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Kansas State Department of Education Bullying Awareness

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Kansas State Department of Education Bullying Awareness

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What are Interpersonal Skills?

Interpersonal skills help us engage, interact, and build relationships with other people, and they are necessary in order to thrive in school, at home, and at work. That's why it's critical to start building these skills in children, starting as early as kindergarten and throughout elementary school. But what do we mean when we say " interpersonal skills? "

Interpersonal skills include:

1. Communication: Includes verbal communication, or what you say and how you say it, and nonverbal communication, such as body posture, facial expression, and eye contact.

2. Cooperation: Working together with others as a team to accomplish a goal.

3. Empathy: The ability to identify and understand other people's emotions.

4. Emotion Regulation: The ability to identify your feelings and manage them appropriately.

5. Impulse Control: The ability to control your behaviors by considering short- and long-term consequences.

6. Social Initiation: Making and keeping relationships by knowing when and how to work or play with others.

Interpersonal skills are also known as social and emotional skills, soft skills, or life skills, but that doesn't mean you should wait until you're searching for a job to develop and hone them! Read on to see why these skills are critical to success at all stages of life and view our activities, lessons, and ideas for improving each of these skills.

Why are Interpersonal Skills Important?

Did you know that kindergarten students who show high social competence (or good interpersonal skills) are 46% more likely to have a full-time job at the age of 25?

In 2015, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation published results from a fascinating long-term study measuring social competence for a group of 753 kindergartners and evaluated outcomes for these same students 20 years later.

What they found was startling:
"For every one-point increase on the 5-point scale in a child's social competence score in kindergarten, he/she was:

Twice as likely to attain a college degree in early adulthood;

54% more likely to earn a high school diploma; and

46% more likely to have a full-time job at the age of 25."

And on the flip side, "for every one-point decrease in a child's social competence score in kindergarten, he/she had:

67% higher chance of having been arrested by early adulthood;

82% higher rate of recent marijuana usage; and

82% higher chance of being in or on a waiting list for public housing."

Getting into college, interviewing for a job, working in a team environment, becoming a leader - you can't afford to wait until junior and senior year of high school to start preparing for these situations and goals. The interpersonal skills, or social emotional skills, that will help you be a standout candidate for colleges and careers aren't developed overnight. And it's clear that the earlier they are practiced and mastered, the more likely it is that you will be successful in both school and the workforce.

You have likely been building these skills throughout your life with or without formal training, and you can certainly continue to improve, but you may be wondering how to actively help someone else, such as your child or a student, improve their interpersonal skills to put them on the path to success.

We need to be able to understand others, and help them understand us, so that we can get along. Both verbal and nonverbal forms of communication, as well as active listening, are essential to understanding. Verbal communication includes the words we choose to convey our message. Nonverbal communication includes tone of voice, body posture or body language, and facial expressions.

Good cooperation skills help us keep relationships even through disagreements because they enable us to work toward solutions that are acceptable to all. Using communication skills to effectively negotiate your preferences while also knowing when to compromise makes it easier to get along with others.

Emotion regulation is the ability to identify your feelings and manage them appropriately. It's important to identify whether a situation calls for a big or small emotions and manage your emotions accordingly.

Regulate emotions and demonstrate effective coping skills when faced with rejection

Identify your feelings

Practice resiliency in the face of rejection

Regulate emotions not only in disappointing situations, like losing a game, but also in situations in which it's tempting to boast, such as winning a game.

Regulate emotions when false accusations are made

Engage in positive self-talk

Resist jumping to conclusions and negative self-talk,

Cope with feeling left out and hurt feelings

Resist peer pressure

Identify big emotions vs. small emotions and the appropriate reactions for each

Identify degrees of feelings in similar emotions

Empathy is the ability to identify and understand other people's emotions. It requires being able to identify words, actions, and facial expressions that are associated with different emotions. Perspective-taking skills, or putting yourself in someone else's shoes, are also important to understanding how another person may feel in a given situation.

While emotion regulation involves managing emotions, impulse control is managing behavior and actions. Good impulse control means thinking ahead to possible positive and negative consequences of choices, as well how your behavior could impact short- and long-term goals.

Making and keeping personal relationships involves initiating conversations with strangers, acquaintances, and friends, as well as knowing when and how to work and play with others.

Find friends with similar interests

Determine who is available and best to work with in a situation

Identify how to best initiate working with a partner

Decide between initiating with a group, a single student, or playing by yourself

Be positive and appropriate when asking about an unfamiliar activity

Positively initiate with a group after being rejected

Interrupt and leave a conversation at the appropriate times

Ask to join a game already in progress

Be flexible when the rules of a game change

Initiate a conversation appropriately

Understand the importance of making and keeping friends

How Can Children Improve Interpersonal Skills?

Through life experiences, interactions with family, friends, teachers, and coaches, you have been in a continuous feedback system that helped you develop your interpersonal skills.

But aside from these everyday experiences, can interpersonal skills be actively taught, and if so, what is the best way to learn? It's best if the learning has some context and is related to real life experiences.

As an example, we enable students to improve all of these interpersonal skills by testing their abilities in simulated social scenarios using our game-based programs.

And beyond the game-based programs, we have created a number of lessons, activities, and ideas that will help students practice key concepts of each skill in real-world scenarios.

To learn more about strategies for helping kids improve these important life skills, please see: 5 Ways Parents Can Help

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What are Interpersonal Skills? Interpersonal skills help us engage, interact, and build relationships with other people, and they are necessary in order to thrive in school, at home, and at work. That's why it's critical to start building these skills in children, starting as early as kindergarten and

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Document - Measures - 2013-casel-elementary guide-1

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Seven Strategies to Keep Students Motivated

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It's easy to overlook the most important step in any teaching strategy: build a positive class culture. When I take the time to set a solid, positive learning foundation, I find it smoothes the way for other interventions.

When classroom rules are negotiated with students they feel a greater sense of ownership and commitment toward them. Often these "rule-setting" sessions at the start of the year generate fairly similar (and effective) sets of rules. A set of class rules may look as follows:

We should listen to each other

We should try not to hurt each other, verbally or physically

We should respect each other's ideas and values

We shouldn't make fun of each other's learning / it's OK to make mistakes

We should help each other

Student-negotiated consequences for breaking these rules, and ensuring they are followed throughout the year, can also reinforce a cohesive and positive learning environment. Students are more likely to meet expectations and interact positively with others when they've agreed on both the rules and consequences.

I've also had success in allowing students to set (realistic) rules for me as their teacher, such as "always be willing to help" and "make sure our tests are fair."

The teacher also has an obligation in a motivation-sensitive teaching approach to make the learning interesting to students. I try to do that by changing up the teaching style and materials, making content and activities fun and relevant to learners, showing enthusiasm for my subject, and being available to offer help.
2. Strategies to Build Commitment
There are a few ways I help students preserve (and potentially increase) their commitment to the goals they set for themselves.

The first step is to help students set appropriate goals. This works best if students make goals based on the S.M.A.R.T principles (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-Specific). I then have them create a learning journal where they record both the goals and their progress. A good stimulus question may be, "What did you learn this week?"

Second, I provide short written feedback on a regular basis. I encourage students to reflect positively on their own progress, and to not discuss grades wherever possible, since the point is to hold themselves to their own standards.

Third, I try to hold verbal feedback sessions several times a year. A natural time to check in is prior to parent-teacher meetings. These one-on-one meetings with students are a chance for a positive self-reflection and discussion about the student's progress over a longer period of time.
3. Metacognitive Strategies
Students are going to get distracted at some point during the school year, and many procrastinate. But they may not have a lot of practice noticing when they start to get off task. To help them gain awareness, have them record examples of things that have interrupted their learning, both inside and outside the classroom. This can take place in their learning journals. Maybe they didn't do their homework because a favorite show was on or they wasted their studying time on social media. Discuss the various choices implicit in those distractions, and focus on positive and realistic solutions, like choosing to watch the show later as a reward for task completion.

Use further student examples in feedback sessions throughout the year, where students can share strategies they've developed on their own for dealing with distractions. Students are often more receptive to this advice when it comes from a peer.
4. Strategies to Boost Student Interest
Students are more motivated by their schoolwork when it is interesting. Offering students choice is a common way of building interest, along with the quality and relevance of learning materials.

Teachers may also allow students to negotiate twists on a task that makes it more interesting to them, while still working toward the learning outcomes of the lesson.

But not every learning goal will naturally pique students' interests, a fact worth acknowledging openly. Ask students to reflect on tasks they find uninteresting in their learning journal to help them identify patterns in these moments and to react in a positive way. The journal entries are also great feedback for the teacher on how to make content more engaging for students.
5. Strategies to Handle Negative Emotions
At the start of the school year, I discuss with my students how different moods and emotions help or hurt learning. I've found students often aren't aware of how much their emotions affect their schoolwork. Then, I ask students to create a positive "mantra" they can refer back to if feeling unmotivated or anxious.

Teachers can also prompt students to reflect on their moods when evaluating how they are progressing toward their goals, and note these observations in their learning journals. For example, a student might write: "I didn't learn much new vocabulary this week. I was feeling angry and I couldn't focus." Once the teacher knows what's going on in the emotional lives of students it's easier to offer targeted advice on strategies to ensure learning continues, even when a student is in a heightened emotional state.
6. Strategies to Build Positive Learning Environments
Ask students to respond to the questions: Who do I work well with? Who don't I work well with? Why? This helps students to evaluate the social dynamics of their classroom context. A target output might be something like: "Harriet's a great friend, but when we are put in a group together we just end up chatting about Riverdale instead of the work." As a teacher, you can also use this information to make groups that collaborate well and work effectively toward common goals.

Creating a positive learning environment - one in which students are free to express themselves, make mistakes and effectively self-reflect - will allow the environment to be an effective place for learning.
7. Visualizing the future
According to Dörnyei, motivation for learning is partly informed by two potential future versions of yourself - the ideal self of your future, and the self that you feel you ought to become. Asking students to map these out in as much detail as possible, and discussing them (what does your ideal self look like? At minimum, what do you feel like your future self should look like?) can be very helpful in bringing this background process into the light. Discussing these selves can also be a fun activity to start off the year, with students getting down to very specific details of what their future selves eat (my ideal self eats a lot more vegetables than I currently do!), where they live, and do for fun.

Refer back to these selves throughout the year to have students track their own progress, and in the process break down long-term motivational goals into shorter ones. This is especially necessary for younger learners who often have trouble visualizing life after school.

It's also important to allow students, in the process of reflecting on these future selves, the ability to think about what they can do if they're not meeting the benchmarks on the road to either who they want to be or feel they should be. Reinforcing the idea that it is never too late to get back on track can help prevent students from feeling they've set unattainable goals for themselves.

While it may be difficult to reach every student with every one of the strategies mentioned above, all we can do as educators is to consistently try. All these strategies are ways to help students develop their ability to consciously recognize and mindfully react to their learning experiences. Strategies like these help students to make progress toward being lifelong learners.

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Seven Strategies to Keep Students Motivated All Year Long | KQED

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Students aren't always aware of the progress they are making or how their emotions affect their learning throughout the year. These strategies can help make those things visible to them.

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Choosing and UsingSEL Competency Assessments: What Schools and Districts Need to Know

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Choosing and UsingSEL Competency Assessments: What Schools and Districts Need to Know

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Life Skills Curriculum

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Life Skills Curriculum

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Life Skills Curriculum

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Life Skills Curriculum

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Overcoming Obstacles Alignment with ASCA Standards

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Overcoming Obstacles Alignment with ASCA Standards

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www.overcomingobstacles.org

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American School Counselor Association National Standards Alignment

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Last year, an English teacher at my school came to me with an all-too-common concern about an essay a student named Kyle had just turned in. The teacher's 10th grade class had just finished op-ed essays on a topic of their choice, and Kyle had chosen to examine the economic impact of illegal immigration on the U.S. economy. But in his submitted draft every source in his bibliography-and I do mean every-leaned toward one political bias, and sometimes quite heavily.

"It happened again," lamented my colleague.

Despite directing the class to consult disparate points of view and guiding them to databases and websites constructed to provide point and counterpoint arguments, Kyle hadn't shown any effort in entertaining other viewpoints. And while Kyle's essay was the most egregious on this front, he was by no means the only one in this camp. Many students start the research process by proclaiming: "I know what I'm going to say!" and seek only sources that validate that pre-formed position.

Students were failing the most central tenet of media literacy, and turning in another set of essays reinforcing bias confirmation. In some cases, they weren't even aware they were doing it.

"How do we help them recognize when their bias is interfering with their understanding?" my colleague asked.

As a library media specialist, I thought I knew the answer. If we only react after the fact, students often meet us with defensiveness. But there is another path. "We need to get out ahead of it," I responded.

Confronting Invisible Bias

Perhaps the biggest challenge we face when accessing information is confronting our biases before we are able to unpack the opinions and insights of other people. Often these biases are unconscious or implicit, meaning we might not even be aware we have them.

But these implicit biases have real implications, and educators are no less immune than students. Research has already shown, for instance, that adults see black girls as less innocent than white peers, even before they meet them. Another study found that white teachers were 30 percent less likely than black teachers to predict a black student of theirs would graduate college.

Until we become aware of our biases, and how these attitudes and opinions emerge through the language we use, we can fall into what's known as the bias confirmation trap-we see opinion with which we agree as fact and information with which we disagree as false.

Nurturing self-awareness in our students and guiding them to see how their biases interact with their information acquisition is a fundamental element to helping them develop the media literacy and communication skills essential for civil discourse. Academics and educators like Robin DiAngelo, author of "White Fragility," challenge us with their findings to grow the self-awareness necessary to promote cross-racial dialogue and foster socially just schools and communities.

Sounds daunting, right? Maybe not. Bias is a part of any source of information; the issue is the degree of transparency. When a text is laden with super-charged words and images, the bias is obvious. When the language is more subtle, we are more inclined to miss it. So when working with my students, we tackle the subtle texts. The experience with Kyle and his classmates prompted a new realization for us. Before we tackle the texts, we have to face ourselves. So I developed a lesson I hoped would make that clearer.

Creating Room for Debate

Since students were already working with op-ed essays, I curated some models of well-written ones on topics I thought would be meaningful to the class. To do that, I consulted one of my go-to resources for editorial content, the New York Times " Room for Debate " section and found a collection of short opinion essays on equity in education. I selected one by Prudence Carter.

From her essay I excerpted one paragraph that, to me, seemed particularly potent. From that paragraph I removed some of the descriptive words: verbs and adjectives, mostly. When I distributed the document to a class, a student immediately asked:

"Are we doing Mad Libs today?"

Here is what the exercise looked like:

Admittedly, it does look like Mad Libs, those fill-in-the-blank joke sheets we loved as kids. That was intentional-so that students would have a basic sense of what they were supposed to do. But this exercise is a little different. First, the goal is to make the paragraph cogent, to choose words that make sense in context. And second, they needed to do it alone, without discussion. (If you have a moment, feel free to follow along and add your own words.)

The class buzzed through the first two blanks, easily completing the ideas. With the third blank they started to slow down. Some started to struggle. They asked questions like, "Can I use a phrase instead of a word?" I said a short phrase was OK, but that all that had been removed in each blank space was one word. The goal, I told them, is to get the paragraph to make sense, not guess what the author said.

When most of them had finished, I said it was time to move to round two: partner work. I directed them to work in pairs or groups of three. This time they needed to discuss the task and agree on the words that filled each blank. Again, they cruised through the first few, easily agreeing about what the missing words could be. And then it got harder.

As students began to find differences in the words they were using, they started trying to convince each other why their word was better. When completing the statement: "Equitably funded schools run by ___ educators," some students chose the adjective "qualified" and others chose "passionate" and still others chose "caring." Organically, they were discussing the subtle connotations of language. Some groups got really stuck and had to skip some parts; others put two words in a spot and then discovered that how they completed the next blank was dependent on which word they chose for the previous one.

Rarely can I say that experiences I plan for my students go exactly how I anticipate. This one did. These students-many of whom had been classmates for years, who lived in similar neighborhoods and took multiple classes together-were starting to see that language impacts meaning, and that their choice of words indicated subtle and even unconscious beliefs. Those they may have presumed viewed the world just as they did actually had different points of view, and-this is important-things they thought were fact might actually be opinion. Students had picked up on all this and we hadn't even gotten to the best part of the lesson.

Next, I asked the students to focus on one sentence from the paragraph:

and share how they completed it. Here are some examples from the students.

We drilled into their words starting with "struggle," "try" and "attempt." "What do these words imply? What do these words say about the people doing the action?" I asked them. The students observed that these words insinuated difficulty, obstacles and likely failure. Some thought they conveyed a lack of will or commitment to the task. Ultimately, they agreed that these words implied a lack of agency.

Then we focused on the second words: "racing," "rising," "moving." Here the students noted progress, accomplishment, success and action. Certainly the way the statement was completed gave the "others" power and agency that the "they" in the sentence did not have.

Of course the final step was to compare their word choice with the original author's:

"Whoa," said one student.

"That's really different," said another.

I invited them to explain why.

Carter, the original author, actually gives agency to the people my students described as "struggling," "attempting," and "trying." Not only did she give them agency but by saying "they work," she implies that they have skill, purpose and goals. And by describing others as "zooming" she implies privilege. And there, in that one phrase, is material for a substantive and meaningful discussion of implicit bias.

Kyle and his class took home a lesson about how our place, our upbringing, our background and our media exposure contributes to our world view. Unless we confront the bias, we can not overcome it.

Making a Conscious Choice

If we consider the language we have used to tell our history and we choose to use different words, we are inviting different points of view into our understanding of the world; we are broadening our perspective and gaining empathy with diverse people.

I have replicated this "Mad Libs" lesson many times with both students and adults. No one has ever completed the sentences the way Prudence Carter originally wrote them. Every time I guide people through this lesson, the conversation about the role bias plays in our lives and our learning is deep and thoughtful.

Some people are struck by the need to read completely-not just skim a headline or abstract in a media feed. Others notice how limiting it is to describe an issue as binary, as in having only two sides. And still others realize that bias is inherent in all of us. For everyone, what resonates is the implicit weight of words.

The cool thing, to me, about this lesson is that the same people can do it over again with a different text and continue to learn about themselves and how their unconscious and implicit biases affect their worldview, slowly stripping out ingrained habits of bias confirmation. And then, they can consciously choose to expand their perspective.

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Everyone Has Invisible Bias. This Lesson Shows Students How to Recognize It. - EdSurge News

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Last year, an English teacher at my school came to me with an all-too-common concern about an essay a student named Kyle had just turned in. The teacher's 10th grade class had just finished op-ed essays on a topic of their choice, and Kyle had chosen to examine the economic impact of illegal immigration on the U.S.

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SECD Student Growth Measures

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Standards - SECD - Student Growth Measure K-12

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Measuring SECD Toolkit

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Standards - SECD - Instructional Examples - K-12

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Centervention’s  innovative programs provide an effective way for students to practice and improve social and emotional skills.

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Centervention’s  innovative programs provide an effective way for students to practice and improve social and emotional skills.

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In Zoo U, students learn the fundamentals of social and emotional skills through common scenarios like joining games at recess and working with a partner, with the added fun of friendly animals.

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In Zoo U, students learn the fundamentals of social and emotional skills through common scenarios like joining games at recess and working with a partner, with the added fun of friendly animals.