Читать книгу Teaching the Social Skills of Academic Interaction, Grades 4-12 - Harvey "Smokey" Daniels - Страница 12

Chapter 3

How to Use This Resource

Overview

There are two parts to this resource. One, which you will grab from the book's companion website (www.corwin.com/teachingsocialskills), is a set of thirty-five projectable skill lessons, ranging from 6 to 25 slides each (468 slides in all, just for the record). Each of these lessons is a classroom-ready slideshow with which you can teach your kids a specific social-academic skill, like being a good partner, asking follow-up questions, or arguing both sides of a controversial topic. While we created these slides in PowerPoint, they are delivered as PDFs, so you can play them on any platform.

Here, in the book, we offer systematic guidance to support you through each lesson. This includes tips, variations, and warnings about any predictable problems for each slide. Thumbnails of the slides adjacent to the step-by-step tips help you keep your place. And, in italics, we offer specific teaching language that you can try out, guiding kids through the more complex steps in a lesson.

We envision you teaching a lesson with this lay-flat book on your lap (or your desk) and a clicker in the other hand as you advance the slides.

In our minds' eye, we envision you teaching a lesson with this lay-flat book on your lap (or your desk) and a clicker in the other hand as you advance the slides. By keeping the book open to the corresponding page, you can see what's coming next and quickly spot the guidance we've offered.

So, before teaching a lesson, we suggest that you read through the book's notes, rehearse your teaching a bit, learn of any potential pitfalls, and grab some grace notes. For what it's worth, we think that all school lessons should be offered to kids this way: with oral, written, and illustrated instructions. We already know that projecting instructions is a vital accommodation for language learners and for many kids with IEPs (not to mention our visual/auditory learners). But now we realize that providing lesson instructions in multiple modalities enhances success for everyone in the room (including the teacher, who gets useful prompts from the screen).

A Guide to the Slides

Meet the Kids

With the wonderful cartooning skills of our partner Satya Moses, we created a cast of students who represent the lovable range of young people we have worked with over the years. These kids appear in the lessons to illustrate different steps, and to model effective social skills. We hope you enjoy getting to know their distinct personalities, and suspect you'll eventually have a favorite student.

Structure of the Lessons

Each of the thirty-five slide presentations offers a complete lesson that helps kids learn and practice a particular social-academic subskill. The lessons take from five to forty-five minutes, averaging around twenty. A couple of the more sophisticated ones stretch over two class periods. But these lessons are not time stolen from your curriculum. They don't assign your kids to interact about nothing. Instead, the content of the lessons—the topics discussed, articles read, or controversies addressed—come directly from your subject matter.

The content of the lessons—the topics discussed, articles read, or controversies addressed—come directly from your subject matter.