Level 3: Life Skills-Long Term Support
Strategies:
1.) Social Skills: My class will be centered around a social atmosphere so my students will have plenty of practice working with peers and with people above them to make meaning, or to come to an understanding. I plan on using a lot of workshop type processes to teach writing and analysis to my students. I will be modeling from many different sources on the major components of how to use social skills. One such source will be Lawrence Shapiro's book 101 Ways to Teach Children Social Skills: A ready to use, reproducible activity book. 2.) Working Together: My classes will be centered around the workshop model that asks students to write, write, write, and write some more. All the while they will be presenting these works to small groups and working through how to refine them and make them better. These groups will work together for a period of time to foster a sense of community and to allow for more honest, and open feedback. However, I will require that these groups change every unit so that students become comfortable working with all sorts of people in a group, collaborative setting. This will prepare my students for a college and career world that emphasizes working together and having open conversations to solve problems. 3.) Understanding Emotions: As part of the RULER curriculum there is a poster called "Taking a Meta-Moment" that is designed to help youth take a moment, once something happens, to breathe think about what happened and why it makes you react the way that you are before you continue onto the action portion. I think that this is a pretty brilliant poster to model and demonstrate for students the process of not letting your emotions get the better of you and to really think about why you feel the way you do. In the adult world there are many instances where a person has an intense emotional reaction during a meeting, to an email, to a conversation that may be caused by a misunderstanding or simply is an overreaction. This strategy gives students a valuable to to make sure that they are acting from the best possible place anytime something comes up in their lives, school, or work. (Brackett, Kemenitzer, 2011). 4.) Communicating: I will have my students practice effective communication by having them work in groups for their workshops, but also once a week having an open forum where students are free to express any concerns or questions to me as a group and we can address where we are going as a class. This will allow me to model for all of the students effective means of communicating your intent and expectations. It also gives them an opportunity to practice having discussions with someone who is in a position of power, relative to them. For instance when they enter the work place they will use this practice to model a conversation they might have with the boss about a deadline or project. 5.) Conflict Management: My group looked at the book Conflict Transformation by John Paul Lederach. I would use the strategies within the book when I was working with students, or when they were having a conflict between themselves. Ultimately the most important lessons to take away from the book are twofold. First that often the conflict isn't really about whatever is on the surface, it usually stems from something deeper. Two, the reason we refer to it as conflict transformation is so that students, and educators understand that while the conflict may never be 100% resolved both parties have come together to transform the narrative of the conflict and turn it into a respectful conversation where both parties feel like they are being heard. (Lederach, 2003). 6.) Self Discipline: Due to the workshop focus of my classes the students will have plenty of opportunities to practice self discipline throughout the year. First I will have a release of responsibility on who holds onto the writing portfolio from me holding onto their papers to having them maintain and curate their own portfolios. Also students will be highly responsible for taking in peer feedback and responding to it in an appropriate manner. They will have to take the initiative to ask a peer for clarification or to receive extra feedback. Students in my class will be able to learn to take their learning into their own hands through the use of the workshop model. 7.) Emotional Literacy: There have been studies that show a connection between reading fiction and a greater sense of empathy within people. So within my ELA classroom I will use this to bring fiction into the class that asks my students to empathize with a person who is outside their own experience. This will train my students to be more empathetic. This will help them become more emotionally literate because as they move through life and the world they will have a greater ability to see where other people are coming from and why they may act the way they do, instead of reacting from a very un-empathetic place. |