IEP (Individualized Education Plans) Goals & Meetings

Realistic IEPs can lead to real, albeit often slow, growth in students. IEP goal writing also involves understanding how social skills improve and progress in individuals of a certain age. Being able to accurately describe the desired social progress is the first step to changing an individual\'s behavior. Increasingly educators and parents are recognizing the importance of the \"social\" component in developing IEPs. There is a lot to learn about understanding how people learn social information before we can determine how to provide treatment by writing reasonable IEP goals.

A Politically Incorrect Look at Evidence-Based Practices and Teaching Social Skills

A Politically Incorrect Look at Evidence-Based Practices and Teaching Social Skills provides a strong base from which professionals, parents, administrators can understand why the basic social skills training programs (usually described as ABA based) are often inadequate for our students with stronger language and learning skills. This evidence-based book addresses some of the false assumptions made by those who advocate that we can only teach social skills within the context of social skills training programs that have strong research support for the specific training methodology. Many programs, including Social Thinking, are developmentally based with strong research supporting the pillars upon which the programs were founded, even if there are not abundant research studies to support them as of now. In 1995 people had only just begun to explore specifically the needs of those with higher language and learning abilities and the related subtleties required of this group to appear more socially proficient! This book reminds us that teaching \"social skills\" is akin to shooting a bullet at a moving target. Social behaviors (social skills) evolve with every year of a child\'s life; hence what was taught last year may not be relevant information for a student to excel this year to stay socially proficient.

Executive Functioning and Organizing for Homework

The 2 hour video "Executive Functioning and Organizing for Homework: Strategies to Facilitate Learning" is available for viewing online with a subscription.

Inside Out

Inside Out: What Makes a Person with Social Cognitive Deficits Tick? describes the relationship between social deficits and difficulties with academic tasks such as reading comprehension, and working as part of a group as well as defines and describes how the social mind impacts tasks across the home and school day. Many doing assessments also use Michelle Garcia Winner's ILAUGH model of Social Cognition to help analyze and describe their informal assessment results and related observations. Furthermore, many chapters conclude with sample goals and benchmarks pertaining to the content in the chapter that could be used in IEPs. In addition, Thinking About You Thinking About Me introduces "the Me Binder" concept used to teach students about their IEP and what it means.

I Read it, But I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers

I Read It, But I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers provides strategies for better understanding of reading material. It discusses ideas readers can use to connect the material to one's own experiences and other tactics to enhance comprehension and enjoyment.

Sticker Strategies

Sticker Strategies: Practical Strategies to Encourage Social Thinking and Organization is a unique product in which strategies from the book can be printed and placed in flip notebooks for students to take to school as visual reminders of the strategies they have already learned. The categories of the strategies are asking for help, emotions and problem solving, organization, writing and homework, group work, Social Thinking, and family time.

Strategies for Organization

Strategies for Organization: Preparing for Homework and the Real World is a DVD and workbook combination that focuses on strategies for organizing a student's work, schedule and brain, as well as enhancing time-management.

Thinking About You Thinking About Me, 2nd Edition

Thinking About You Thinking About Me 2nd Edition discusses the challenges of trying to use standardized tests to quantify an abstract, complex, synergistic process and presents the Informal Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment Protocol®.

Thinking About You Thinking About Me features three chapters on assessments: the first describes the Informal Social Thinking Assessment Protocol®, the second gives comments and critiques on other assessment techniques, and the third provides the 29 pages of the Informal Social Thinking Assessment Protocol® and checklist to encourage others to use these informal assessment tools. Research done on the effectiveness of one of the informal subtests included in the protocol is posted on our website; "The Double Interview Task: Assessing the Social Communication of Children with Asperger Syndrome".

Think Social! A Social Thinking Curriculum

The book, Think Social! A Social Thinking Curriculum for School-Age Students, ends each chapter a list of IEP goal ideas and also a review of how the goals help to foster the development of academic standards. Due to public demand, a CD is now included with the book that summarizes all of the goal ideas discussed in the text to encourage parents and professionals to think about goal writing in a more fundamental manner. One chapter in this book lays out the connection between social academic demands set forth in the standards of education and how Social Thinking vocabulary and concepts help to foster the development of not only social behavior but classroom success. Furthermore, it features approximately 70 lessons that allow students to explore the basics of working, thinking, and monitoring one's own behavior in a group. The lessons have helped those in kindergarten through adulthood.

Next Steps:

The Emotion and Expression Cards as well as Speechmark\'s 6-8 picture sequence cards Sequences: 6-8 Step for Children and Sequences: 6-8 Step for Adults are also available on our website. The use of these picture sets is described in the assessment chapters within the book Thinking About You Thinking About Me 2nd Edition. We recommend the Adult set for use with anyone over the age of 10 as they show teens in most of the pictured sequences. Pre-adolescents and adolescents prefer to see pictures of teens rather than young elementary school students when using tools to assess their knowledge and provide related treatments.