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

on a topic or issue; clarify, verify, or challenge ideas and conclusions; and promote divergent and creative perspectives

      • Respond thoughtfully to diverse perspectives; synthesize comments, claims, and evidence made on all sides of an issue; resolve contradictions when possible; and determine what additional information or research is required to deepen the investigation or complete the task

      • Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) in order to make informed decisions and solve problems, evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source and noting any discrepancies among the data

      • Evaluate a speaker's point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric; assess the stance, premises, links among ideas, word choice, points of emphasis, and tone used

      Now we're talking real “college and career readiness.” While critics complain that some CCSS targets are irrelevant or archaic, these goals couldn't be more appropriate and realistic.

      Now we're talking real “college and career readiness."While critics complain that some CCSS targets are irrelevant or archaic, the above goals couldn't be more appropriate and realistic. School graduates who have mastered these speaking and listening skills are going to be miles ahead in their later studies, in career achievement, and in life.

      Given that forty-five states initially adopted these guidelines, the CCSS has given the explicit teaching of social-academic skills a huge push. Even though a few states never joined up or have recently parted company with the national standards, each of those states has its own set of targets that are often very similar to the CCSS. For example, the Texas standards require fifth graders to “participate in student-led discussions by eliciting and considering suggestions from other group members and by identifying points of agreement and disagreement." And in high school, to “work productively with others in teams, building on the ideas of others, contributing relevant information, developing a plan for consensus-building, and setting ground rules for decision-making” (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, 2008).

       Concern About School Climate, Violence, and Bullying

      The socioemotional climate of our public schools and the relationships among the people who inhabit them have populated the headlines in recent years. The horrific school shootings, like those at Columbine and Sandy Hook, remind us that our schools are too often crime scenes, not safe harbors. And while the rate of major violence in U.S. schools has actually been shrinking since 1993, there are still ample reasons to worry about kids' safely.

      The Centers for Disease Control (2013) reports that in a nationally representative sample of youth in grades 9-12:

      • 12 percent reported being in a physical fight on school property in the twelve months before the survey.

      • 5.9 percent reported that they did not go to school on one or more days in the thirty days before the survey because they felt unsafe at school or on their way to or from school.

      • 5.4 percent reported carrying a weapon (gun, knife, or club) on school property on one or more days in the thirty days before the survey.

      • 7.4 percent reported being threatened or injured with a weapon on school property one or more times in the twelve months before the survey.

      • 20 percent reported being bullied on school property and 16 percent reported being bullied electronically during the twelve months before the survey.

      • During 2010, there were about 828,000 nonfatal acts of violence at school among students ages twelve to eighteen.

      • Approximately 7 percent of teachers reported that they had been threatened with injury or physically attacked by a student from their school.

      • In 2009, about 20 percent of students ages twelve to eighteen reported that gangs were present at their school during the school year.

      As the CDC wrapped up in its report:

      Not all injuries are visible. Exposure to youth violence and school violence can lead to a wide array of negative health behaviors and outcomes, including alcohol and drug use and suicide. Depression, anxiety, and many other psychological problems, including fear, can result from school violence. (Centers for Disease Control, 2013)

      Among all these issues, bullying has been prioritized as a topic of urgent action. In fact, many states now require that each public school district have a bullying prevention program in place.

      Concern also is growing about teenage suicide. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), teen suicide is the third-leading cause of death for young people ages fifteen to twenty-four, surpassed only by homicide and accidents. The CDC reports that each year, 20 percent of high school students seriously consider suicide, 14 percent make a plan, and 8 percent make a suicide attempt. What pushes certain kids over the edge? The APA offers an explanation:

      The risk for suicide frequently occurs in combination with external circumstances that seem to overwhelm at-risk teens who are unable to cope with the challenges of adolescence because of predisposing vulnerabilities such as mental disorders. Examples of stressors are disciplinary problems, interpersonal losses, family violence, sexual orientation confusion, physical and sexual abuse and being the victim of bullying. (American Psychological Association, 2013)

       Discriminatory Discipline Practices

      Many traditional school disciplinary policies have now been shown to be unfair to some groups of students. Both governmental and private research studies have shown that minority students are disproportionately excluded from school through a wide array of disciplinary practices: corporal punishment, suspension, expulsion, and even referrals to police and arrests. For example, compared to white students, black students were twice as likely to face corporal punishment; 2.5 times as likely to be suspended in or out of school or arrested in a school-related incident; three times as likely to be expelled; and four times as likely to face out-of-school suspension multiple times. Similarly, Native American students were twice as likely as white students to be suspended from school several times, expelled, referred to law enforcement or arrested, or face corporal punishment (American Institutes for Research, 2013).

      All these factors combine to keep minority students out of their seats in classrooms, losing instructional time, falling behind their peers, and becoming ever more likely to drop out of schools without the skills to support themselves, and thus feeding today's accelerated, school-to-prison pipeline. In response to these accumulating reports, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went to Howard University to pledge action:

      Perhaps the most alarming findings involve the topic of discipline. The sad fact is that minority students across America face much harsher discipline than nonminorities, even within the same school. Some examples—African American students, particularly males, are far more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their peers. (Holland, 2012)

      These data are not new. Reports about inequities in school discipline policies have been circulating for decades (Skiba et al., 2002). Some cities, like Baltimore, have been revising their suspension policies to keep kids in school and learning. Since 2000, Baltimore has moved to in-school discipline approaches, and therefore lowered its suspension rate by 58 percent (Cichan, 2012). Other districts and states are finally experimenting with a variety of fairer and less exclusionary discipline approaches, including restorative justice, teen court, and peer mediation.

       Best Practice Instruction Requires Social-Academic Skills

      Although the term best practice is often used with vague intent, decades of thoughtful research have yielded a clear consensus on what optimal classroom instruction looks like—and it doesn't