Solely focusing on test scores deters from providing a supportive learning environment that nurtures students’ social and emotional development (Elias & Arnold, 2006). Addressing this need, the purpose of this article is to offer resources to help schools with children’s social and emotional learning, preparing them for living with and working with others. We start by discussing three overlapping areas of concern: (a) students’ problematic behaviors that threaten individual and classroom learning; (b) students’ social skills and the need to teach behaviors that facilitate students’ interpersonal relationships and create a civil, respectful, and productive learning environment; and (c) students’ social emotional learning (SEL) to create a nurturing and supportive classroom.
After providing this foundational information, we discuss a positive and proactive approach—teaching pre-identified social skills with children’s literature (bibliotherapy). We recommend a list of carefully selected picture books that tie in with a set of identified social skills (see Table 1). Using books as the centerpiece, we propose a lesson plan format for social skills instruction (see Appendix). We close the article with Internet links to our trove of prepared resources (lesson plans, posters, video clips, and activities; see Table 2).

This study investigated the effects of school-wide positive behavior support (SWPBS) on middle school climate and student outcomes. Data consisted of over 300 teacher responses and 10,000 student responses in two middle schools in the Western United States. This study used a quasi-experimental (non-equivalent two-group, pretest-posttest) design. One school implemented a SWPBS intervention over a period of four years, while the other served as a control. The SWPBS intervention included school-wide teaching of social skills, praise notes from teachers to students, posting of school rules, proactive screening for students at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders, and referrals of at-risk students for targeted interventions. The treatment school showed statistically significant improvements in teacher ratings of school climate, while the control school tended to stay the same or worsen. Statistically significant decreases were also evident in students’ tardiness, unexcused absences, and office discipline referrals when compared to the control school. Implications and limitations of this study are addressed.