Social Thinking workshops are designed for professionals and parents alike who are working with individuals experiencing social and communication challenges. The Social Thinking Providers Conference in June each year is primarily designed for professionals. Adults experiencing challenges with transtioning to adult responsibilities have also benefited from the adult transitional workshops.

The concepts related to social thinking provide a practical, common-sense way in which we can all start to observe and experience the social thoughts and related social interactions we encounter and participate in on a daily basis. We cannot begin to teach something we don't know how to describe ourselves. While the end-goal is to develop better methods and strategies for teaching students with social learning challenges to make better social decisions and participate with more success in social interactions, clearly we all need to understand the concepts of social thinking. Just as a teacher can't teach math if they don't understand the math concepts they are teaching, we can't teach students to understand the social mind if we have not thought about how the social mind really works! Merely participating in social interactions successfully is not the same as understanding how to teach social thinking.

Michelle Garcia Winner, Stephanie Madrigal and Dr. Pamela Crooke each give their own perspective on many different workshop days. While each workshop day shares in a common theoretical approach, each day is unique with its own explicit focus. You will learn more about these days by reading our different workshop descriptions.

Most of our teachings are focused on persons with social learning challenges who are 8 years old or older (all the way through adulthood) who have a near normal to way above normal verbal IQ, unless otherwise indicated on the workshop day description.

Our workshop days are known to be enlightening as well as practical. It is a goal for each participant to leave the workshop with a specific framework from which to observe their own and others social behavior, while also having a far deeper understanding with regards to what our students need to learn and how to teach them.

The workshop days blend scientifically based research, theories based on clinical practice, teaching strategies that are tried and true, many clinical examples and a good dose of humor. We have to laugh at ourselves first! Social behavior when stripped down to its core is pretty odd. We tell people what they want to hear even if we don't believe it is true! How many times have you told someone they looked good when you didn't believe they really looked as good as you made it sound!

Most workshops are booked by groups bringing Michelle, Steph or Pam into their community. These groups organize and administrate their own workshop day(s) in their community while we provide the content discussed during the workshop. Please look at the Schedule of Workshops to see if one of our speakers will be in your community in the coming year and to see whom to contact if you are interested in attending one.

If you are interested in hiring one of our speakers to come to your community, please email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it