I’ve had so many ideas swirling around for blog posts for the past several months that I’ve had trouble deciding where to start.
I have been co-teaching in general education classes and helping students at my school grow and develop a personal life skills class and club. The process of seeing teens with and without disabilities come together to work on social skills has been the most challenging, rewarding, exasperating, and joyful work of my career. I’m making an effort to carve out time for the blog again.
Personal Life Skills started as a class that did occasional outings and met daily as a class. Our class brings together teens who have intellectual disabilities and teens who don’t. There are behaviors. Lots. Of. Behaviors. When I came on board three years ago, I tried to run the class like I had my center-based EBD program. It was okay…but not great. A lot of the lessons I’d found successful in the past fell flat. The hardest thing for me to do was relax and let the kids tell me what they wanted and needed to do. Kids can say stuff to other kids that I could never say. Newsflash, fellow professionals: teenaged girls don’t want to talk about their armpit hair with you.
Letting go of tight control over my days (and, eventually, my nights and weekends) made me sweaty with anxiety. Like, actually sweaty…on my forehead…little beads of sweat. I was deeply fearful of everything that could go wrong. What if somebody had a seizure when they were out in the hall painting a banner? What if someone had a meltdown and flipped a table? What if a student hit a peer model? What if a student bit a peer model? The list of what-ifs was paralyzing. Honestly, my personal life skills class was the most dreaded part of my day that first year. I was crippled by what-ifs and my own, misguided belief that—if I only sweated enough–I could keep unpleasant things from happening. I would have traded my soul to get rid of that class.
Guess what? Unpleasant things happened anyway. I was a nervous wreck.
I turned a corner in February of that first year. I was tired of trying to cook up lessons every day that felt not-quite-right. Two of the peer models said they wanted to host a dance for high school students and peer models in our school district. My teaching partner at the time and I were not initially enthusiastic. You know…because of the sweaty anxiety. I mean, what if somebody had a seizure AT THE DANCE? What if someone had a meltdown AT THE DANCE? What if a student hit a peer model AT THE DANCE?
THE TERRIBLE SWEATS!
Ugh. But I’m a sucker. The kids were so excited. And, besides, they were already hitting and biting and table-flipping and having seizures anyway. Doing it at a dance wouldn’t really be much worse, right?
Planning for that dance was a major turning point for me and for the students. Instead of solely teaching social skills via direct instruction (which, honestly, had been my forte), we were busy doing authentic tasks with a purpose; we had buy-in. Our peer models were providing literally dozens of tiny, subtle social skills lessons every single day during the planning and preparation process. Guess what? It’s hard to hit somebody if your hands are making a corsage out of tissue paper. It’s hard to flip a table if you’re delivering flyers to mailboxes in the office. It’s hard to bite somebody if you are blowing up a balloon. The peer models and I had a major realization: the trick to teaching social skills and using peer models effectively is to set a normative “high school experience” goal for the group and go about doing it. This was a game-changer for all of us.
Peer models were empowered to take leadership and ownership. Students rose to the occasion because they HAD to in order to gain a desired reinforcer (going to the dance). We had a sense of purpose that kept us engaged. Were there bad days? Sure. Were there times when our committees didn’t do what they were supposed to do? Absolutely. My teaching partner and I were not absolved from teaching; the teaching simply looked different from the model to which we were accustomed. Our role as teachers changed. Much of the time, we became responsive assistants. When we did lead the class in direct instruction, it was much more targeted; we were using explicit instruction in short mini-lessons to address specific social behaviors we observed as committees went about their work.
When the dance finally happened, it was an amazing experience for all of us. I had all the feels. I ruined our best video of the dance because I was bawling in the background and it was drowning out the music.
That dance was the defining moment for our group. It opened the door to an avalanche of other social activities and school engagement. We redefined our purpose. We changed EVERYTHING about our class and club after that. Peer models and students had gotten a taste of choosing their own goals, and there was no going back. Three years in, we have reshaped our group into an essential part of our larger school community. Our social skills club is a force to be reckoned with. As a group, we go to sporting events, attend school plays, participate in the Homecoming parade (Our float won AGAIN this year. It was NOT a “pity prize”–we blew everyone else out of the water), earn varsity letters for Job Olympics, represent ourselves at assemblies, sponsor the annual Trunk-or Treat to benefit a local food bank, host fundraisers where everyone works a shift, sponsor Kindness Week, and (for the first time, this year) have a Unified Athletics Special Olympics team. The best part? NONE of this was my idea. The kids chose what they wanted to do; all I do is support them and guide them when they hit a roadblock.
It has been wonderful…and sometimes scary. Each time we take on a new challenge, I feel that unpleasant, sweaty feeling. That never really goes away when you’re working with students who have significant disabilities and behavioral challenges. However, the growth I’ve observed in both students and peer models keeps me pushing forward with the program…and mopping my brow.
Tags: secondary special education, social skills curriculum, peer models, project driven classroom, student directed learning, SECD lessons
