The focuses of today’s training included experiential
education and social skills instruction.
Often when I think about experiential education, I think
Outward Bound and “hands on” learning and it’s true that these things can be
experiential opportunities. However, what defines experiential education,
especially in a setting led by the principals of Re-ED, are the briefing,
planned sequencing, experiencing, reflection, and debriefing components brought
together in a complete activity. In my secondary setting, I would sequence
activity, with my specific students in mind, over a period of time to allow
students the opportunity to interact as a group, build trust, practice and grow
communication skills, and solve problems. Small classroom experiences/activities
can help students grow their social competence by giving them frequent
opportunity to practice. Certainly, there are a lot of examples of experiential
education that go beyond the walls of a classroom, but I think there are plenty
of inquiry lessons that could have an experiential component within the walls
of the school.
Instructional Resources for Experiential Education:
Our discussion around social skills instruction highlighted
the Re-ED principal that self-control can be learned. Additionally, when
educators see a student struggle with an academic problem, the assumption is
made that the student needs to be re-taught the skill. If the student still
doesn’t master the skill other interventions are often explored until the
student finds success. When educators see a student struggle with a social
skill, an assumption is made that the student is purposefully acting that way
or that they could do something different if they chose to, educators fail to
see that the social skill has yet to be mastered and therefore do not teach and
re-teach the skill.
In effective social skill instruction, educators identify or
name the skill they are attempting to teach, teach when and when not to use the
skill, operationalize (task analysis or break into steps) the skill, model the
skill, practice the skill, review, test, collect data on the effectiveness of
the instruction and implementation, and then try to generalize the newly
learned skill into other areas.
We teach social skills everyday, whether we are deliberately
planning for it or not, therefore if we integrate social skills teaching into
our lesson planning and instruction deliberately we will positively impact
future behaviors in our classrooms.
Social Skills Instruction Resources:
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