Overview
The Prosocial Education Journey
The eMINTS National Center is a leader in professional learning. We have provided high-quality, research-based professional learning activities for educators for over 25 years on topics ranging from educational technology, high-quality lesson design, reading recovery, coding and computational thinking, STEM, educational leadership, student engagement, and much more. Our eMINTS Instructional Model drives all our programs and supports our work in helping enhance instructional practices that increase student engagement.
After years of helping teachers implement constructivst-based, hands-on, active learning strategies, we heard from teachers that students simply do not have the skills to get along and work with others to solve these complex problems. While teachers greatly value and understand the importance of engaging students in these active learning experiences, they found that student behavior too frequently got in the way of learning. Teachers felt disheartened and disrespected and often resorted to using various unsuccessful classroom management strategies to try and control student behavior.
In 2016, eMINTS partnered with expert Dr. Christi Bergin from the University of Missouri to develop a professional development program to help teachers implement prosocial education, which focuses on promoting positive behavior that benefits others and improves relationships. The eMINTS Team incorporated the pillars of prosocial education into a program that supports teachers in learning how to enhance their current classroom management practices and improve their everyday interactions with students.
In 2018, the Curators of the University of Missouri were awarded a $4 million Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant to study the effectiveness of the PAL Classrooms program. The program successfully supported the implementation of prosocial education in 5th-grade math and science classrooms in Missouri, Arkansas, and Kansas. In 2023, they received an $8 million EIR grant to expand the project in school-wide implementations working with middle schools throughout the Midwest.
Prosocial education is pioneering how to improve student behavior, motivation, and engagement in the classroom by enhancing the way teachers interact with students. Teachers are given interactional, embedded, and evidence-based practices that are easy to implement and work with any age level of student in any content area. These strategies and practices help create a positive learning environment where teachers and students want to be and lead to greater academic achievement.