Social Thinking Santana Row (STSR) and Social Thinking Stevens Creek (STSC)

Our clinics specialize in working with children and adults with social cognitive deficits on the high end of the autism spectrum and with like disabilities (High-Functioning Autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities, ADHD, including those undiagnosed). The philosophy of our clinics is to provide team based services to our client and to communicate with the client’s larger treatment team. When we consult regarding a child we are interested not only in his immediate social/communication and behavioral issues but also how these are being handled across environments (home and school). Most students participate in our clinic through our social thinking groups where we teach social thinking and related skills. For more information on this approach, please look to our website: www.socialthinking.com.

Founder and Director

Michelle Garcia Winner, the founder of the Social Thinking Clinic and Think Social Publishing.

Michelle is passionate about educating all persons: parents, educators, administrators and students, about the importance of social functioning across our lives. Teaching we can do more to help students find increasing levels of success as adults. All of our therapists possess a thorough knowledge and strong understanding of the cognitive therapy techniques discussed in Michelle’s conferences and utilized in our private practice. We also have an “assessment team”, specifically trained in doing the informal social cognitive assessments Michelle discusses in her trainings and her publications.

The groups run at our Social Thinking Clinics, will be observed at times by professionals who come from all over the world to study our techniques and observe and at times participate in treatment sessions. Confidential information about clients will not be shared with them beyond what the professional who may be interning with us needs to know to plan an effective lesson. Any time a professional interns at our clinic they will ALWAYS be accompanied by the group’s lead clinician and all planning will be implemented only after it is approved by the lead clinician.

Clinic Services

Therapeutic Evaluations (Social Thinking Santana Row): Consultation/informal assessments to families and school districts about educational and life planning

Therapeutic evaluations are NOT required for participating in our social thinking groups. Prior to offering consultation to your child’s educational program, we would need to schedule a full evaluation meeting with you (the adult family members) and the child. This provides a time to:

1. Become familiar with the personality and profile of your child.
2. Discuss current strengths and weaknesses of the educational setting.
3. Review and update the IEP.
4. Review behavioral needs, if they exist.
5. Discuss concerns from the home environment.
6. Create a therapy plan that serves best his current functioning level.
7. If the family is interested in receiving ongoing services from our clinic, decide appropriate placement within a therapy group.

On average we do 1 - 2 assessments each month, taking time to write the narrative reports to describe the issues of the child rather than simply report test scores and diagnostic labels. There is usually a waiting list for these services. Michelle’s schedule allows for a very limited number of assessment appointments, the waiting list for her assessment services usually is about 4-6 months.

Assessments will most likely be scheduled during a Mentor Training in which a group of professionals gathers in our clinic to learn the Social Thinking process. Assessment individuals will be observed through a two way mirror and would typically have no knowledge that they are being observed. Please see item #3 for more information on our Mentor Training Program.

Weekly Social Thinking Treatment Services (Both Clinics)

We conduct on-going therapeutic services, generally in small group sessions for ages Pre School (Social Thinking Stevens Creek only) through adulthood. On some occasions we will see clients individually. We teach students and their families how to take the social thinking lessons they learn at our center, out the door to continue working on them at home, in the community and at school. A full therapeutic evaluation/assessment by our staff is NOT required prior to placement in a group at our clinic. Families are asked to submit the items listed at the top of this form. This information is then reviewed by our staff and decisions about placement can, in most cases, be made with the submitted paperwork. The letter from the parent is a very important piece that adds a special dimension to the student’s file. If additional information is necessary, we then contact the parent. Some persons do not have any past reports written about them, we then will just accept a letter or we meet with client or family prior to trying to make a placement in our clinic.

All group therapy consists of no more than 4 students in a group and consists of student treatment (generally 45-50 minutes) and a parent education component (generally the last 10-15 minutes). It is during this time that we will review with the parents what techniques were taught during the session that should be carried over at home and school across the week. Parent observation is available by request, but not actively encouraged.

Occasionally we find the need for a “small group.” Small groups consist of only 2 students. The purpose of the small group is to accommodate the more unique needs of students with very slow auditory processing, very weak ability to take perspective of others or have significant behavioral challenges. We prefer to serve students in the larger group size and will move your child to the larger group when we all feel it is an appropriate time.

Teaching social thinking is unique in that we actively teach students to think about how to think about others and how others think of them(take perspective), as well as work on organizational, problem solving skills and forming social relationships. All of these skills can be worked on in isolation, but are more powerful when a student is guided to see how the skills are interwoven. Humor is also an important component of our program.

Training for Professionals

Social Thinking is considered a “promising practice” being pioneered at our Social Thinking Clinic. A goal of our center is to provide a treatment model that can be implemented widely. We get requests from professionals internationally to train them in this approach. To help meet the needs of the greater community, we started providing “mentor training programs” about 6 years ago, where a team of 6-7 therapists/educators come to our clinic for a 3 day visit to learn more about our techniques and to observe our therapists in action. Therefore, another unique aspect of our center is that participating families are required to give permission for these visiting professionals to observe clinical services to help them learn how to provide these in their own community. We do not share written reports with these “mentor trainers” and parents are free to talk to them about what they are learning. We post a notice each time we have a team of visiting professionals observing at our clinic. Due to these mentor trainings, social thinking programs are now running in school districts in Washington, Illinois, Wisconsin, New Hampshire as well as in Hong Kong and Singapore.

Conference presentations and trainings for school districts, SELPA’s, parent groups or geographic areas.

One of the missions of our center is to help teach school educators how to work with students with social learning challenges within their own educational environments to avoid having to “out-source” educational services. A primary goal is to help districts/SELPAS to educate specific talented educators to further their own educational competencies in this area. Our staff then serves as mentors within the educational systems to teachers how best to teach students with higher level autism spectrum disabilities and related disorders. Please contact our office for further information and scheduling.

If you are interested in clinical services at the Social Thinking clinic, please fill in and mail in the appropriate forms below. You must also read the information of services, the exchange of information, and the appropriate information for new clients, teachers and adults, as applicable.

For questions, please read the FAQs below or contact us at 408-244-2005.

Please note: We are closed major holidays - and during the holiday season, the approximate two weeks from just before Christmas to just after New Year's Day when schools are out - our offices run on a limited schedule. During this time, phone calls may not be answered and there may be a delay in replies to mails, emails and if you order books, etc.

Social Thinking Clinic FAQs

Typically students come to the clinic 1x a week for one hour. The students work with their therapist for 50 minutes and then work with the parents of the students for the final 10 minutes. They attend the entire semester and very often students attend for many years in a row because we are not teaching just one concept, we are also teaching students to notice how social information and related responses are supposed to evolve across each year of our life. OY! There is a lot to learn!

Is it OK if students also see mental health therapists at the same time their come to your clinic?
Yes, we usually encourage this! Our students struggle with their mental health as they age up into adolescents. We like to have mental health providers on the overall team for students when they have anxiety, depression, etc.

When should I apply; is there a wait list?
The best time to apply to our clinic is before the start of a new semester. The school year semester runs from September to June; the summer semester runs from June to August. It is during this time we have the best chance of placing a new student in a social thinking group. If you student does not get into our clinic during the semester you apply, they stay on the wait list for the duration of the semester. However, the wait list information is NOT transferred to the next semester. The next semester all families have to re-apply by completing an application and providing us potential times during the week that work best for your student to receive services.

If I send in my application right away, will this assure my student gets into one of the clinics?
No. The social thinking groups are not formed based on a first come, first serve approach. Instead we carefully consider and try to understand the social thinking functioning level of each person that applies. We then make every attempt to try and place that student with other students who function at a similar level and are of similar age who can come to the clinic at the same time! Putting our schedule together is a bit like solving the Rubik's Cube. We do not believe that students can be best served by placing them in groups of students with similar diagnostic labels; instead we want to group students who are in a similar social thinking learning zone. While it would be really easy to have all students with Asperger syndrome come to the clinic at 4 pm for social groups, we don't see that creating an effective learning environment, since there are many different types of Asperger syndrome.

Do you need to have a formal Informal Dynamic Social Thinking Assessment to be part of the clinic?
No. If a parent perceives there is a need we will consider that as a valid referral for consideration in the clinic program. We do ask parents to write us a letter explaining their concerns and we also ask that all reports written about the student in the last 3 years also be provided, as well as a diagnostic report if one exists.

Do you need to have a diagnostic label to be part of the clinic?
No. We have learned that diagnostic labels to not tell us enough about who the student really is. We work with the person not the label!

Do you work with adults?
We have worked with adults for the last 10 years. We tend to see the majority of our adults in individual therapy sessions (past college age) since they have very unique, definable challenges. We thoroughly enjoy our adult population and feel the work we do with them on expanding their own social thinking and related social skills is quite effective.

Who runs clinics using your therapy technique elsewhere in the United States?
Michelle gives her workshops and sells her products nationally and internationally, so many people have access to her information. Thus, Michelle has heard that there are numerous clinics that are using her approach. However, given that Michelle does not personally know the work of these folks she cannot guarantee their product or how they interpret using her strategies. We hope to post a list of service providers that we are familiar with from around the country on this website under the "professional section". In this area of our website we also post the names of mentors and interns who have trained directly with us at our clinic. If someone says they are teaching "Social Thinking" in your area, please do your own research into their approach to see how closely it aligns with the published teachings of social thinking while also exploring their experience and respect for the struggles of the parents. If people say they are teaching social skills and reinforcing proper social behavior as the majority of their teaching program, they are not teaching social thinking! Furthermore, anyone participating in a social thinking program should have the treatment providers spend time with the parents/caregivers at the end of each session (in private practices) to explain to the parents what is being worked on so they can carry social thinking over into their homes. Ideally school programs also develop a way to communicate with parents to help parents learn what they can do to be part of their child's social learning. This treatment approach is not all about the kids, we need to also support the parents!

Clinic Forms

Contact Us

Overview of the Clinic

The goal of Social Thinking is to educate all persons about the importance of social thinking challenges and how they affect the lives of individuals, particularly those who have high-functioning autism (including Asperger Syndrome), NLD, PDD-NOS and ADHD and to provide a number of services to that end.

As successful as the Social Thinking approach has been, we acknowledge that this field is still young, so we are always developing new, practical treatment approaches to help individuals with higher functioning autism spectrum disorders, ADHD, NLD and similar challenges to eventually process social-communicative information in a deeper way.

Other services offered through Social Thinking and its clinic include:

• Mentor training and internship programs for professionals seeking more experience and expertise to take to their settings
• Books and curriculum materials that Michelle and others in the Social Thinking field have written and are continuing to innovate
• A website, email newsletter, online professional forum and other resources for people interested in higher-functioning autism and Asperger's and similar social-cognitive challenges and the treatment programs we have developed