Student Resource Area for: Guiding Children's Social ...



Student Resource Area for: Guiding Children's Social Development and Learning, 6E

Chapter 13 - Promoting Prosocial Behavior

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Key Points

I. Create a prosocial environment.

• Label children's prosocial acts as they occur.

• Point out instances in which an unintentional lack of kindness is shown and describe an alternate, prosocial approach.

• Create opportunities for children to cooperate and to help others.

• Use prosocial reasoning when talking with children.

• Reward prosocial behavior.

• Administer group rewards.

• Demonstrate a variety of prosocial behaviors.

• Demonstrate constructive ways of responding to other people's prosocial behavior.

• Be positive when engaging in prosocial behavior.

• Point out the prosocial behaviors you and others model.

• Use positive attribution to increase children's prosocial self-images.

II. Give direct instruction related to prosocial behavior.

III. Provide on-the-spot instruction.

• Observe children for signs of prosocial behavior.

• Ask children directly to help you.

• Make children aware when someone needs help or cooperation.

• Teach children signals they might give to elicit help or cooperation from others

• Point out situations in which people could decide to help or cooperate.

• Discuss situations in which it would be best to decide not to cooperate.

• Assist children in determining what type of help or cooperation is most suitable for a particular situation.

• Teach children how to share.

• Work at increasing children's perspective-taking skills.

• Provide opportunities for children to increase their instrumental know-how.

• Work with children to evaluate the results of their actions.

• Encourage children to accept kindness from others.

• Support children when their attempts at kindness are rebuffed.

IV. Coordinate planned activities.

• Decide what prosocial skills you want to teach.

• Think of many different ways the prosocial skills might be presented to the children.

• Select one of your activity ideas to develop further.

• Develop a plan of action that outlines the prosocial activity from start to finish.

• Gather the materials you will need.

• Implement your plan.

• Evaluate your activity in terms of immediate and long-term prosocial outcomes.

• Repeat the same prosocial activity, or a variation of it, at another time.

V. Communicate with the children’s family.

• Communicate your classroom philosophy of cooperation to families.

• Initiate and model cooperative activities in the program that include family members.

• Invite parents and other family members to help in the formal group setting.

• Answer families' questions about the role of competition and cooperation in their children's lives.

• Assist adults in figuring out how their children can be helpful at home.

VI. Avoid common pitfalls.

• Failing to recognize children's efforts to behave prosocially.

• Bringing a prosocial model's behavior to a child's attention through negative comparison or through competition.

• Coercing children to engage in insincere prosocial behavior.

• Making children share everything all the time.

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