Social Intelligence (SI)

Definition: The ability to connect with other people. I play and work well with others.

“Social intelligence is as important as IQ when it comes to happiness, health, and success. Empathetic people are less likely to experience anxiety, depression, and addictions later in life. They are also more likely to be hired, promoted, earn more money, and have happier marriages and better-adjusted children.” (Character Lab)

Motto: "I am aware of and understand my feelings and thoughts, as well as the feelings of those around me." ¹

Note: As social intelligence is a big part of the social and emotional learning (SEL) movement, this page offers much more information compared to the other Character Strengths pages.

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The Strengths Spotlight Podcast Series: Listen to the Institute of Positive Education descriptors of the strengths that include integration strategies.

What it Looks Like and How to Encourage:

• Having mutually beneficial relationships

• Experiencing empathy in how to respond to others

• My relationships give me a boost

• The people in my life help me be my best

• Acknowledge the interpersonal efforts to understand and connect

• Help connect the Character Strength of gratitude with self-understanding and friendships

• Build self-awareness to then focus on awareness of social scenarios

• Promote a language around SI and wellbeing

• Situational analysis (Teachable Moments)

Teacher Strategies to Personally Strengthen Their Social Intelligence:

• Continue to acknowledge, validate and celebrate others, especially during busy and stressful times.

• Grow your awareness of your strengths by making them more visible. Depending upon your learning style and preferred modality, choose tools from your instructional toolkit to apply to yourself. Examples: Audio Recording (have a friend interview you to record your very own "strengths podcast"|Concept Mapping|Outlining| Sketchnoting. Find ways to show how you combine strengths in some situations while also connecting to your talents/abilities, skills, interests, and values.

• The Key to Reading People

• Start with the CL construct of model, celebrate and enable to develop some strategies.

Character Lab SI Teaching Strategies and Tips: How to offer age-appropriate versions of the strategies? Note: There are dozens and dozens of tips from Character Lab. These choices are filtered for elementary school and practicality to bring this strength into the culture of one's classroom.

• The Holy Trinity of Healthy Relationships

• Use WOOP to set goals supported by Character Strengths. (WOOP Worksheet from Character Lab. A more scaffolded worksheet.) Grades 3-5 lesson. WOOP App: Android | IOS

• V Is For Vulnerability

The folks at Positive Psychology offer an excellent overview of information and activities to support their chart that is shown above. This information is intended for adult users of this site. There is also an integration strategy listed below for students in which the Positive Psychology materials can be adapted to the developmental levels of the students. Being assertive is an important aspect of setting healthy boundaries. One definition is being assertive "means recognizing your feelings and making your needs and desires clear to others". (Hales, D., 2021)

• Active/Attentive Listening - One of the most important skills we can teach our students is to help them be active listeners. So look to design a lesson and follow-up practice activities to coach your students to really grow this important skill which is integral to their being able to exercise their social intelligence Character Strength. Here is an outline of a lesson I put together for high school students that can be adapted for elementary students.

Are you a good communicator? What does it mean to actually be a good communicator? One big part of being a good communicator is being able to listen - yes, to listen actively. To listen actively means to use your body and words and emotional intelligence to really show that you are listening. Let's go through the steps of active listening.

• Pay Attention - Body language counts! Whether you are standing or sitting turn your body to be directly in front of the person you are listening to. You might even lean slightly in a bit to show your engagement. Your eyes are on the eyes of your partner. Make sure if at all possible that there are no distractions around you. This means that no cell phones are in sight! Your face is neutral or showing welcoming features as in a smile. You are not showing any facial expressions that might communicate that you are judging the other person.

• Share Back What You Hear - Really concentrate on what your partner is saying. He/she can be sending a lot more information than what the words are saying! But start small by simply sharing back your understanding of what you think you are hearing. It looks like this. Person A - I am going to see my grandmother tomorrow. She has been really sick. Oh my, I really worried about her. What will I say to make her feel better? You - So you are going to see your grandmother tomorrow. It sounds like you are worried about her.

• Don't Judge or Offer Advice or "Sugar Coat" - One of the biggest mistakes we make as listeners is thinking that we need to fix the other person's troubles or to somehow make them feel better by downplaying their strong emotions. The reality is that most of us simply want someone to listen to us! This means sharing back what we hear and possibly helping to label the emotions being shared. This part takes practice and it can help the speaker to better engage his/her emotional intelligence to help them help themselves. It isn't your job to say "everything will be OK or here is what you should do". In the end, your active listening will give your partner validation and will help him/her in time figure out what to do, if some sort of action is needed.

• Be Patient and Present - Again, your only responsibility is to be an active listener unless the other person is thinking about doing something to harm her/his self or others. Then you would need to contact a responsible adult to intervene. Part of being a good listener is allowing your partner to think and not talk. It is OK to pause when neither of you is speaking. Stay focused in the moment and don't try to switch topics or worse, start talking about yourself. ;)

These four steps were drawn from the article entitled "What Is Active Listening?".

• Active/Attentive Listening Protocol - One way to help our students make emotional and social connections with each other is to help them learn how to listen with attention. Design a guided listening protocol based on the tenets of attentive listening that fits the age of your students. One protocol is Acknowledge - Validate - Celebrate in which the listener acknowledges what he/she is hearing to then offer validating words to the sharer to then celebrate his/her actions. Use this article and this one as a starting place with your design work to teach and embed active listening into the culture of your classroom. Look to integrate active listening into your Turn and Talk activities.

• Active Constructive Responding (ACR) - Design strategies to teach the four ways we can respond to good news.

• Cartoon Scenario Drawing - 1) Students generate social scenarios from their experience. Draw them and then complete a graphic organizer/rubric around criteria like “what is person A thinking & feeling?, and person B thinking & feeling? how can each person acknowledge the feelings and thoughts of the other?” 2) Teacher provided cartoons for students to analyze and complete a graphic organizer/rubric.

• Celebrate! - Act in the moment of appreciation connecting to mindfulness and feelings of joy and gratitude. Make celebrating oneself and others an integral part of your class culture. Habit formation author BJ Fogg writes about designing your own physical acts of self-celebration. Examples are raising one's hands to do the victory sign, high-fiving oneself, speaking a word or two (e.g., nice job!), sound (e.g., a cheer or whistle), singing a line of a favorite song... the possibilities are limitless. The point is to be in the moment and acknowledge one's efforts. The connection to multiple pillars of PERMAH is strong with this strategy! | Look to be very intentional about teaching the Active Constructive Response (ACR) and Acknowledge - Validate - Celebrate active listening protocols to help your students celebrate each other.

• Character Day - Find ways to participate and elaborate on the activities offered for this annual event.

• Citizenship and Digital Wellness - Work with the wellness coach and the tech integration coach to design lessons on these two topics. The wellness coach brings knowledge of digital wellness, while the tech integration coach covers citizenship in the digital realm with students. One activity is to have the class brainstorm a list of all the hardware and software they use. Each student divides a worksheet into three columns, or you provide one. Across the top are the column headers of "Technology," - "Actions," - "Emotions." Students work individually to list software or hardware to describe how they use it in the second column. The third column is where they describe the emotions that arise when using each type of technology. You can add a group work aspect of having students compare findings or move to the next phase of the activity. Ask the following questions for students to respond to on the back of the worksheet: When are you feeling uncomfortable emotions when using technology? When are there times when your use of technology leads others to have emotional responses? What are some examples? This activity aims to raise self-awareness of how using technology affects the users' and others' emotional states.

• Compassionate Classroom - Edutopia provides resources to help your students understand inclusion and tolerance. Also, look to draw from the activities and lessons at Learning for Justice. They also have a lesson-building tool to use once you set up your account. Here are some resources for teaching respect: Lessons and Activities for Teaching Respect | Teaching Respect in the Modern Classroom.

• Conversation Starters - The active/attentive listening skills and active constructive responding (ACR) construct help students with their listening and conversational skills. A possible next step is to simply introduce the term "conversation" with students as we take it for granted that students learn to converse on their own. To go to the next step after introducing the term and modeling conversation in action, you can introduce conversation starter questions to your students. You can build out a list of conversation starters on one of your classroom walls. Eventually, you can guide your students to see patterns in the questions to come up with categories to group them into to further build their understanding. Here is a conversation starter list for adults to provide background on categories for adults. For students, the categories would be like meeting someone for the first time, helping a struggling friend, getting started on a group project, etc.

• Do You Feel Me? - Watch videos of elementary students sharing stories. Your students then guess the emotion(s) the presenter felt.

• Emotion Coaching - Use the steps of emotion coaching (source Jacob Humes) when students "flip their lids".

• Empathy - Develop activities to develop this disposition.

• Friendship Building - Reach into your teaching toolkit to pull out activities that help students grow their friendship-making skills. Do read-alouds from friendship-making books, do role plays of ways to make friends, bring in active listening skills, and make sure to have buddies for your new students... Use the four skills for making friends from Understood give your students a framework to better understand friendships.

• Games - Playworks provides a wonderful list of group games to help students grow their strengths of emotional intelligence, self-control, and social intelligence.

• Healthy Boundaries - Look to read through the 7 Types of Boundaries materials on this page to design a series of lessons to introduce the concept of boundaries to your students. The next step is to build their understanding of each of the seven domains. There probably is a cross-over with your child safety curriculum so look to connect there as well. It is one thing for our students to understand and set their boundaries, it is another to coach them in how to communicate them to others. Once the curriculum is taught, you can look to embed it into the culture of your classroom through a series of activities drawing on the PRIME strategies listed on this site.

• How Is Your PERMAH Today? - Draw from this blog post to design your lesson(s) to guide your students to understand and use this protocol.

• I Feel Statements - Teach your students how to make I Feel Statements focusing on their feelings in situations while not being accusatory of the behavior of others.

• I Used to Think... Now I Think... - Use this thinking routine to prompt students to reflect and share social interactions in which they learned their first reaction to interaction was incorrect. Use the mantra of "seek to understand" as you guide students to understand the perspectives of others.

• Lesson Databases - Find lessons at the Heart-Mind Online resource site provided by the Dalai Lama Center for Peace and Education. Find lessons at the Greater Good in Education resource site provided by the Greater Good Science Center (University of California - Berkeley). Wide Open School provides a great many social and emotional learning support activities. Here is their page for Grades 3-5.

• Mindfulness Activities - Design activities that help your students identify their physical and emotional states while practicing being present. Here is a video to introduce mindfulness to your students. Help students be present and aware of how they feel when interacting with others. Here is a lesson page with a few ideas. Positive Psychology provides research and a long list of activities to try in your classroom. Smiling Mind provides PDF downloads of lesson ideas for the different age ranges of our elementary school. Scroll down to the bottom of the page for the links to the PDFs.
  
  Build in a few times during the day for students to stop, be mindful, and think about their emotions. You can announce the moments or possibly use a chime at set intervals or sound off randomly. Here is a digital chime. Choose from the many meditations for children at Insight Timer to take a longer mindful moment with your students.
  
  ReachOut.com (focus on MS and HS students) provides a few apps that can help students manage their feelings of anxiety and worry. Take a look at their main app ReachOut Worry Time. They have more apps at the bottom of the page. Also, look to A Little Guide to Mindfulness PDF for some mindfulness strategies. VIA provides a mindful/meditative strategy for each Character Strength.

• Personal Profile - Students engage their active listening skills to interview a partner to complete a personal profile organizer. The goal is for the interviewer to start with a few starter questions to then engage their own questions to learn about their partner's interests, skills, talents, and goals. This activity needs to be scaffolded by grade level. The intent is to practice active listening and to help the students grow their social awareness.

• Random Acts of Kindness - Help your students understand the impact of doing kind acts towards others. A helpful place to get resources is the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation (RAK). Start by setting up an account to download the free lessons organized by grade level or access them from this folder. Review other resources such as their kindness ideas database. This website is loaded with ways to highlight and nurture kindness in our students. Here is a list of 45 possible random acts of kindness.

• Restorative Practices - Access the Restorative Practices Toolkit for strategies to build relationships and to nurture your school community.

• Self Awareness - Build on skills being taught to extend into awareness of oneself in social situations.

• Six Thinking Hats - No specific strategy is offered here other than to unpack the thinking hats to see how your students in using them can better understand themselves and their interactions with others. Collaboration, creativity, decision-making, emotional intellect, intellectual humility, mental models, and perspective-taking are just a few of the internal processes that can be supported by guiding students to use the thinking hats. Here is an article about one teacher's learning in teaching the thinking hats to her students.

• Sketchnoting to Paint the Strength Picture - Guide your students to make visible their self-understanding of how they currently engage with each strength. A secondary activity is to have your students sketch out new ways they can exercise each strength. We know that going from thinking about ideas to then make them visible often leads to taking action with the ideas. The first step to this strategy is to teach your students about sketchnoting. You will find applications of this tool across all areas of your curriculum. :) Students can take pictures of their sketches to upload to Seesaw to then explain their thinking.

• Social Intelligence Calendar - Choose a month to post a daily social awareness activity for everyone to try. Here is a kindness example for February.

• Social Struggle Problem Solving - Edutopia offers a menu of strategies to empower students to be social problem-solvers to dial up their social intelligence.

• Social Thinking - Look to draw on the books, videos, and curriculum from the Social Thinking website. You will need to decide on language around social skills to choose from the terms of social intelligence, social thinking, and/or social smarts among others.

• Strength Chart - Teachers have lots of ways to bring their strengths into the language and culture of their classrooms. A teacher at one of my schools connected to the school's core values by having the names of students on small sticky labels that he stuck to the core values poster. He would place the student's name by the value on the chart in the following ways that are adapted here for the strengths. One technique is for students who want the class to support his/her effort to grow their strengths to have his/her name placed beside the designated strength(s). A second strategy is for teachers to verbally highlight students who are applying their strengths at the moment in class. The teacher then puts the student’s name by the strengths on the chart.

• Superhero Creation - Challenge your students to create a superhero who maximizes this strength. One approach is to have your students draw a picture of the character with a biography that describes how the superhero uses the strength in his/her life. You can provide categories such as physical, intellectual (thinking), emotional, and social as to how the superhero demonstrates the strength. This activity could take the form of playing cards that students then create games around.

• Think, Feel, Care > Exploring Complexity - Adapt this thinking routine to be a human system and social situational awareness tool. This routine can help students grow their self and awareness of others as they participate in various systems. You can bring in the term "roles" the students inhabit as you introduce school systems such as athletics, arts, playground, classroom teams, etc. In time, you can venture into systems outside of school from family to after-school teams and to community programs. The routine focuses on taking the perspective of others and one's understanding of the system and his/her role within it. You can of course first use this routine for students to grow their individual self-awareness within different systems.

• Weekly Time for Dedication to Others - Integrate the ritual of having each student share a short dedication to someone in their life during your community meetings. You can have dedication time once a week for everyone to share or assign a few students each week to have their sharing time during your daily community meeting. This article gives details on how this activity helps students open up to each other, builds trust, and engages the strengths of gratitude, and emotional and social intelligence.

• What Makes You Say That? - The teacher can model this routine and line of questioning to help students seek to understand as they learn perspective-taking. It also can be taught to support active listening for students to use this question in their social interactions.

• Zoom Out Then In Routine - Students learn to mentally momentarily step away from social situations to see from the outside to analyze what is happening. Build out a set of questions to prompt this perspective-taking. Possible questions could be "What are we really talking about? What could each person be feeling? How can I connect to what that person is feeling and communicating?".

• Other possibilities: SI Superhero marketing design projects, student-created videos highlighting SI stories, class weekly sharing of their SI efforts, high school IB students using CAS time to produce age-appropriate videos for ES students answering questions of “What is SI? How can I grow my awareness of what is happening in social interactions?”, older student buddies and their ES partners meeting from time to time share SI stories, incorporate into co-curricular activities like field trips, after school activities, assemblies, etc.

Grade(s) Specific Teaching Strategies: The following ideas are offered as jumping-off points for teachers to build from and adapt to their needs.

Virtual School Home Wellness Support with SEL - Review the strategies by grade level used by one school.

EC-K>

• Arthur: Community Building PBS series

• Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers. (To be developed)

• Storybook readings, digital media, and share time by teachers and students to build understanding.

• Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

1-3>

• Arthur: Community Building PBS series

• Grades 1-2> Possibly doing some storybook readings and use of digital media. Eventually could lead to students writing their own storybooks that involve friendship and empathy.

• Lesson Listing - Access teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

• SI stories on a wall in each classroom. Possibly start with friendship stories for lower grades to then move into school and home scenarios. Build in weekly time for students to share their stories of understanding others, showing empathy, and understanding what others have communicated. Have them draw pictures with descriptions to go up on a designated wall of the classroom.

• Student Agency - Work with student ideas to learn and strengthen SI.

• Use visuals of toolkits and tools engaging language of creating our "strength toolkits" with strengths as tools.

• Weekly SI Seesaw Journal post: will need to develop prompt and potential categories for students to draw a picture of and/or take a photo of. They then voice-record their response.

4-5>

• Arthur: Community Building PBS series

• Design a lesson around the question “How do you think people succeed?”. Guide students to understand that happy and “successful” people have strong social connections.

• Journal: Google Doc or paper version. The teacher provided prompts and in time work with students to create new prompts. Could be a section of their portfolio.

• Lessons - Access several teacher-created lessons and those from other providers.

• Student Agency - Work with student ideas to learn and strengthen SI.

• SI wall (and possibly a virtual one via Padlet) in each classroom where students post examples of their efforts. You would need to work with students to ask permission from classmates who are in their stories. This offers the opportunity to teach about privacy and confidentiality. You could break this routine down to instances of attentive listening and empathy the student saw in him/herself or others. Have them draw pictures with descriptions to go up on a designated wall of the classroom.

Learning About SI:

Websites and Videos>

• All About Empathy (Video)

• Character Lab

• Empathetic Listening (Video)

Books>

• Stand in My Shoes (Video Reading)

Parent Engagement:

• Ask someone to video record the strength in action and publicize the efforts via social media (#----------) and the school website.

• Family Tree of Strengths: Provide parents with definitions and what strengths can look like in action. Provide a family tree graphic organizer with space for names and the individual’s main strengths. Offer prompts to guide parents to explain how family members and earlier generations lived specific strengths.

• Have students take their character cards home to teach their parents about their strengths.

• Strength-based Parenting - Share with your parents the Dr. Lea Waters website which includes resources and information on her book. Here is an article to help with your understanding of strength-based parenting.

• Teachers send specific reminders to have family talks around the SI reflection products the students produce.

• Teachers share with parents the idea of weekly sharing with their children examples of their social intelligence.

• Use our various communication pathways to inform parents of their children's growing social intelligence.

• VIA Strengths Survey: Send parents information about the strengths and the English language Strengths Survey that they can take. The results can offer a discussion starting point for families.

Character Lab Research References

Character Lab Image Source

CASEL Image

¹ Niemiec, R. M., & McGrath, R. E. (2019). The power of character strengths: appreciate and ignite your positive personality. Cincinnati, OH: VIA Institute on Character.

² Embedding Character Strengths. Institute of Positive Education. With permission.

Hales, D. (2021). An invitation to health: Taking Charge of Your Health (19th ed.). Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning