Tag: relationships

How the Social Styles List Can Transform Your Classroom

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Free Resource for Effective Classroom Management

Without a doubt, high school classrooms today are more diverse than ever—culturally, emotionally, and socially. As educators, you likely face students with varying communication preferences, personalities and “social styles”, making it challenging to foster meaningful relationships and manage your classroom effectively. Importantly, one-size-fits-all approaches to classroom management don’t work anymore. When you’re striving to build an inclusive and supportive learning environment, you need better tools.

An illustration of a classroom of students that look different from each other. A group of diverse students are working together on a project, symbolizing collaboration, innovation, creativity, teamwork, and education.

This is where my free Social Styles List comes in. In particular, it’s designed to help you easily identify and understand your students’ communication type. These are “styles” present in most classroom settings. Understanding the styles helps you create better connections. and guide classroom interactions in a way that feels authentic and supportive for each student.

Why Knowing Your Students’ Social Styles Matters

Image shows animal illustrations from Carson and Sands Medicine Cards.
From Medicine Cards by David Carson and Jamie Sams

Understanding social styles can be a game-changer in your approach to classroom management. Students often express themselves in ways that reflect their social and emotional tendencies. By recognizing these tendencies, you can:

  • Create more effective lesson plans tailored to different communication styles
  • Mediate conflicts before they escalate by addressing the root of the issue
  • Build stronger relationships with students by connecting in ways that resonate with them
  • Foster a positive, collaborative classroom culture where students feel seen and understood

Furthermore, how do you know what social style each student leans toward? That’s where my Social Styles List can help!

What You’ll Get with the Free Social Styles List

The Social Styles List provides a simple breakdown of the four main social styles: Analytical, Driver, Amiable, and Expressive. Each style comes with a description of common traits, behaviors, and interaction preferences.

Imaage shows a picture from the aws Studios.art mental health skills building "Circle of Community" resource.

This List is a sneak peek into my comprehensive Circle of Community which is an activity to help you implement these strategies and build stronger student relationships.

How This Resource Solves Common High School Classroom Issues

Current high school teachers are facing challenges like low student engagement, increased social anxiety, and classroom conflict stemming from differing communication styles. In addition, many students are struggling to express themselves. This is further underscored by disruptions caused by the pandemic.

Image shows the opt-in form to sign up to get a free copy of the Social Styles list.

The Social Styles List offers a solution by helping you:

  • Identify students’ communication preferences so you can tailor your approach
  • Understand what drives different social behaviors in the classroom
  • Minimize miscommunication that leads to conflicts or disengagement
  • Cultivate a classroom environment where each student feels valued and understood

Take the First Step Toward Better Classroom Management

Ready to get started? Download the Social Styles List for free and begin using it in your classroom today! It’s a practical tool you can start using right away to improve your relationships with students and help them connect with each other.

Also, if you love this List, you’ll find more resources in my Circle of Community activity. In addition, it is also available as part of my Classroom Management / Relationship Building Bundle. These resources provide deeper insights and actionable strategies to strengthen your classroom community.

Getyour free Social Styles List today!

This resource can help you build stronger connections with your students. This creates a classroom environment that promotes learning, growth, and mutual respect.

Have you used Social Styles in your classroom?

How did it go?

Let us know in the Comments section below.

Conquer Student Anxiety

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Transform Student Feelings of Overwhelm to Confidence

Do you find your students feeling overwhelmed? Students want to do a lot. Furthermore, they deal with expectations from their relationships with family, school and friends. It can feel like it’s all too much. And, giving up might be right around the corner. Roles and Goals™, a social emotional goal setting and planning activity, helps students prioritize their roles. This reduces feelings of being overwhelmed.

This image is an abstract depicting young people looking harried because of all the expectations they have and limited time to do it all.

Create Calm with Goal Setting and Planning

In particular, Roles and Goals™ focuses planning based on the preservation and enhancement student relationships. This includes family, school, teams, and friends. In addition, this planning exercise uses a schedule of one week. Importantly, this is a better than daily planning. It gives them an easier view of the context of their relationships and balancing their time.  

Solves a Huge Mental Health Issue

This image is a close up of the previous image of a young girl trying to keep the hands of a clock from moving. She's trying to stop time.

Roles and Goals™ solves the problem of how, often, young people feel overwhelmed with all that they are expected to do. The activity helps students assess their relationships, expectations, and time by prioritizing and organizing tasks for one week. This reduces overwhelming feelings of expectations by breaking down responsibilities little by little, bit by bit.

Student Focused with Real-World Application

Roles and Goals™ enhances learning by giving students a real-world problem to solve — their weekly schedule — and provides examples and prompts to guide them.

Find out more, get your Roles and Goals resource today and help your students create calm!

Swept into Mental Illness? Assess Your Mental Health

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Beware the media!

aws Studios is all about helping you have mental health! Saturated with issues of “mental health,” the media is often reporting on mental illness and its treatment,  not mental health. At large, the focus on anything related to mental health is actually a focus on the “downstream” area of mental health – the place where mental health becomes illness requiring treatment. At aws Studios, the focus is upstream, on your mental health skills not mental illness!

Upstream? Downstream? What Does it Mean?

This image of a river running in front of a mountain illustrates the public health concept of catching health problems early - upstream - before they become more dangerous and costly downstream.
From the NYS Office of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Services, Albany, NY circa 2011. Artist unknown (if it’s yours, I’d love to know and give you credit)!

In explaining the overall health of people in a community,  this parable about a river “slowly filling with drowning people” (representing illness) is often used. Due to their overwhelming numbers, many are unsavable. They are the end of the river, in the “downstream.” By taking a look “upstream,” we can see what is getting them into the water unable to save themselves in the first place — do they need lifejackets or, better yet, swimming lessons or a fence to keep them slipping into the river, etc.?

If we use this parable to represent mental health, there are actions that, for the most part, could prevent “overwhelming numbers” of “drowning people” or mental illness. For some, mental illness is inevitable due to genetics. But for most, mental illness can be prevented and reduced or “cured” for those experiencing its symptoms. The upstream area of mental illness includes acquiring and maintaining the skills associated with mental health and implementing and enforcing policies that support both mental health and skill building.

How are Your Mental Health Skills?

The skills of mental health or social-emotional learning include self-management, relationships, and resource management:

Self-Management:

is the development of self-awareness and self-management skills such as the ability to take care of ourselves, building and maintaining resilience and identifying and managing our feelings or emotions.

Relationships:

include the development of healthy relationships to promote mental health such as building and maintaining communication skills, skills of empathy, compassion and acceptance and the ability to express gratitude and forgiveness.

Resource management:

Is to know what, when, where and how to ask for help for yourself and others.

So, what do you think? How are your mental health skills? Do you have them down pat or might they need a little tweaking? Like all areas of health, our mental health will take a bit of managing and checking in on, on an ongoing basis.

Check out the aws Studios mental health skill building activities here and give your mental health a boost today!