Modeling Good Social Skills

"Billy, can you please turn around and focus on working with Jim?" "Will you please hold on a second, Susie? I'm in the middle of talking to Mrs. C." "Guys, do you really think it's a good idea to be karate kicking a full water bottle off the table?"

Yes, these are all things I've said to students this year in attempts to manage their behavior and suggest to them that their actions may not be socially fitting for seventh graders. As a teacher, part of my job is to help students learn appropriate social skills.

A coworker recently emailed me a link to the article "Social Skills in the Digital Age: What's Screen Time Got to Do With It?" In this article, Norene Wiesen alerts readers to a concern about too much time spent in front of electronics' screens stunting children's social skills. The article suggests that excessive time devoted to electronics by children prevents them from learning to carry on normal person-to-person interactions.

This idea makes sense--time spent watching television, surfing the web, and playing video games is time spent either without conversation or having artificial conversations. There is no healthy exchange of ideas. There is no reading of physical cues. There is no consensus reached on a disagreement.

But what makes less sense is Wiesen's call to action. In my classes, students spend only a small percentage of their time in front of a screen. This article intimates that the excessive time students spend in front of screens is mostly outside of school. Yet Wiesen calls upon teachers like me to devote instruction to helping students learn healthy screen-time skills in daily life.

This is an unreasonable task to undertake. Most of the days school is in session, I only have my students for 42 minutes. Anyone familiar with the Common Core State Standards knows the depth of learning my students must achieve in English/Language Arts, and that learning takes time. Also, I don't think it's my place to suggest, through lessons, that students' choices for free-time activities at home are inappropriate--that's up to their parents. Finally, even if teachers do instruct students on using electronics in moderation, there's still the matter of instilling in students good social skills.

Having students learn good social skills is the crux of the matter, isn't it? I want to concentrate on teaching my students what to do, not what not to do. Wiesen does touch upon what should be an effective, embedded approach, modeling. On my whiteboard most days is a new quote of the day. These quotes are meant to provoke thought in my students, but many times, they also serve as reminders to me. Two that have made the board, and I don't know the source of either, are "Children have more need of models than of critics," and "Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing." Again, time in class is limited. Wouldn't modeling be the best and most efficient way for me to teach students good social skills?

But what social skills should I model? Here, too, Wiesen brings up an excellent source, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People. This book is filled with principles for how to handle people, get people to like you, bring people around to your way of thinking, and be a good leader--the skills needed to be socially successful. If I take these principles and apply them to my interactions with my students, my students will be witnesses to excellent social skills.

Here are a few examples. Carnegie posits that one of the basic techniques for dealing with others is to "Arouse in the other person an eager want." In other words, he suggests that we find out the other person's desires and then present ways we can help him or her achieve those desires. So, in my class, I can sit down with a student, learn about her goals, and then explain how what she will learn in Language Arts will help her achieve those goals. Another idea Carnegie presents is, to get people to like you, "Talk in terms of the other person's interests." With this in mind, I try to keep mental notes of my students' interests--Steve plays football; Jane plays basketball; George plays the trumpet; Alison is into hunting; Carl has chickens; Erica has a horse; Paul likes The Hunger Games; Rachel likes Harry Potter. Then, when I get the opportunity, I'll spark up a conversation with students related to their preoccupations. Finally, Carnegie opines that to be a good leader, one thing to do is "Ask questions instead of giving direct orders." You saw me do this in the first paragraph of this post.

Stephen Covey writes in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, "Goethe taught, 'Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be, and he will become as he can and should be.'" I have hundreds of interactions with students each day. There is ample opportunity, each day, for me to do my part in encouraging my students' social growth by modeling the principles Dale Carnegie suggests.

Thank you,

Brendan