What+about+this+Scenario

What about this Scenario: Jeff is a student in Miss Erney’s class who lacks the ability to get along with his peers. Jeff’s inappropriate behavior includes taking toys and food from his classmates’ hands. On the playground, students try to avoid Jeff so that he does not take their things. When Miss Erney talked with Jeff about his inappropriate behavior, he refused to take responsibility and blamed his classmates for the problems. Recently, Jeff has withdrawn from the class, and he frequently can be found walking alone on the playground and after school. Miss Erney wants to help Jeff become more socially mature.

1. Discuss the use of sociometric techniques to assess social skills and related problems. How can Miss Erney use information from a sociogram to help Jeff? Sociometric techniques are commonly used to assess social skills and related problems. Sociometric methodology is typically is grouped into three categories: Peer Nominations, peer ratings, and peer assessment. The peer nominations are asking students to nominate peers according to nonbehavioral criteria such as preferred work partners, best friends, or perferred play partners. These sociometric techniques can provide a detailed look at the social status of Jeff in the classroom. It may help identify why he is behaving the way he is. For example rejected students tend to show agressive behaviors and disruptive behaviors, whereas neglected students display high rate of shy withdrawn and fearful behaviors and low rates of positive social interactions. Using a sociogram and graphing all of the data collected from the peer nominations, peer ratings, peer assessment will give you a visual picture of the whole class and may identify a student who could be paired up with Jeff to help him on his social interactions.

2. Discuss the use of social skills training to reduce Jeff’s inappropriate social behaviors. Include the use of direct instruction to increase Jeff’s interpersonal social skills. Interpersonal social skills can be increased through direct instruction. Four types of direct instruction are 1. Description: involves primarily oral techniques in which the teacher describes how to perform a skill appropriately. 2. Modeling involves demonstrations of the social skill ither by live models or by film, audiotape, or pictorial models. 3. Rehersal involves verbal repetition of requred skill steps to ensure that the students have memorized the steps in sequence and can instruct themselves in what to do next and structd practice whereby the learner attempts to perfrom the skill. 4. Fedback- involves verbal reinforcement following rehersal to inform the students about what steps they performed well and what behaviors need improvment. Behaviors chosen should be important to Jeff's environment.

3. Describe three social development activities that may help Jeff with his social problems. Predict some of the possible outcomes of each activity. Pairing Jeff with a competent socially mature peer for various activities will help Jeff learn to work cooperatively and the success or failure of the project can be shared by both students. This may be hard for Jeff at first, but ultimately this should be a good thing for Jeff. Another activity for Jeff is using modeling techniques to teach various social skills praise the model for appropriate social behavior in the presence of Jeff. This may cause some tension at first because he may not be receiving attention or be receptive to this, but over time this should be a helpful activity. Another activity is working on vocabulary that expresses feelings. One way to do this is to glue pockets on a large piece of tageboard and on each pocket illustrate a face showing a different expression(smiling, frowning, and serious) write words expressing feelings (sad, cheerful, troubled, anxious, pleased, miserable, and nervous.)on index cards. Instruct Jeff to match each word to a picture expressing that emotion. The correct face can be drawn on the back of each card so that the student can check the response. This activity should work well for Jeff to identify feelings and put names to it.

4. Instructional games promote positive peer relations and enable the teacher to work on specific social behaviors. Create a game that Miss Erney can use to help promote Jeff’s social development. media type="file" key="Social_Skills_game.swf" width="560" height="421" 5. Discuss the use of life-space interviewing and reality therapy as two interventions to manage Jeff’s behavior and promote his emotional development. The life-space interviewing is a way for Jeff to work out the problem independently. The interview is also designed to be free of judgement. The steps involved are: 1. All students that are involved are able to give their own impressions without being interrupted. 2. The teacher listens without casting judgement, asks questions to determine the accuracy of each student's perception. 3. If the student cannot resolve the problem agreeably the teacher may have to suggest an acceptable plan to deal with it. 4. The students and the teacher work together to develop a plan for solving similar problems in the furture. The life-space interviewing process will give Jeff a change to express his feelings and side of the story in a calm and hopefully producative manner. In reality therapy all students are assume responsible for their own behavior, student receives emotional support during the interview process and no judgements are made. The morality of the behavior is emhasized and the student is taught socially accepted ways to handle problems.