Promoting Social Emotional Development in Young Children

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Promoting Social Emotional Development in Young
Children

• Rosa Milagros Santos, Ph.D.
• rsantos_at_uiuc.edu
• Center on the Social Emotional Foundation for
  Early Learning
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Agenda

• Introductions and quick overview of CSEFEL
• Importance of social emotional skills
• Teaching triangle (or pyramid)
• Social Emotional Teaching Strategies
• Identifying teachable moments
• Positive relationships as an essential foundation
• Friendship skills
• Emotional literacy
• Controlling anger and impulse
• Please feel free to ask questions or make
  comments any time during the session!

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Center Collaborators

• University of Illinois
• University of Colorado at Denver
• University of South Florida
• Education Development Center
• University of Connecticut
• Tennessee Voices for Children

Funding Agencies

• Head Start Bureau
• Child Care Bureau

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To Strengthen the Capacity of Head Start and
Child Care to Promote the Social and Emotional
Foundations of Learning
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Guiding Principles

• Prevention
• Comprehensiveness
• Intensity
• Clear criteria for efficacy
• Cost and time efficiency
• Long term essential outcomes
• Family-centeredness
• Cultural and linguistic sensitivity
• Collaboration with and responsiveness to consumers

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Products

• What Works briefs
• Interactive Web site
• Videotape vignettes
• Training Modules
• Others

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Social emotional development as a foundation for
school and life success

• Key indicators of school readiness that are
  related to social emotional development
• Persistence at difficult tasks
• Ability to express emotions and feelings
  appropriately
• Ability to make and sustain relationships with
  peers and adults
• Confidence
• Ability to negotiate and cooperate in a group
  setting

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Social emotional development as a foundation for
school and life success

• Childrens social emotional development at entry
  to kindergarten is predictive of their later
  success in other important areas such as language
  and literacy and cognitive development.
• Children who have accomplished these indicators
  are more likely to engage in and learn from
  activities and experiences that promote their
  skills in language and literacy, cognition, and
  numeracy.

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Social emotional development as a foundation for
school and life success

• Environments that promote social emotional
  development reflect indicators of high quality
  care in general.
• When children dont experience high quality early
  care and learning experiences they are less
  likely to benefit from even the best teaching and
  they are more likely to engage in challenging
  behavior when they get to school.

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Key social and emotional skills children need as
they enter school

• Key Skills
• Confidence
• Capacity to develop good relationships with peers
• Concentration and persistence on challenging
  tasks
• Ability to effectively communicate emotions
• Ability to listen to instructions and be
  attentive
• When children dont have these skills, they often
  exhibit challenging behaviors.
• We must focus on teaching the skills!!

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Intensive Individualized Intervention
Social Emotional Teaching Strategies
Preventive Practices
Building Healthy Relationships with Children,
Families, and Colleagues
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Building relationships with children, families,
and colleagues

• Why is it important?
• Creates a safe environment for children.
• Ensures that all children, even those with the
  most challenging behaviors, have access to
  ongoing positive relationships.
• Video Segment
• Watch what the teacher does to build
  relationships with the children.
• What strategies does she use?

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What are your HOT Buttons?

• What behaviors have you seen that press your
  buttons?
• What is a challenging behavior?
• What factors influence how we view behaviors?

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Classroom strategies that promote childrens
success

• Create a context that makes EVERY child feel good
  about coming to school
• Design an environment that promotes child
  engagement
• Focus on teaching children what to do!
• Teach expectations and routines
• Teach skills that children can use in place of
  challenging behaviors

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Environmental factors that influence childrens
behaviors

• Physical design
• Schedule and routines
• Transitions
• Engagement
• Rules
• Ongoing monitoring and positive attention
• Praise and encouragement

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Major Messages

• First and foremost, build positive relationships
  with every child family.
• Focus on prevention and teaching appropriate
  skills.
• Promoting social emotional development is not
  easy.
• There are no quick fixes to challenging behavior
• Requires a comprehensive approach that includes
  building relationships, evaluating our own
  classrooms and behaviors, and TEACHING.

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Intensive Individualized Intervention
Social Emotional Teaching Strategies
Preventive Practices
Building Healthy Relationships with Children,
Families, and Colleagues
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We will focus our session today on

• Identifying teachable moments
• Positive relationships as an essential foundation
• Friendship skills
• Emotional literacy
• Controlling anger and impulse

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Identifying Teachable Moments

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Building Positive Relationships with Children
Share
Happy Grams
Home visits
Notes home
Time Attention
Play
Empathy


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Friendship Skills

• How to give suggestions (play organizers)
• Sharing toys and other materials
• Turn taking (reciprocity)
• Being helpful
• Giving compliments
• Understanding how and when to give an apology

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Play Organizers

• Rationale
• Describe
• Get friends attention
• Give friend a toy
• Give idea what to do with toy or play idea
• Demonstrate
• Right way
• Wrong way
• Practice
• Promote

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Sharing

• Rationale
• Describe skill
• Child has materials
• Offers or responds to request from peer for
  materials
• Demonstrate
• Right way
• Wrong way
• Practice
• Promote

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Turn Taking

• Rationale
• Describe skill
• Get friends attention (look, tap, call)
• Hold out hand
• Ask for toy
• Demonstrate
• Right way
• Wrong way
• Practice
• Promote

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Being Helpful/Teamwork

• Rationale
• Describe skill
• How to help at home
• How to help at school
• Demonstrate
• Right way
• Wrong way
• Practice
• Promote

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Giving Compliments

• Rationale
• Describe
• Verbal say things like
• Good job _____! Great _____! I like the
  way you _____!
• Physical Do things like
• Hug Pat on the shoulder High Five
• Demonstrate
• Right way
• Wrong way
• Practice
• Promote

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Knowing When and How to Give Apologies

• Rationale
• Describe skill
• Im sorry that___
• I didnt mean to ___
• Demonstrate
• Right way
• Wrong way
• Practice
• Promote

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Setting the Stage for Friendship

• Inclusive setting
• Cooperative use toys
• Embed opportunities
• Social interaction goals and objectives
• Ethos of friendship

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Strategies for Developing Friendship Skills

• Modeling principles
• Modeling with video
• Modeling with puppets
• Preparing peer partners
• Buddy system
• Priming
• Direct modeling
• Reinforcement

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Enhancing Emotional Literacy

• Learning words for different feelings
• Learning how to recognize feelings in self and
  others

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Increasing Feeling Vocabularies

• Direct teaching
• Incidental teaching
• Use childrens literature
• Use songs and games
• Play How would you feel if?
• Checking in
• Feeling dice and feeling wheels

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Feeling Activities
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Identifying Feelings inSelf and Others

• Learning ways to relax
• Empathy training

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Relaxation Thermometer
Take 3 deep breaths 1...2...3
Adapted from Incredible Years Dinosaur School
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Identifying Feelings inSelf and Others

• Empathy Training

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Key Concepts with Feelings

• Feelings change
• You can have more than one feeling about
  something
• You can feel differently than someone else about
  the same thing
• All feelings are valid it is what you do with
  them that counts

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Controlling Anger and Impulse

• Recognizing that anger can interfere with problem
  solving
• Learning how to recognize anger in oneself and
  others
• Learning how to calm down
• Understanding appropriate ways to express anger

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For children with persistent, challenging
behaviors

• A comprehensive approach to addressing the
  behavior is required.
• Must consider all environments and all
  stakeholders
• Develop and implement a systematic plan based on
  an understanding of the child and the problem
  behavior.

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Intensive Individualized Intervention
Social Emotional Teaching Strategies
Preventive Practices
Building Healthy Relationships with Children,
Families, and Colleagues
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Ways to address persistent, challenging
behaviorsOLD Way NEW Way

• General intervention for all behavior problems
• Intervention is reactive
• Focus on behavior reduction
• Quick Fix

• Intervention matched to purpose of the behavior
• Intervention is proactive
• Focus on teaching new skills
• Long term interventions

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Positive Behavior Support

• A values-based, empirically-valid approach for
  resolving problem behaviors and helping people
  lead enhanced lifestyles
• A new applied science of behavior change

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Research suggests that

• Problem behavior has meaning for the child.
• The function of problem behaviors is defined by
  the context.
• Functional assessment is the formal process for
  determining the why (i.e., function) of problem
  behaviors.
• Behavior support plans are best developed by a
  team.

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Research suggests that

• The support plan must include prevention
  strategies, replacement skills and new ways to
  respond to problem behavior.
• Behavior support must be an ongoing effort and
  outcomes must be monitored.

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Major Messages

• When children are engaged, they are less likely
  to engage in challenging behaviors - this means
  we have to TEACH!
• Childrens challenging behaviors are serving some
  function, they are communicating some message -
  this means we have to figure out the MESSAGE!
• When we focus on prevention and teaching
  appropriate skills, we take the blame off of
  children - this means we have to focus on
  changing OUR behavior!!

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• If a child doesnt know how to read, we teach.
• If a child doesnt know how to swim, we teach.
• If a child doesnt know how to multiply, we
  teach.
• If a child doesnt know how to drive, we teach.
• If a child doesnt know how to behave, we
  ......teach? punish?
• Why cant we finish the last sentence as
  automatically as we do the others?
• Tom Herner (NASDE President ) Counterpoint
  1998, p.2)

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For more information, visit our web site at
http//www.csefel.uiuc.edu