Tips for Teachers
Supporting Social Skills on the Playground
Schools can take steps to promote and teach positive behavior at recess. First, develop simple schoolwide expectations for playground behavior. Then communicate them clearly to all. Posting the rules in public, visible places can be helpful.
In addition, increasing adult availability on the playground to teach and reinforce these rules is a wise investment in school safety. Consider encouraging all school staff—administrators, classroom teachers, counselors, and support staff—to spend some time on the playground. Doing this gives everyone the opportunity to observe and interact with children in a less structured setting, develop awareness of recess problems, and show support for playground monitors.
When significant adults at school, especially principals and vice-principals, circulate and interact with students on the playground, it also sends a powerful message that adults care about students’ playground behavior and experience.
To promote positive playground behaviors, it is also helpful to:
- Provide sufficient play equipment, and a range of equipment, for students of all ages.
- Teach common playground games to children. Designate specific staff members to lead this effort for children and adults within the school.
- Encourage a range of activities, games, and equipment to engage the interest of all children, from those who like energetic games to those who prefer more quiet activities.
- Assign recess buddies to new students, especially at younger grade levels, to support their entry into new peer groups.
- Increase adult availability for a variety of activities on the playground, such as organizing games, introducing activities, and helping with social problem solving.
- Use community volunteers to interact with children on the playground (but not to supervise).
Increasingly, schools are adopting programs to promote students’ social skills and prevent problematic behaviors like fighting. Playgrounds are a prime setting for children either to use old problematic behaviors or to practice new skills such as problem-solving strategies. For this reason, it is helpful to consider ways to support a program’s goals on the playground.
The SECOND STEP Program
The SECOND STEP program is designed to teach children the skills to empathize with others, solve problems, and manage angry feelings. Use of the elementary program has been found to reduce negative playground behaviors (Grossman et al., 1997) and improve students’ negotiation skills (Frey, Nolen, Van Schoiack-Edstrom, and Hirschstein, 2001).
Perhaps the single most important way to support these outcomes is to help staff receive training in social skills programs like the SECOND STEP curriculum. In SECOND STEP training, educators learn to prompt students to “Imagine the Day,” identifying times to generalize new skills to settings like the playground. Before going out to recess, for example, a teacher might say: “Today we had a SECOND STEP lesson about joining in at the right time. Would recess be a good time to practice joining a group?”
SECOND STEP teachers also ask students to “Remember the Day,” describing when, where, and how they used specific skills. Prompting, discussing, and reinforcing skills used at recess is an important way to connect SECOND STEP lessons to playground behavior.
Use Common Language
To provide consistent messages to students, ALL adults in a school must use the language of the program and be familiar with the skills. Because playground monitors are faced with many opportunities to help students use the skills to solve real-life problems, it is critical that they receive the training and tools to do this well.
There are simple ways to support skill use during recess. For example, one aim of the SECOND STEP program is to teach children steps to identify and solve social problems. Reminders about the steps can be strategically placed for easy reference and reinforcement during recess:
- Display laminated SECOND STEP posters of problem-solving steps on outdoor walls or external doors to the playground.
- Provide playground monitors with SECOND STEP problem-solving cards and key chains to distribute to children.
Attending to playground supervision and procedures is especially critical when a school adopts a schoolwide bullying prevention program. Most bullying takes place during recess. Thus, playgrounds present important opportunities for adults to reinforce students’ efforts to solve bullying problems and prevent them from escalating. By doing this, adults communicate that they take bullying seriously and are “walking the talk” of making school a safe, respectful place for everyone.
The STEPS TO RESPECT Program
The STEPS TO RESPECT program specifically encourages children to report bullying to adults at school. If the program is to succeed, adults’ awareness and responsiveness to bullying problems must increase. Conversely, if playground supervision and procedures are such that school personnel are unable to intervene effectively in bullying events, or take and follow up on students’ reports, the credibility of the program and trust of school staff may be undermined.
Coordination and follow-through are critical elements of a successful response to bullying. Guidelines for implementing the STEPS TO RESPECT program suggest that school administrators:
- Provide playground staff with information about bullying prevention, your school’s anti-bullying policy and discipline code, and ways to receive and respond effectively to students’ bullying reports.
- Anticipate increased reporting of bullying during recess and make a plan for ways to handle this increase.
- Provide additional supervision and support for playground staff as children and adults become more aware of bullying situations.
- Develop and train staff in a system for responding to bullying reports on the playground. Since playground personnel don’t have time to engage in lengthy conversation during recess, other staff members, such as the principal, counselor, and teachers, may need to be responsible for following through on bullying reports and coaching.
- Develop a system for tracking and coordinating responses to bullying reports (for example, create a notebook where staff members record incidents and verify that follow up occurred).
By Jennie Snell, Committee for Children research scientist.
References
Frey, K. S., Nolen, S. B., Van Schoiack-Edstrom, L., and Hirschstein, M. K. (2001). "SECOND STEP: Effects on Social Goals and Behavior." Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Prevention Research, Washington, DC, June 2001.
Grossman, D. C., Neckerman, H. J., Koepsell, T. D., Liu, P., Asher, K. N., Beland, K., Frey, K., and Rivara, F. P. (1997). "Effectiveness of a Violence Prevention Curriculum Among Children in Elementary School: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Journal of the American Medical Association, 277, 1605–1611.