Rick Lavoie Videos

Although I was only privledged to view one of the Rick Lavoie videos, I was greatly influenced by what the author shared. I viewed the video on social skills in which Mr. Lavoie discussed social skils and whether they should be tought by teachers. I believe that as as educator you have no choice but to teach social skills because of the amount of time that you spend with the students. Although most students' behavior is not that far removed from when they are around their parents, they tend to do more acting out and exemplify more socially incorrect behavior at school. That acting out most of the time will cause a teacher to intervene and attempt to correct or repremand that student's actions. Mr. Lavoie's video laid out some very simple intructions on how to deal with social misbehaviors.

The suggestions that Mr. Lavoie shared on how to correct and teach those social skills was very insightful. A few of the key point that stuck with me were that: 1) we have to look at the world through the eye of the adolescent, 2) we have to teach the culture that they are in in order to achieve the correct social skill, 3) everything has to be broken down to it's most finite point and every social rule should be used as an opportunity to learn and teach. I have put a couple of these key points to use and have also shared them with a few of my colleagues at school. But the main conclusion that I brought away from the video is that there seems to be a fine line being drawn between special needs students and general education students. They all can use a social autopsy on occaision and we as educators have to be prepared to use that oppotunity to acknowledge the error, determine the damage and teach prevention of it's reoccurence.