For families and educators, understanding and working with children who experience a combination of deafness and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be challenging. Yet both understanding and work are crucial. For children with ASD to succeed, parents and educators need to understand them and to be able to work together to implement successful…

Social skills instruction (SSI) provides a promising avenue for teaching and promoting positive social interactions to students with high-incidence disabilities. Within SSI, a distinction can be made between social skills and social competence. Social skills are specific behaviors one must perform correctly within a specific social context or…

Teachers at all levels have reported a stark decline in students' ability to interact with others face-to-face in a technology-driven world. In the world of work, communicative soft skills have surfaced as both a concern and focal point for potential employers. Schools can teach these skills using an approach called S.P.E.C.I.A.L, which focuses on…

Children have a natural proclivity to teach, help, cooperate, and empathize with others, and these interactions can have positive benefits for children's emotional, social, and cognitive development. This article is about ways music teachers can design peer-assisted music learning activities that will benefit everyone in the class and ultimately…

Social and emotional learning (SEL) provides a foundation for healthy development. It is the process children, youth, and adults go through to develop the skills to engage with others, manage their emotions, show empathy, handle stress, resolve stress, set goals, and make responsible decisions to succeed in work and life. School climate is a…

Students with emotional or behavioral disorders (EBD) are being included to a greater degree in the general education classroom. Due to the least restrictive environment mandate in the Individuals With Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004, more students with EBD are being taught in inclusive settings. As a result, general education…

Building on extensive feedback from the field as well as vigorous new research on how best to support infant and toddler development and learning, the authors have revised and updated the widely used "Infant/Toddler Environment Rating Scale." ITERS-3 is the next-generation assessment tool for use in center-based child care programs for…

Children and burgeoning adolescents' creativity blossom in play-based environments. Likewise, students as active social agents have the opportunity to examine the structures and processes that shape them. The photographic image intimates an aura of credibility, providing the students pause to reflect upon their socialized interactions. These…

Social skill acquisition is an essential step in young children's development with lasting implications for the quality of social experiences throughout life. Difficulties with social skill acquisition may be related to delays in physical development, communication methods, and/or social awareness that limit one's ability to progress along a…

Research shows that a child's social and behavioral skills affect the development of cognitive and physical abilities. Set students on a path to success and have fun doing it with this activity-packed second edition of "Wanna Play". The authors provide hundreds of activities that help children learn how to behave appropriately and make friends.…

This popular guide offers a wealth of innovative, research-based strategies for making K-12 classrooms the best learning environments they can be. Easy-to-implement best practices are presented for establishing a classroom management plan, organizing procedures and materials, building a respectful community, fostering peer collaboration, and…

Teaching social skills to mainstreamed handicapped children can be accomplished by prompting, praising, using graduated guidance, and capitalizing on incidental teaching. (CL)

Interpersonal relationships should be an important part of learning-disabled students' curricula and should focus on appropriate classroom behavior, the impact of poor language skills on socialization, resistance to change, establishing degrees of value and priorities, cause-effect relationships in human interaction, planning/organizational…

Teacher warmth and support, say University of Virginia researchers Bridget Hamre and Robert Pianta, have unparalleled power to help children adjust and achieve. Their 2005 study of 910 first-grade students included 5- and 6-year-olds whose mothers had low-level education and children identified with "significant behavior, social, and/or…

Verbal and non-verbal communication interactions have a strong influence on the social construction of gender. Therefore understanding the classroom interaction structures and the subsequent socio-cultural context is a vital commitment for any teacher. Furthermore, since gender is constructed in the day-to-day interactions of children's lives,…