Six Strategies to helping your students become active participants in life!
“Hey Mr Hoeg did you hear what happened to the hungry clock?”
“No Ethan what happened to the hungry clock.”
“He went back four seconds.”
“Oh my gosh, Ethan that is so funny!”
As we both laugh. I realize Ethan may not have understood the play on words, but he certainly understood the positive reaction and energy he received from sharing his joke with me.
Challenge
Children with autism and other anxiety related disorders may find communication and social interaction challenging, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want to and are unable to be social. Quite the contrary, these children like most, have a deep desire to be connected with others. These children just need more opportunities and support to practice key life skills.
Many children believe they must ‘get it right the first time’ or they might be considered a failure, or worse. Many children might be thinking to themselves, “Gee they will think I am stupid if I say something,” or “ I only have one chance to make a good impression,” or “What if they don’t like me.” The overpowering sense of failure is enough to keep many children from developing the basic skills needed to creating a full and connected life.
Solution
According to William James, a leading psychologist from the turn of the 19th century, happiness is created as a result of our being active participants in the game of life. James suggested that happiness is not produced merely by thinking or by resigning oneself to life’s circumstances, but rather by taking bold risks and acting on possibilities that come from around us. It is no secret that the more connected we are, the happier we tend to be.
Connecting with others can be a powerful positive experience. As teachers we have a great opportunity to teach our students the skills of connecting with others and the positive feelings surrounding it.
In this upcoming school year, most likely you will have children with social communication deficits, anxiety, and other challenges in your classroom. Here are Six Key Strategies to helping all your students become Connectors.
1.Increase opportunities to connect with others: This sounds so simple, but we all know how many things you are required to manage each day in your classroom. In reality, the more students are doing things for each other frees up your time to focus on what you do best — teaching.
How many opportunities do your students have to interact with each other during the course of the day? These interactions do not have to be significant and not even verbal. Just connecting by passing out materials, sharing notes, giving quick feedback are all interactions that can be planned and take up little time.
2. Teach them how to smile. Smiling sounds like such a simple action, but for many smiling requires direct instruction and practice. Learning how to naturally smile is one of the most important skills your students need to develop.
Smiling changes our mood, and allows others to have good feelings about us. If you want a calmer and happier classroom, teach all your students how to smile. Set up ways for them to practice it often. You might want to have a reminder at your classroom door, and encourage your students to smile every time they enter the class.
The skill of smiling involves four steps, and can be taught in 15 minutes. There are many fun videos out there on the web for instruction.
1 — relax and smile with your eyes,
2- place your tongue at the top of your mouth, and turn up the corners of your mouth,
3- show just a little bit of teeth,
4- think of something funny.
3. Jobs. Providing jobs for all students gives them a sense of purpose, identity and belonging. For students that need more practice at social interaction, consider creating jobs specifically designed to help in these areas. Pair up more verbal and less verbal students to take on certain responsibilities. Switch it up, and provide lots of encouragement along the way.
4. Use Nouns instead of Adjectives: Helping kids to learn how to Future Think is an important skill. For some children with social communication challenges, projecting themselves into a positive future is not easy. One way to work on this is to use nouns when describing the students. For example you might say, “Ok all writers over here,” instead of, “Time to do writing.” Writing is a process, but a Writer is an identity. Help your students project themselves into future positive identities. If you want your students to become great communicators, start by calling them, “Great Communicators,” and then let self-fulfilling prophecy do the rest.
5. Strengths: All children have significant strengths. One of our jobs as teachers and coaches is to help identify what those strengths are for each student. The way to develop any child’s sense of confidence is to first leverage their strengths to the fullest . If their strength happens to be sharpening pencils, then surely find all the pencils you can for them to sharpen, and recognize the heck out of the importance of sharpening pencils. And only then, start to work on those areas that the child struggles with.
6. No Labels: Eliminate all labels that can have a negative connotation. Ethan is in Special Education, Suzie has Autism, Jimmy has ADD, or Betty is the one in a wheelchair starts to define their potential by their disability. Kids are kids first, and negative labels do not define who they are or what their potential is. It is important to have high expectations for all your students. I suspect other teachers don’t refer to you as “that teacher with the glasses.”
It doesn’t take much to include someone and provide opportunities to help them connect with others. As teachers we all have a responsibility to help our students become proficient Connectors which guarantees them an active and productive place in society.
Like the hungry clock, the seconds are ticking away.
What other strategies do you use in your classroom to help students develop and practice connecting with others? All your comments and ideas are greatly appreciated.
