Let’s say you give your kids an assignment to work together in a group to develop a set of flash cards for the multiplication tables.

If you made a list of the academic skills they would need to complete your assignment, you might list: counting, multiplying, writing, recalling, adding, subtracting, and so on. And most teachers would expect that all the children who had these skills would be able to satisfactorily complete the assignment.

But I don’t agree.

In such group assignments it’s easy to judge a kid as lacking the academic skill if she can’t make an adequate contribution to the group effort, but in fact it may be that she doesn’t have the social skills the assignment requires. So, when I’m training teachers how to teach social skills to their students on a daily basis, I urge them to consider not only the academic skills their assignments may require, but also the social skills.

If I were making the above assignment, here’s what I would do. I would first make sure the students knew how to assign roles in a group, take turns, ask questions, raise their hands, cooperate, and be patient, because any of your students who don’t have these skills will have a hard time completing such an assignment.

Sometimes you can recognize these kids because they’ll be the ones who let the other kids carry them. Again, you’ll think it’s because they don’t have the academic skills – and that just may not be so.

Another thing, when I ask students to work in a group I teach them how to assign a person to be the writer/recorder, another to be the time keeper, and a third to be the reporting person – the one who will report out to the class. And then I teach them how to fulfill those roles.

I strongly recommend always looking at your assignments for both the academic and social skills required. Then, use the opportunity the assignment offers to add another social skill to your kids’ repertoire.

By using the daily teachable moments, by the time June comes, you can have your students pretty skilled in working in groups.