Setting Social Guidelines: A Proactive, Universal Intervention

Community building activities foster a positive and safe learning environment as students get to know one another and discover how they can learn and work together. Community building should take place at the beginning of the year and should continue throughout the school year as students learn about one another and themselves.

When we create a safe learning environment, we implement a proactive universal intervention. Another way to intervene and create a positive and safe learning environment involves the creation of social guidelines that guide the group in their daily interactions and communications. This intervention sets the expectations for how the class will communicate, learn, and work collaboratively.

Social guidelines foster a positive learning environment. They also set expectations for how the group will communicate and interact with one another as they learn and work together. Social guidelines should encourage an environment of responsibility and respect and support the learning objectives of the classroom.

“You must extend to others what you want to receive. It begins with you.”
—Susan Scott, Fierce Conversations

The tips below are based on ideas offered in the PLS course Behavioral, Academic, and Social Interventions for the Classroom™.

Read on for a social guideline you can use with your students to kick off the new school year.

Social guidelines often involve a school mascot or motivational acronym to communicate individual guidelines. An example might be SAIL. Use the visual of a sailboat to represent smooth sailing in the classroom and the word SAIL to represent the attributes Share, Accept others, Involve yourself, and Listen.

You can either come up with the words to represent the attributes or have students come up with them, either as a class or in small groups. Be sure you and/or the students explain what each of the attributes means. In other words, what does share look like, sound like, and feel like? What does accept others look like, sound like, and feel like? Students can explain, role play, and/or have you model the attributes until they are prepared to practice them on their own. Older students can become involved enough to create the guidelines.

You may wish to create a poster with the acronym and reference it throughout the year as students practice the attributes. The poster can also serve as a quick and effective reminder when students disregard the attributes.

Social guidelines such as the poster demonstrate a proactive universal intervention that you can use in your classroom. Social guidelines also establish expectations for a positive classroom environment and the majority of the students in our classroom will respond to and operate under these guidelines. At the secondary level, you may begin to hear students draw their peers’ attention to the guidelines when someone does something out of line.

Did you know?

Social and emotional development is the foundation of academic success (Zins et al., 2004; Zins, Elias, & Greenberg, 2007).

Schools must strive to be as effective in teaching social-emotional skills as they are in developing academic competencies (Bernard, 2006).

Resilience in high-risk youths can be strengthened by developing their problem-solving skills, internal locus of control, and social skills (Furlong, Morrison, & Jimerson, 2007).

Taking It Further

Visit the Positive Behavioral Intervention & Supports Web site at http://www.pbis.org/ for more information about school-wide interventions.

References

Bernard, M. E. (2006). It’s time we teach social-emotional competence as well as we teach academic competence. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 22(2), 103–119.

Furlong, M. J., Morrison, G. M., & Jimerson, S. R. (2007). Externalizing behaviors of aggression and violence and the school context. In R. B. Rutherford Jr., M. M. Quinn, & S. R. Mathur (Eds.), Handbook of research in emotional and behavioral disorders (pp. 243–261). New York: Guilford.

Zins, J. E., Bloodworth, M. R., Weissberg, R. P., & Walberg, H. J. (2004). The scientific base linking social and emotional learning to school success. In J. E. Zins, R. P. Weissberg, M. C. Wang, & H. J. Walberg (Eds.), Building academic success on social and emotional learning: What does the research say? (pp. 3–22). New York: Teachers College.

Zins, J. E., Elias, M. J., & Greenberg, M. T. (2007). School practices to build social-emotional competence as the foundation of academic and life success. In R. Bar-On, J. G. Maree, & M. J. Elias (Eds.), Educating people to be emotionally intelligent (pp. 79–94). Westport, CT: Praeger.