Programs
Procedures and Social Skills
Character education is most effectively delivered in a safe, orderly, and caring school/classroom environment and the need for this is well established in the research. School and classroom operating policies, procedures, and practices must be aligned to ensure a safe and orderly environment.
In the following video clip CS Partners President Chuck Stockwell talks about school safety and character education.
Chuck Stockwell Video
Routines and Procedures .JPG)
The project schools are guided through a review and revision of the school and classroom operating policies, procedures, and practices that support a safe, caring, and orderly environment.
Specifically, each school examines those procedures that are consistent to the support for students making personal decisions that contribute to the well being of their peers, classroom, and school. The process of developing procedures will be accomplished individually at each school through an outlined process during professional development activities. While each school may choose slightly different school wide procedures, examples include:
Traveling Through the Building
Attention in Large Groups
Restroom Use
Playground
Taking Care of Classroom and School
.JPG)
The next step in the process is to identify classroom procedures that needed to be developed. Teachers at each grade level will begin by brainstorming lists of procedures that are part of daily classroom routines. Each classroom chooses the most essential procedures to begin teaching to students. These generally are procedures that needed to occur during transition times.
Charyl Stockwell Academy Executive Director Shelley Stockwell discusses teaching children procedures in the following video clip.
Shelley Stockwell Video
Examples of School and Classroom Procedures:
Lunchroom procedure
Restroom procedure
Entering the classroom procedure
Tardy procedure
Make-up work procedure
.JPG)
Social Skills
Social skills are important for students to master. Too often we encounter children and adults that simply lack the basic skills of appropriate social interaction. For instance, how many times do you extend a greeting to someone and during their response to you they fail to make eye contact. Or, when asking a child to complete a task they roll their eyes and/or fail to check back with you to let you know the task has been completed. Everyone needs social skills. They are needed to effectively interact with others, meet basic needs, ask for help and build up the acquisition of the character traits of getting along, kindness, optimism, respect, responsibility and work ethic.
After a thorough search of the literature and research Smart Character Choices modeled their social skills after the work done by Dowd and Tierney in Teaching Social Skills to Youth. Each school will select skills that are of high importance or need at that school. The teachers in all classrooms will introduce these to students and reinforce them throughout the year using the same teaching strategies as with procedures and routines. The social skills each have specific steps to complete it successfully as well as a rationale and helpful hints.
Administrators and teachers will model and use the social skills on a regular basis so that they become an integral part of the school culture. Initially this will be accomplished by ‘overt’ modeling, meaning the teachers will bring attention to social skills they themselves are using or that they observe used by students in a specific situation.
Examples of Lower Elementary Social Skills
Examples of Upper Elementary Social Skills
Examples of High School Social Skills
