Tag Archives: social-emotional learning

Bullying

I’m hard pressed to imagine a time and place in any high school where this reading on bullying and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet  wouldn’t be of use.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Growth Spurt

If you teach middle-schoolers, this reading on growth spurts and its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet might be something helpful for you. The Sheltered English Immersion class I took last winter for my Massachusetts license was held in a middle-school health classroom, and I saw a lot of stuff like these materials there.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Metacognition

“metacognition: Knowledge and beliefs about one’s own cognitive processes, an important class of metacognition being metamemory, The term is also sometimes applied to regulation of cognitive functions, including planning, checking, or monitoring, as when one plans one’s cognitive strategy for memorizing something, checks one’s accuracy when performing mental arithmetic, or monitors one’s comprehension while reading, and these forms of metacognition are called metacognitive regulation in contradistinction to metacognitive knowledge. Writings on metacognition can be traced back at least as far as De Anima and the Parva Naturalia of the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BC), and the phenomenon was brought to prominence during the 1970s largely by the US psychologist John H. Flavell (born 1928), who focused attention on developmental aspects of metacognition. In an influential article in the journal Psychological Review in 1977, the US psychologists Richard E. Nisbett (born 1941) and Timothy D. Wilson (born 1951) summarized a range of evidence suggesting that people are often unaware of the factors influencing their own choices, evaluations, and behavior, and that the verbal reports that they give when questioned are often quite erroneous and misleading.”

[From Greek meta beside or beyond + English cognition]

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Panic Disorder

This reading on panic disorder has endured over time with my students, especially those who live in crowded and violent inner-city neighborhoods, as a high-interest reading. Here is the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Reactive Attachment Disorder

“A mental disorder of infancy or early childhood (beginning before age 5 years) characterized by disturbed and developmentally inappropriate patterns of social relating, not resulting from mental retardation or pervasive developmental disorder, evidenced either by a persistent failure to initiate or respond appropriately in social interactions (inhibited type), or by indiscriminate sociability without appropriate selective attachments (uninhibited type). By definition, there must also be evidence of pathogenic care, assumed to be responsible for the disturbed social relating, in the form of persistent disregard for the child’s basic emotional or physical needs or repeated changes in major attachment figures.”

Excerpted from: Colman, Andrew M., ed. Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

The Selfish Gene

A book (1976) by the biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) that popularized the evolutionary theory that living organisms are primarily the means by which genes perpetuate themselves. This helped to explain the continuing existence of characteristics that do not necessarily benefit an individual organism. The book did much to popularize the field of sociobiology.

‘They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence…they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines.'”

Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.

Gender Identity

Rounding out this morning’s labors will make this the tenth post I’ve published on this Monday in late July. So, here is a reading on gender identity and the vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet that accompanies it.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Language, Learning, and Social Integration

“Verbal communication is the basis for everything that occurs in classrooms, whether this is the delivery of new information or the regulation of behavior. Although language skills are biologically primary, their development in children of the same age can be highly uneven, Further, a significant proportion of children in any class may have developmental language disorders, which may or may not have been formally diagnosed. Such disorders typically impact a student’s success with written or spoken language.”

Ashman, Greg, and Pamela Snow. “Oral Language Competence: How it Relates to Classroom Behavior.” American Educator Vol. 43, No. 2 (Summer 2019): 37-41.

Attention Deficit Disorder

Monday morning seems like a pretty good time to draw teachers’ attention to this reading on attention deficit disorder and its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. I’ve tagged this reading as high-interest material, because it there is one thing I’ve frequently found among kids who struggle to sustain attention in the classroom, or who have been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it is they want to know more about the affliction that has made school so difficult for them. Over the years, kids under my instruction have asked repeatedly for these materials.

If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.

Term of Art: Fine Motor Skills

“The use of small muscle groups for specific tasks such as handwriting. Fine motor skills are developmental, with children generally improving in their ability to use writing or drawing implements as the enter elementary school and are introduced to the concept of writing and copying. Deficits in fine motor function can have a detrimental effect on the development of writing skills.”

Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.