Social and Emotion Behavior Process

This afternoon I was watching my son Hunter crush the baseball at batting practice. As I watched him, I was amazed at how much he has grown up and how mature he is becoming. Besides being very athletically gifted, at 14, he practices being a gentleman and genuinely works on using good manners and being the type of person that makes a Dad proud. Don’t get me wrong, he can still be a big-time goofball. He is 14 after all. But as I sat watching Hunter I began thinking about all the times this boy made me laugh. And aside from swelling with pride when he holds the door open for others and is the first to jump up and offer to help, his ability to make me laugh has been one of my life’s great blessings. As I was watching him at practice I became nostalgic and remembered this:

How do you teach social skills to a group of students lacking the basic social skills to sit, listen, participate, and learn?

Last week we talked about the method, or pedagogy, for teaching social and emotional skills. After all, you can’t just start a conversation or class with kids by telling them what they are doing wrong socially or where they are missing the boat emotionally. The Probative-Informative-Probative-Assimilative (PIPA) methodology lets you start a conversation with the kids and then use the tenor of the conversation to guide them to a skill that needs to be addressed. This is a critical part of the social and emotional development process, because it is an opportunity for the young person to identify a problem and then begin the development of problem solving skills.

Over the last three weeks I have had the incredible opportunity of visiting with educators, administrators, and legislators in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Alabama. I have spent time in Lansing, Madison, and Huntsville, and during that time and at each stop I have had the great privilege of visiting with people who are dedicating their lives to making sure our children have the best opportunities possible. From school to ready-to-work to free and reduced-cost meals to immunizations, these good people are trying to insure our kids have access to the greatest social experiment in history – the American way of life.