NEWS FLASH: A major meta-analysis of 213 studies showed an average 11 percent gain in academic performance for kids receiving explicit social-academic learning instruction.
Turns out this “soft stuff” about creating a culture of respect and rapport yields hard and fast gains, and that’s no surprise to collaboration “gurus” Harvey “Smokey” Daniels and Nancy Steineke. Now, these authors share a yearlong plan for helping you build powerful and binding peer-to-peer interactions. The added bonus: Your kids will meet speaking and listening standards, while you score better on classroom-engagement rubrics.
Teaching the Social Skills of Academic Interaction taps the instructional power of slides, full-color illustrations, and super succinct directions to teach both the language and the behaviors of working effectively with others. These 35 lessons take your kids on a carefully paced upward spiral of collaboration, with explicit coaching on how to speak, listen, argue, persuade—and get along. Here’s the best part: You model and your students practice these social skills with the content of your curriculum, not in disconnected add-on exercises.
For each lesson, there are six to 25 slides that focus on one vital academic-social skill; step-by-step teaching tips are in the lie-flat planning book. The sequence looks mostly like this:
- The first slides introduce the skill—like being a good partner or arguing both sides of a controversial topic—then explain its value.
- The next slides help model the skill in action, using whatever curricular topic you happen to be teaching.
- Now, kids’ active thinking is invited as you co-create strategies to enhance use of the target social-academic skill.
- Additional slides help kids practice the skill using your curricular content as you monitor and support.
- Lessons end with a debriefing to solidify new understandings.
Any way you look at Teaching the Social Skills of Academic Interaction, it’s a win-win. Your students realize better engagement in curriculum topics, higher performance, and social skills to last a lifetime. That’s really college and career ready! And our schools become safer harbors, where students know one another, respect one another, and learn together.
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Author Bio
Nancy Steineke consults nationally as a keynote speaker, workshop presenter, and literacy coach for K-12 teachers. She specializes in content-area literacy, nonfiction writing, purposeful close reading, literature circles, and student engagement.
Harvey “Smokey” Daniels has been a city and suburban classroom teacher and a college professor, and now works as a national consultant and author on literacy education. In language arts, Smokey is known for his pioneering work on student book clubs. Harvey works with elementary and secondary teachers throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, offering demonstration lessons, workshops, and consulting, with a special focus on creating, sustaining, and renewing student-centered inquiries and discussions of all kinds. Smokey shows colleagues how to simultaneously build students' reading strategies, balance their reading diets, and strengthen the social skills they need to become genuine lifelong readers.