Social Skills Lesson Plan: Initiating Conversation 1. Group: The small group consists of six students that range from 9-10 years old, both male and female. All students are identified with various learning disabilities and struggle in reading as well as oral communication. 2. Skill: Initiating a conversation with a peer 3. How and why skill chosen was for instruction The social skill “initiating conversation” was chosen because through observation and teacher interviews it has been noted that many of the students have difficulty making friends and do not know how to appropriately approach their peers. Based on observations I have made in class, recess, and lunch students use attention-grabbing tactics such as poking or interrupting others as a way to start an interaction with their peers. Overall, being able to initiate conversation will help students build a social support system which can improve their attitudes about school, their self-esteem, ability to express themselves orally and help students work in groups or with partners in an academic situation. 4. Objective: The student will initiate communication once a day with someone they know or someone new during classroom group activities, lunch or recess. 5. Material(s): White board, eraser, topic cards, and conversation starter worksheet Instruction Procedures: Teacher starts lesson by asking class why they start conversations with other people. a. Describe skill: Initiating a conversation means going up to someone you know or don’t know in order to get and/or give information. 6. Teacher will discuss reasons for initiating conversations, eliciting examples from the class first, then providing reasons to help guide them. To learn about people’s interests To make friends To get help To join in a group To share your opinion Next the teacher will model both good and bad examples of how to initiate conversation with a peer by acting out a scenario with the paraprofessional as listed below: Teacher: goes to paraprofessional and start poking her and making weird face Paraprofessional: Stop that is annoying, leave me alone. Ask student what was wrong with your approach and elicit bad examples of initiating a conversation. Then discuss good ways of initiating conversation, guiding student examples to fit the steps of the skill (Make eye contact, smile and say name, greeting) Next model an appropriate way to initiate a conversation with the paraprofessional using an example below. Teacher: Ms Stout, how was your weekend? Paraprofessional: Good, I went to the mall. What did you do? 1 Teacher then differentiates situations in which the students approaches someone they know versus someone they don’t know and elicits ideas from class while writing them on the board. Together the class will make a list of topic sentences to initiate conversations with people the students know and people they don't know. Next pass out topic cards to pairs of students and let them practice with each other. Student will report back what they learned about their partner and if they have anything in common. Next switch partners and topic cards and let students practice again. b. Student Rationale (adapted from the PBIS Compendium web site): Teacher will give examples and elicit examples from students. It shows friends we like them We can make new friends It’s polite People like to talk People may want to learn more about us and our interests People will wants us to be in their group and play with us at recess What happens if we don’t begin talking in a nice way c. General conditions for using skill: To learn more about someone you know or don’t know, to ask for help, to join a group or get another person to engage in talking with you or doing an acitivity with you. d. Specific examples of situations in which the skill is used: At lunchtime if you want to share your food or trade snacks. During recess if a group of your peers are playing kickball and you would like to join or you want someone to play a board game with you. When you are in class and working in a group and don’t understand something you can ask, or if your highlighter runs out you can ask to borrow one. e. Steps of the skill: Teacher will specify why each step is important, but will first elicit reasons from class and supplement accordingly. For example: Eye contact and saying a person’s name lets them know we are talking to them, smiling lets others know we are approaching them in a friendly manner, appropriate space ensures that our peers can hear what we are saying. Do not invade personal space as it makes people uncomfortable. Come up with an appropriate greeting (e.g., “Hi, how are you? What did you do this weekend?) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Make eye contact Smile and say person’s name Greeting (topic sentence or question) Space (allow peer personal space) Wait for a response f. Model the skill : Teacher will role-play by initiating a conversation with different students in the class. Solicit feedback from the class, let those participating what went well and what went bad in the conversation. Next assign pairs of students to talk initiate a conversation with each other. Pass out topic cards and have each student think of a starting/greeting sentence to get a conversation going in that subject area. They can choose to share information or ask information. g. Verbal rehearsal of skill steps (students learn to name steps of skill to automaticity) 2 Steps will be written on white board. Class will practice chorally saying the steps, in normal voices, whisper voices and robot voices. Next let the students repeat the steps in a round robin format until they can repeat with automaticity. For students with memory difficulties supply an index card with the steps that they can keep in their pocket. h. Behavioral rehearsal (role play) : (adapted from the PBIS Compendium web site) Teacher selects two students at random (names could be drawn from a hat/bowl). One student stands on the front of the room. The other goes to the hall, re-enters classroom and is to approach the other, make eye contact, smile and say the person’s name and say greeting. Teacher will give feedback to students if they left out any steps. To generalize, supply students with a worksheet with three conversation-starting sentences and have students self-record the number of people they initiate conversation and how it went on a sheet provided at the end of the lesson. At the end of the day they will turn in their sheets. i. Homework (generalization) assignment Students are to initiate a conversation on an assigned topic with their parent or older sibling and report back details of the conversation to the teacher the next day. Assignment will be put in planner for parent to sign for confirmation. 7. Student Evaluation—evidence of student learning After reciting steps chorally and practicing the steps with a partner, the students could repeat the steps with 100% accuracy in order when called on in a round robin format. Additionally, when the children reported back from their topic cards activity, they reiterated the steps their partner did in initiating the conversation and were able to share common interests they learned about each other through conversation, reinforcing why initiating conversations is relevant to them. Students specified if their partner completed each of the steps and specifically shared the greeting/topic sentence they used during the conversation. 8. Lesson Evaluation/Additional comments The conversation skills demonstrated by the paraprofessional and me went well and helped elicit ideas from the children on both good and bad ways to initiate conversation. Students openly admitted to getting nervous in approaching others to talk, which reinforced the relevance for the lesson. I had good participation from the students in chorally stating the steps of the skill and they volunteered to repeat them more when they got to choose the “type” of voice we used. In particular they had fun using a robot voice. One of my students was out, so I had to partner with one student, which didn’t allow me to monitor other’s conversations. One group had a hard time grasping the purpose of the topic cards and instead of using the topic card of “pets” to make conversation; they tried to make up a story. So I redirected them to appropriate topic sentences and got them on the right track. The second round of topic cards went a lot better and students actually learned new information about each other and found common interests. If I did the lesson again, I would have had one student pair model their topic card conversation to the class and critiqued them, before I let them practice independently. At the end of the day, only two of my five students initiated conversation with three different people and completed their worksheet. Two initiated conversation with one person and one student did not initiate a conversation with anyone. However that one student was pulled away from his peers during recess and afternoon classes for testing and had less opportunities. References: 3 PBIS Compendium. (2010). Retrieved on November 9, 2010 from http://pbiscompendium.ssd.k12.mo.us/ResourcesSchools/SSD/SocialSkills/0108.htm Name ________________________ Conversation Starter checklist 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Make eye contact Smile and say person’s name Space (be close enough but not too close) Greeting Wait for a response Sentences to use as a greeting: 1. Did you have a good weekend? 2. What kind of sandwich is that? It looks delicious. 3. I forgot my highlighter today. May I borrow yours? 4. I have a sister/brother. Do you have any sisters or brothers? 5. Can you help me I don’t understand this math problem? People I initiated conversation with today: Name _______________ When: Lunch Recess Class Name _______________ When: Lunch Recess Class Name:________________ When: Lunch Recess Class 4 5