Education is meant to accomplish many different things for students. One important aspect that often times gets overlooked is socialization.
What Social Skills are Learned Through Education?
There are many different social skills that your child will learn while attending school. These include:
- Greetings
- Learning how to initiate a conversation
- Understanding how to be a good listener
- Learning how they can be an empathetic member of society
- Determining how to properly read social cues
- Thinking about the effect that the words they use in a conversation will have on other members of the conversation (a.k.a. previewing)
- Finding good ways to solve problems
- Discovering when they should apologize and how they should go about doing so
How Teachers can Help Students Learn These Skills
These skills may seem as though they would be innate – skills that we were naturally born with. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case and children must learn them. This is why having a teacher available to help them here is so important. When it comes to improving a child’s social skills, the teacher has a variety of important roles that they must perform. These roles include:
- Allowing children to actively engage with one another. This will allow the child to naturally learn and practice their social skills. Over time they will be able to do so with great accomplishment.
- Teachers should always take advantage of any opportunity that’s available to them to help children with social skills. When this is done as a natural part of the daily environment, it will trump any class on social skills that the teacher may offer.
- Being alert to teasing before it reaches the level of bullying is important. Noticing when children are being ignored or rejected by their peers is vital. Once a teacher notices this they should work with the child’s parents to prevent any humiliation, distress, or embarrassment that could otherwise occur.
- Teachers can be valuable facilitators when it comes to helping a child become socially competent. One way of doing this is by pairing a child who may be socially inept with one who’s socially adept. This will help everyone involved learn that social strengths and weaknesses should be accepted and celebrated because everyone plays an important role in the classroom environment.
Understanding how a school can help your child improve their social skills is one thing, but finding a school that successfully accomplished this is quite another. If you live near Mansfield, Texas this isn’t something you have to worry about though. The Children’s Academy has successfully done this for many children over the years. Contact them today so they can help your child too.
