As any parent or teacher with the responsibility of teaching individuals with social skills deficits can tell you, “It ain’t easy.” The reason that teaching social skills is so difficult is because those who need it usually possess mental and emotional barriers to learning.

For the purposes of this paper, a social skills deficit is defined as an antisocial or asocial behavior that estranges an individual from others. Sometimes the person with the real social skills deficit, is the “normal” child who taunts, teases, bullies or otherwise ostracizes exceptional children or children from other ethnic, social, or cultural backgrounds.

Parents and teachers who work with children who engage in asocial and antisocial behavior frequently resort to various forms of rewards and punishments to motivate them to change. But, while rewards and punishments may be effective in modifying short term behavior, they are less effective in influencing long term behavior.

The reasons are simple, external influences are not always consistent from one environment to another. Moreover, people change and threats of punishment which may work on one occasion may work not on another.

To effect long term changes in behavior, we must help students develop sufficient internal controls to manage their own behavior without external intervention. This requires that we employ teaching strategies that enable us to break through the learning barriers these students possess.

The barriers we have to break through are attention, comprehension, retention, and motivation. Following are two teaching strategies, and the rationale behind them, that can help you break through these four barriers to learning.

STRATEGY 1: SMALL DOSES, FREQUENTLY ADMINISTERED

Students with social skills deficits usually have short attention spans. It is difficult to hold their attention for long periods of time. A quick, to the point lesson is more likely to capture and hold their interest than longer lessons.

For example, a reading lesson that focuses on Helen Keller’s experience at the well may prove far more profitable than reading a biography that covers her whole life. In this one experience students are able to see Helen up close. They can observe her frustration, rebellion, and her resistance to learning. Then they can witness the transformation that occurred when all of a sudden she realized that words have meaning.

The lesson is short and to the point. Moreover, its message to your students is so relevant, and the topics for discussion it provides are so many, you will find frequent opportunities to create mini-lessons by recurring to different aspects of Helen’s experience at the well.

For example, the notion that words have meaning can lead to many valuable discussions about the importance of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. Other discussions might include how their ability to communicate with others, or even their very ability to think, is influenced by the meaning they attach to words.

Similarly, discussions of the reasons behind Helen’s frustration, anger, and rebelliousness—her inability to understand what was happening, her inability to even understand her own feelings or to communicate her wants or needs—prior to her experience at the well may be very profitable in helping students understand some of their own frustrations, anger and rebelliousness.

Short lessons of this sort not only help break through the barriers of attention, but also can help break through the barriers of comprehension and retention by creating opportunities for frequent repetition. Repetition is a key to learning and retaining any important idea or skill, especially for individuals with attention deficits.

Daily is better than weekly, and several times a day is better than once a day. One ten minute lesson and two or three five minute lessons spread throughout the day will do more to establish understanding than one forty or fifty minute lesson.

Frequent, short, and relevant lessons can do much to overcome attention and comprehension barriers to learning.

STRATEGY 2: FOCUS ON THOUGHTS NOT BEHAVIOR

While specific behaviors are the desired outcome, it must be remembered that behavior is the product of thoughts and feelings, and it is these thoughts and feelings an individual must learn to manage.

One of the great lessons from the story of Helen Keller is that new thoughts lead to new behaviors. Sometimes, a single idea can change a person’s life as it did Helen’s. Once she learned that words had meaning, a new world opened up for her.

The experience of Colin and Mistress Mary in The Secret Garden is another example of how new thoughts lead to new behaviors. In working with children with social skills deficits, and in fact all children, it is important to help them recognize the intimate relationship between thoughts and choices.

Literature, both factual and fiction, provides unlimited opportunity to examine in non-threatening ways the influence of thought on action. Much as a medical student may learn much about the human body from dissecting a cadaver, students may gain much by learning to dissect the thought processes by which people make choices. By examining the relationship between thoughts and choices, and the experiences produced by those choices, students can learn how to make better choices.

Helping students come to grips with their thought processes and better understand the inner forces driving them not only increases their comprehension and improves retention of the social skills you are teaching them, but also provides motivation for making necessary changes.

CHARACTER BASED LEARNING

The above two strategies for teaching social skills are key elements in an educational concept called character based learning. Simply stated, character based learning takes place when students are acquiring useful knowledge, developing their mental and emotional faculties, and are growing in virtue. The goal of character based learning is to help students develop the internal controls necessary for responsible self-governance.

The advantage of these two strategies is that they may be employed while teaching virtually any subject. Although, the above example consisted of a reading lesson, every useful field of study has valuable moral lessons embedded within it for those who are looking for them.

For example, a writing assignment may provide an opportunity to help students explore the relationship between thoughts and actions and provide an appropriate occasion to remind them that every day they are writing the story of their lives by what they think and do.

Similarly, observing a chemical reaction may lead to a brief discussion on the relationship of thoughts to actions. After discussing the cause and effect relationships in the chemical reaction, it may be pointed out to your students that just like the chemical agent in the experiment they observed, they too are agents that cause things to happen. In fact, they cause many things to happen every day. The difference, of course is they get to choose. Whether they cause good things or bad things to happen is up to them, but, just like in the experiment, there are consequences that follow.

In summary, to parents and teachers who are aware of them, there are frequent and abundant opportunities to help children break through barriers they may have in their development of essential social skills by employing short, to the point lessons that help students recognize the relationship between thoughts and actions.

As students learn to better understand them selves, and gain greater control of their thoughts and feelings, their motivation to act in socially responsible ways increases and the need to impose external incentives decreases.

George Rogers
http://www.choiceskills.com .