In reflecting on some of the responses to my last blog about bullying (and what we can do to be more proactive in our classrooms and schools to address this serious issue at all grade levels), I spent some time thinking more deeply about the social skills at the core of the Responsive Classroom® approach to teaching and learning.

Originally drawn from the work of Stephen Elliott and Frank Gresham and the now well-known Social Skills Rating System, the five skills of cooperation, assertion, responsibility, empathy, and self-control serve as reliable and measurable positive social standards for behavior. Responsive Classroom strategies of proactive classroom management and logical consequences for misbehavior enhance acquisition of these five skills and are supportive of productive academic outcomes, as shown in research.

Yet, it serves us well as teachers and as parents to examine each of these skills in the context of our classrooms and the children with whom we live or work on a daily basis. For the next five blog posts I will focus on one skill at a time and I welcome your comments and conversation.

I’ll take the position, beginning with cooperation, that every social skill, though we seek to frame and teach it in a positive, prosocial way, has the potential for harm. For example, take bullying. Bullying takes cooperation. Peer pressure bears down on children at earlier and earlier and earlier ages, it seems. If you don’t cooperate in picking on someone who is different, you run the risk of being picked on, too. If you tell on someone who is bullying, you run the risk of getting beat up. “Snitches get stiches,” you know. Better cooperate!

So teaching children how to cooperate for positive ends has to become a part of the social glue of families and classrooms from the earliest ages. It has to be modeled by the adults. Children have to see teachers helping one another for real and not just telling and showing the kids how to help each other. It has to be modeled and role-played in the classroom. It has to be part of the fabric of learning. Children need to learn what it means to be a partner, a buddy, a listener, a helper … in reading, math, science, at clean-up, recess, lunch, Morning Meeting, on the bus, on a playdate.

Teachers should plan jobs and academics in the classroom that require a partner twice as often as they plan individual or whole-class work. Remember, cooperation, done well, multiplies positive social and academic learning outcomes.