As students transition to middle school, they face intensified peer influence but often lack the skills to manage these interactions effectively. Educators, meanwhile, are challenged by the need to keep track of students' social dynamics while juggling other academic responsibilities.
PROJECT OVERVIEW
According to the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC), 19.1% of children aged 10-11 and 25.6% of children aged 12-13 were concerned about not fitting in with their friends.
This project was designed to help 6th-grade students build essential social-emotional skills, with a focus on forging and sustaining healthy peer relationships. The curriculum aimed to empower students with the tools they need to foster empathy, mutual respect, and effective communication, creating a supportive, inclusive school environment where every student feels seen and heard.
design process
What's unique about this group of learners?
In my design process, I deeply considered the unique backgrounds, experiences, and developmental stages of the students:
I started by exploring the students' developmental stage, understanding that 6th graders were transitioning into more abstract thinking and facing new social challenges. This insight guided how I adapted instructional goals and created activities that honored their existing experiences while helping them grow.
Given that students had participated in social-emotional learning (SEL) lessons during intermediate school, I leveraged their previous knowledge of self-awareness and basic coping strategies to build new skills. This approach helped students connect new content to what they were already familiar with, making learning more meaningful.
Throughout the design, I followed a backward design framework, starting with the desired outcomes in mind. This helped me align the instructional strategies and assessments with overarching goals, ensuring each activity was purposeful and targeted.
overarching GOALS
What do 6th graders really need to succeed in their social world?
To address these challenges, I designed a curriculum centered around these key elements:
Empathy and Mutual Respect: Encouraging students to recognize and cultivate supportive peer relationships.
Self-awareness and Reflection: Helping students reflect on their experiences, emotions, and the impact of their actions.
Coping Strategies for Negative Interactions: Teaching students effective ways to handle difficult peer situations and set personal boundaries.
The Curriculum
Make learning stick and relationships flourish
The curriculum consisted of 11 weekly lessons delivered over the first semester, for students to explore peer-related issues and develop their skills collaboratively.
Interactive Lessons: Each week focused on key topics like understanding positive and negative peer relationships, assertive communication, and recognizing personal boundaries. The content was carefully scaffolded with direct instruction, video lectures, group discussions, and hands-on activities to build students' confidence as they progressed through their learning journey.
Authentic Tasks: Students participated in activities like Boundaries Diagram, "I" Statements, and The Go-To Person, simulating real-life peer interactions. These tasks allowed them to practice setting boundaries, asking for help, and showing empathy, while fostering self-awareness through reflection on their thoughts and emotions.
Knowledge Checkpoints: Each class ended with a reflection activity where students noted their key takeaways and any points of confusion. This encouraged continuous reflection and growth, and it provided instructors with valuable insights for adapting future lessons to better meet students' needs.
Key Learning Activities and Assessment
How do we measure growth?
Formative and Summative Assessments: The project included weekly answer booklets to track students' progress, two unit quizzes, and a midterm scenario analysis. These assessments were designed to be holistic and diverse, capturing not only students' grasp of concepts but also their ability to apply skills in real-world scenarios. The final role-play served as a summative assessment, evaluating students' understanding of empathy, coping strategies, and setting personal boundaries.
Scenario-Based Role Play: For the final project, students worked in small groups to create and act out scenarios that depicted challenging peer interactions and coping strategies. This activity provided an opportunity for students to engage in dynamic, learner-driven experiences that built on what they already knew while encouraging creativity, empathy, and critical thinking.
Proposed Results
What happens once we give students the tools?
Although the curriculum, as a course project, was not implemented, the feedback received during the poster session provided valuable insights into its potential impact. Reviewers praised the focus on fostering empathy and creating an inclusive classroom environment. They highlighted that the interactive activities and role-playing scenarios had strong potential to help students better understand positive and negative peer interactions and their impact on well-being.
Reflecting on this project, I see great potential for future implementation and testing. If this curriculum were to be piloted, collecting data on student outcomes would be crucial for validating design choices and making iterative improvements. Based on feedback from the poster session, one possible enhancement would be adding more peer-led discussions to deepen students' sense of agency and belonging. Additionally, incorporating structured opportunities for students to set personal goals and reflect on their progress could further enrich the learning experience.
