then calling out
the grade for the teacher to enter into the grade book. For struggling
students, this can be very embarrassing and cause social concerns for the child.
3. Social Interaction
- We know that children learn best through social interaction. Is your
classroom set up so that children have ample opportunities to talk with each
other as they share ideas and learning? Have students been taught exactly what
this looks like. It was part of our work in guided discovery and should be
reasonably executed in every room at this point.
4. Set of Social Skills
– Cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control. Wow! If we
could get each of those skills embedded in each of our students (maybe in each
of us as well) we would sure feel a different vibe around here each day. How do
we do this? Not sure, but we must try. So, here is the plan for now:
Every Thursday that we meet we will take a few
minutes to talk about one of these skills and share some ideas and some data.
Each team, after administration identifies skill, will be responsible to find
out the following and bring to PD –
What does this skill mean specifically for
children?
Is there any way to find sample lessons on how to
teach the skill?
Some ideas we have as a team –
Lessons that we are going to teach this week –
Artifacts we will bring back to our next PD to
share outcomes –
It will be exciting to see these new skills being
taught to our students and watch them start to take ownership and use the skill
independently,
5. Knowing the Children
– We know that this is perhaps the single most powerful belief we can use to
positively impact the children at Holiday Park. Please remember that the first
20 minutes, 8:00 – 8:20, every day, are set aside for personal connections. We do not
teach content during this time. No worksheets, no centers, no content. We are
all about social connection at this time. We use our morning meetings to
accomplish this goal. Getting to know our kids, having the class get to know
each other, letting our students know more about us, these are each important
to build positive relationships with children. We also have an expectation that
we greet each child, each morning, as they enter the classroom. A greeting
consists of eye contact, the use of the student’s name, some type of contact
(elbows touch, foot to foot greeting, etc.) and a simple personal phrase if
possible. Never anything negative or judging (like, I hope you brought your
homework today) as that changes a friendly greeting to a defensive interaction.
We also use our closing circle each day to close out the day, set the tone for
tomorrow’s learning, and calm the students down to go home organized and
relaxed.
Just for a friendly reminder, the morning meeting
has specific parts to it that together make up the effectiveness of the
meeting. As we continue to grow in this practice, please plan for each of these
parts of the morning meeting each day.
The
Four Components of the Morning Meeting:
1. Greeting:
Children greet each other by name, often including
handshaking, clapping, singing, and other activities.
2. Sharing:
Students share some news of interest to the class
and respond to each other, practicing communication skills and learning about
one another.
3. Group Activity:
The whole class does a short activity together,
building class cohesion through active participation.
4. News and Announcements:
Students develop language skills and learn about
the events in the day ahead by reading and discussing a daily message posted on
a chart by their teacher.
6. Knowing the Parents
– We know that working with our parents can deliver big dividends in regards to
student learning and parent/teacher relationships. While it might seem
difficult to manage, reaching out to parents on a regular basis is necessary to
ensure the success of each student. Phone calls for challenges have to happen,
however, phone calls for little things or sharing something good about the
student is necessary as well. Parents need to know that we "see" their child and notice their talents and treasures. Let them know how much we care.
7. Model Social and Academic Skills – We
have spent considerable time teaching expectations to our students the first
three weeks of school. Some ideas to ponder:
How is your class, overall doing with these
expectations?
How do new students learn these expectations?
When, if ever, do I re-teach these expectations
again?
These are questions we will need to be prepared to
answer both individually, as teams, and as a whole school.
One last “nugget” I wanted to mention , was the
“Time-Out” portion of the First Six
Weeks of School. I know that we didn’t spend much time as a staff
talking about this section, however, this section is critical to the success of
our students. You can go back onto the book to read more, however, this was the
summary I sent out at the beginning of the year:
Time-Out:
Time away from the group is used when a child is
not able to cooperate and is being disruptive to the group. In younger
elementary grades, there is often a designated area in the classroom where
children go for a brief time to regain their control. In older elementary
classrooms, students often have input into deciding where their time-out place
will be. To be a
logical consequence and not a punishment, time-out
must be used in a matter-of-fact and respectful manner. The teacher’s tone and
intent is a critical factor in this distinction.
So, this is the place that a teacher can choose to
ask a child to go to in an effort to regain self-control and rejoin the group,
or perhaps a student can go to this time-out if the student has identified the
need to get away from the group and regulate his/her emotions. The important
part of this space is that the class agrees on the place, the students
understand it is not punishment, and the teacher remains respectful during
these interactions. How many of our classrooms have time-out areas created by
the class that every child can articulate?
So, as you can see, we have taken on a huge
innovation as we work to ensure the social and emotional learning of each of
our students. Hard work, but worth it!
