“What I'd like to know is how you assess need and measure progress over time. I have many of the books and have looked through and read parts of all of them, but haven't seen anything that fits my need.  Our special ed. director would like to have some data to show that these groups have been successful.”

Here are some thoughts:

When our kids are in preschool there are tons of books, parent support groups, play groups, field trips and play dates. When our kids get older all of that goes away, during some of our hardest parenting years we have the fewest networks and support systems... and through this process our children are magically supposed to evolve from kids to adults. My own two neurotypical daughters have continued to teach me about what they needed me to teach them to help them prepare for life as adults.  Having worked with many adults with social thinking challenges they have also taught me about how they handled this transition. The lessons I have learned through watching my daughters and my clients' transitions into adulthood and abilities to sustain themselves as adults are these:

I was recently asked to write about the social skills kids need to have acquired to benefit more fully from an integrated setting. While this is a huge question I will write some basic thoughts on this concept.

Many of you who are familiar with my work know that I talk about the social complexities of the classroom learning environment. While we often only teach social skills for the context of playing or conversing the reality is that students use social thinking and related social skills every moment they are around people including more structured environments like classrooms. While I know our political education plan is quick to advocate the inclusion of all kids into “integrated” settings as much as possible, I encourage “thoughtful inclusion” rather than making blanket statements that “all kids should be included”. I think kids with social learning challenges have extraordinary problems with processing social information “in mass”. These challenges are far beyond the challenges of students with more typical learning disabilities. I think  that much of the research on inclusion of special needs kids fails to really look specifically at the inclusion of kids with social learning challenges and how much they are learning of a functional nature of how to participate with others given the amount of cueing and support (Paraprofessionals helping to complete their work for them, etc.) in this environment. Now take what I am saying here with the understanding that I have gone to great lengths to explore different levels of the social mind in other articles on my website, so I am not making blanket statement here. It is all about really thinking about the student and what we are REALLY teaching them so they can learn to function as more independent, self-regulated students and then adults who can also have command of academic information (as much as their brains allow them to learn).

More Superflexible Thinking on my part… - by Stephanie Madrigal

The Superflex curriculum was primarily designed for the elementary age children; however, many educators have come up at workshops to tell us that they have successfully introduced Superflex with their middle school students or that they have changed the characters adapting them into more age appropriate characters or even used an anime spin which many middle school students are into.  As we know all students are different in how they may respond to this curriculum.  Most students find it fun while some think it is boring or maybe too childish for them.

by Stephanie Madrigal, therapist at Social Thinking and author of Superflex (Part 1 of 2 part post)

Superflex: A Superhero Social Thinking Curriculum, ironically, was developed as I had to work on my own rigid thinking in trying to work with one of my students!  I began working with a student, Eric, individually, because he was so rigid and did not have the skills, to work in a group setting.  As I quickly realized, he and I were going nowhere fast.  He was extremely rigid and had difficulty following anyone else’s plans and had huge meltdowns when things did not go his way. So after a couple of weeks of banging my head against the wall because I could not figure out a way to reach him, I remembered that he liked Superheroes.  Hmmm… do I stick to my own ideas and lessons that I had already outlined for his treatment? I already knew the answer to this question--No way! I needed to think outside the box with him and find something that would motivate him or I was not going to be able to teach him.  

So the next week, before Eric’s session, I wrote, in big letters on the white board, "Superflex a Social Thinking Superhero!" Then, once he entered the room, I just waited to see if he noticed. It was only a few seconds before he walked over to the board and asked, “Who is this?” In my confident tone, I responded, “Superflex!  Haven’t you heard of this Superhero before?” I proceeded to explain that this Superhero was a little different than most he had learned about.  “Superflex is a superhero that hangs out in our brain and helps us to think about thinking about others, being flexible and making good choices,” I said.  “However, like any other Superhero, Superflex has a nemesis and his name is Rock Brain!”  I can remember consciously thinking at this point, “Is he really letting me talk about this with him?” he was completely intrigued with this concept.  So, of course, I continued…”Rock Brain is that character that also lives in our brain, and attempts to defeat Superflex by trying to prevent our flexible thinking.” Rock Brain makes us get stuck on what we want to do, insisting on doing things only one way, our way and does not let us see things from another’s point of view.”  Eric quickly agreed with this assessment of Rock Brain’s powers and then proceeded to tell me that Rock Brain was active in his brain a lot except, “He was not made out of rock, he was made out of titanium!”

In the first blog on anxiety (please read first), we concluded with how the "Spiral of Social Success" can work for your students if you talk to them along these lines:

1. You will encounter some stress approaching this situation that you are used to bailing out of from your anxiety. However, instead of starting by doubting yourself, explore what strategies you can use to help yourself deal with the uncomfortable social situation.
2. Use your inner coach to remind yourself how much better you will feel once you use your strategies, that you are capable of using these strategies as well as what the strategies are to use.
3. You feel better about yourself when you see yourself demonstrating your abilities or social competencies.
4. This encourages your to implement the use of the strategies.
5. Resulting in the fact you are training your brain that "you can do it" better than you have done it before!

Here's how this looks:

The second part of this blog is now posted, but please start here...

An astute clinician I have worked with for years, Randi Dodge, strongly encouraged our team to explore anxiety as part of our social thinking treatments for higher-functioning autism spectrum disorders, ADHD and similar diagnoses. While we had all come to realize we had been teaching strategies to reduce anxiety, we were not talking about “anxiety” and really starting at its impact on Social Thinking/social learning because, quite frankly, we are mostly a group of speech-language pathologists and that seemed to be crossing into the domain of mental health. However, the more Randi brought in materials for us to review about anxiety, the more we began to focus on how strong a role anxiety plays in the hearts and minds of our higher level students and how this affects their abilities to demonstrate their own improved social thinking to others. For those of you familiar with my work, you know that I encourage a very interdisciplinary approach with our students. Meaning, we all have to learn about social pragmatics, sensory systems, emotional regulation, counseling, behaviorism, educational demands, etc., to work with our students. As much as we try to uniquely assess a student using these different disciplines, they learn as whole people!

Where to start when using our child-centered products, Social Detective and Superflex?

We are thrilled you like Superflex and are finding it so helpful. The response to this superhero comic book curriculum has literally been overwhelming.

I have recently begun to find the words to explain the evolution of the teachings of Social Thinking...

Superflex is getting great feedback on how it gets kids onboard and motivated to look at their own behaviors... the purpose of Superflex is to teach students self-awareness, self-monitoring and self-control using related strategies initially introduced in our core Social Thinking books, Think Social curriculum, Thinking About You Thinking About Me, etc.

We then released the Social Detective comic book to focus on the Social Thinking Vocabulary, which is essential to carry across the school and home day; this book is often the starting place for direct work with our students. There has been a remarkably broad range of classroom teachers, principals, parents and therapists who are finding the magic of our Social Detective and Superflex books for introducing Social Thinking concepts to students, many of whom are "neurotypical"!

Finally, in the third part of this blog on the transition to adulthood, I felt a letter I received from a parent put a human face to the ideas on this topic... and gave the reason I write this blog, for the letter was in response to one of my earlier blogs. (Probably best to read the first part and the second part of this blog first.) Personally identifiable information has been changed.

Letter from a parent:

When we began to look at colleges for Mike, the only people who had written colleges were Lars Perner, Temple Grandin, and maybe Stephen Shore. The only book I was able to find was the Guide to Colleges for Students with Learning Disabilities.

This is the second part of a three-part blog. If you haven't read the first part, you might want to do so. The following is a list of questions to explore related to a student when they are in mid-high school to help consider what realistic options are for the next step post-graduation. Rarely have the students I have observed "pulled it together" in their junior and senior years of high school, given the tremendous increasing pressures they feel as they start to realize they will be graduating. While we want to include the student in these discussions, we also have to realize that many of our students cannot imagine something they have not experienced. Many students assure their parents they will figure it all out once they go to college; this is called "talking the talk". Until our students demonstrate they can understand the action plans they need to demonstrate in order to show themselves and us they are "walking the walk", it is overly optimistic to trust our students know how to problem solve what their next step past graduation should be. While the "next step" should not discount what the student is saying he/she wants to do, they can only really be given that choice after they have been exposed to multiple post-high school options.

Consider these questions:
1. Does the student keep track of his own homework assignments?
2. Does he create and implement plans, even if he doesn't do them to perfection that are reasonable for working through his short term and long term homework assignments?
3. Does he know how to ask for help?
4. Does he understand how to manage his/her anxiety when dealing with a stressful day? Or does he require adult intervention for him/her to implement self-calming strategies?