If you have been in education the last several years, you may have noticed a shift in our students’ behavior. I know the 2022-2023 school year was unlike anything I have ever experienced. I’d like to say I saw it all but I know that we all could trade horror stories of the trauma, pain, and stress that we saw in our students and may have experienced ourselves.
I wasn’t prepared for this year, the teachers I worked with weren’t prepared, our building wasn’t prepared, and the district wasn’t prepared. I saw behaviors unlike anything I had ever seen before. Being the Student Intervention Team facilitator, I hosted hours upon hours of meetings with teachers and support staff on trying to prevent and react to student behaviors. I don’t have the magic ingredient or the key to cure all behaviors, because that just simply doesn’t exist. Behaviors are complicated, intense, and time consuming.
There were a few things that I learned and one of the TOP strategies we found to help with (again not “fix” or “cure”) preventing or decreasing behaviors…what was that strategy you ask? Social stories.
Social stories should be designed in a way that is relevant to the students, uses simple and/or familiar language, and pre-teaches an expected behavior in a positive way.
Whole Group Instruction
Social stories can be utilized during whole group instruction. They can support morning meetings, mini lessons, or your social emotional instruction. Social stories can be used to introduce an expected behavior, classroom procedure, routine, or rule. They can also be used to review expected behaviors in the classroom or in the school.
I like to use social stories whole group when I need to introduce a routine or procedure or review as needed when behaviors tend to increase.
Small Group Instruction
Not all students need to learn or review all school or classroom routines and expectations. Most often, there are a select few students who have difficulty with executing the expected behaviors throughout the day. Social stories can be used during a small group time during the day to proactively teach what’s expected and/or facilitate peer groups.
Small groups don’t have to be 20-minute lessons, it can be a quick 5-minute lesson to review and/or teach the missing skill. This can be done while students are transitioning to another activity, right before recess when students are lining up, center time, station time, independent work time, etc.
Individual Intervention
Like I said in small groups, social stories may not be for everyone. However, you may have a student or two (or more) that need lots of reminders of expected behaviors throughout the day. Social stories can definitely help with this.
I have found that reading social stories can improve positive behaviors. We no longer can assume that students have learned how to be a student the last several years. If a student is struggling to demonstrate expected behaviors, it’s necessary then to teach what that should look like and sound like. Again, I’m not saying it’s the key to drastically changing everything, but we don’t expect students to just learn how to read by watching others do it. We must teach what we want to see.
If you want to give social stories a try, check out my FREE active listening social story!
