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Effective Teaching Strategies: including reading lesson plans.

Teaching Strategies on Safety

Educators have to create teaching strategies for a wide range of topics. They come up with engaging reading lesson plans, fun social studies lesson plans and interactive science lesson plans, but there’s still an abundance of teaching strategies and lesson plans that need to be developed. One such important topic is teaching safety. Although most children should be taught by the parents the basics of what to do if someone tries to overpower them, many educators are taking on the roll of also teaching safety without scaring children needlessly.

One difficult part of developing teaching strategies for safety is that most of us have enormous anxiety about the person safety of children. On top of that, we aren’t entirely sure of what works and what is myth. For example, we regularly teach the notion of “stranger danger”, but it turns out that of all children who are reported as kidnapped in the U.S. each year, fewer than 100 were victims of someone they didn’t know at all. As a result, experts recommend that we rethink the old method of concentrating the distinction between stranger and friend and instead educate children about common lures and ploys. We should teach them to trust their own feelings when something isn’t quite right and reassure them that it’s okay to say no to adults, including those they may know well, if they do or say something that makes them feel uncomfortable or scared. Obviously giving kids the skills they need for safety is already a lot more complete than developing reading lesson plans or other standard curriculum.

The old teaching strategies grounded in distinguishing between “good touching” and “bad touching” are already outdated as the distinction proved ineffective. When presented with a real threat, it’s common to freeze up and not to be able to think or evaluate at all. As such a more innovative approach to teaching safety today is to focus on active skills that kids can use in emergencies. In some classes across the country, seven-year-olds get practice talking back to and warding off a padded attacker. They strike back, run away and yell. During this time the child role-plays every level of boundary violation, from inappropriate touching, lying, bullying and physical assault. This process builds the child’s sense of self-reliance and gives each child a plan or action. Although developing this curriculum is definitely more complex than creating effective reading lesson plans, it’s definitely an investment in our future.