The Social Pathway

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Thank You for Being a Friend 🎤🎵🎶🎤🎵🎷

Traveled down a road and back again

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Social learning is an important component of education. Vygotsky, an important theorist in education, proposed social learning and the importance of social skills in a person's development; I believe that is why homeschooling is less appealing, since the students are less exposed to the social aspect of learning. 

 Here are some ways students benefit from social skills and social interaction:

  • child can tutor others students in need
  • child can be tutored if they are in need
  • learning through play and/or the opportunity to free play
  • vocabulary expansion
  • exposure to different religions, races and/or ethnicity, and cultures
  • exposure to new people 
  • exposure to new information, thoughts, and ideas
But ... should social interaction be strictly monitored with younger children? Clearly, that can be very evasive to a child's development, but it could also be beneficial. We all know children replicate habits very quickly. Behaviors, languages and forms of communication, and more are passed from child to child through social interaction. 
Behaviors we'd want to weed out during social interaction:
  • derogatory words and phrases 😷
  • bullying and/or aggressive actions 💪
  • habits like nail-biting, tantrums, or anything that would cause a child to regress in development 🙍
Why wouldn't we want to control play and weed out negative behaviors and habits? 

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BECAUSE IT'S NOT SUPPORTIVE OF THE GROWING MIND! 👎😵

YES YES YES we would like to protect children from everything dangerous, but learning best occurs when a child is able to learn from a mistake they made. If they learn a derogatory word or phrase, the best way to not replicate that behavior is to replicate the behavior and be reprimanded for it; that'll make a child fully understand: "Yes, this is wrong and this is why I shouldn't do it again."
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Janet Nay Zadina, author of Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain (2014), dedicates chapter 8 of the text to the social pathway. Zadina (2014), writes, "Social status has been shown to affect academic performance." (pp. 191). Zadina suggests that the social hierarchy in educational settings does affect how a child performs in the classroom. If this is true, what does it mean for the students that are socially isolated or ostracized? Do those children have to suffer academically and socially? NO! We, as educators, incorporate those activities with numerous opportunities for social interaction. And how do we do this, while having all students in the classroom interact with EVERY child in the room? W   e   l   l   .   .   .  

  • Pull Popsicle sticks for groups/partners 👯
  • Online random group generator 💬
  • Categories 💭
    • Examples:
      • all girls with bows in their hair 👧🎀
      • all boys with red shirts 👦👕
      • everyone with December birthdays 🎅🍰
      • "People whose favorite food is pizza, stand by the door. People whose favorite food is crawfish, stand by the board. People whose favorite food is wings, stand by the teacher's desk. Go!" 🍕🍗
  • Count-off ☝✌
    • 1...2...3...1...2...3...1...2...3 
    • "All 1's, you are the red team. All 2's, you are the blue team. All 3's, you are the yellow team." 💗💙💛


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Resources:

Zadina, J. N. (2014). The social pathway. In Multiple strategies to the student brain, pp. 187-210. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

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