Book a Social Thinking Speaker

This course is designed to teach professionals and parents the social learning frameworks, concepts, and strategies needed to guide others toward improved social processing and social competencies. Conference attendees will gain new insights into the power of their own social-emotional intelligence as they explore their social motivations and how they process and respond to social information. We will dissect hidden social rules, contemplate how social expectations change with age, and discuss how social problem solving is at the heart of social competencies and affects how students interpret and respond to social-academic information and assignments. Social Thinking has developed a large range of treatment* strategies—and attendees will walk away with a number of them, including approaches for helping students avoid “the blurt,” cope with boring moments, and develop conversational language.

Much of the day will focus on the ILAUGH Model of Social Cognition. ILAUGH is an acronym for Initiating Communication, Listening with Eyes and Brain, Abstract and Inferential Thinking, Understanding Perspective, Getting the Big Picture, and Humor & Human Relatedness. The ILAUGH model demonstrates not only why people with social learning challenges have weaker social abilities but also how social interpretation is linked to academic tasks such as written expression, conversational language, reading comprehension, and organizational skills. As we wrap up the day, we will explore how to teach at the roots—and not through the leaves—of Social Thinking’s Social Learning Tree. We will then discuss how to write realistic IEP goals based on rubrics. Mainstream teachers find the information in this course applicable to all students as it pertains to social-emotional learning, and audiences around the world love that it furthers their own social-emotional insights!

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

We begin the day by exploring how to better understand the minds of individuals with social learning challenges when traditional standardized tests fall short. We introduce the Social Thinking Informal Dynamic Assessment (ST-IDA), a series of tasks with corresponding templates described in Michelle Garcia Winner's book Thinking About YOU Thinking About ME, 2nd Edition. The dynamic tasks included in the ST-IDA examine the way the individual approaches social communication, executive functioning, and problem solving in real time. The ST-IDA can be a useful tool for initial or three-year testing and can provide valuable insight to all members of the educational or support team.

Results of the ST-IDA can help to uncover the link between social thinking challenges and social and academic learning. We provide a detailed checklist for two assessment tasks, which serves as a catalyst to guide more meaningful observations. Deeper observations, in turn, lead to developing more meaningful treatment* programs. Discussion related to the video footage of the informal assessment tasks will highlight how stakeholders (e.g., parents, diagnosticians, paraprofessionals, teachers, counselors, therapists, etc.) can work more effectively with those we aim to help. Parents and professionals applaud the highly practical nature of this workshop.

In the afternoon, we will review two practical treatment frameworks. The first, Social Behavior Mapping (SBM), is a visual framework that teaches social responsibility by highlighting that social expectations occur in a given context based on the situation and people. SBM enables individuals to discover what is expected or unexpected in a social situation while also learning the impact their behavior has on others’ feelings. How others feel about our behavior also impacts how they treat us and ultimately affects our own feelings! SBM has been widely adopted for use with all ages. This core Social Thinking treatment framework reflects our cognitive behavioral teaching style. Audience members will create their own Social Behavior Map as part of the training.

To help individuals understand the difference between friendly and friendship we have a visual treatment framework called the Friendship Pyramid. We will delve into five different levels of relationship development starting with the importance of initiating and responding to greetings with people who are not “friends.”

To round out the day, we will describe a four-phase social competency pathway to guide our students as they engage in a social learning process.

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

The majority of individuals with social learning challenges have difficulty developing the organizational skills needed to manage the increasingly complex expectations of life in upper elementary, middle, and high school, and into their adult years. Our organizational abilities emerge from executive functioning skills that are expected to develop with minimal instruction. Not surprisingly, identifying motivation, knowing how to get started on a project, and managing time across a variety of homework assignments can feel overwhelming—even for the most intellectually sharp individuals. The impact of poor organizational skills is immense; it affects outcomes in school, at work, and at home. People with poor organizational skills and limited motivation are often referred to as lazy, but the truth is their behaviors are more likely the result of a neurologically based executive functioning weaknesses than a lack of desire to be competent in their work. Often, relatively little support is provided by parents and teachers to guide individuals to develop these critical skills—and even those who want to help are not sure where to begin.

In this course, we explore key executive functioning skills and practical strategies to help individuals track and tackle homework and other deadline-based responsibilities. Discover two types of organizational skills: static and dynamic. Dissect dynamic organizational skills into 10 steps that are critical to the completion of any homework assignment. Learn an educational strategy aligned with each step and receive an extensive take-home handout to support this teaching method.

This course has been enthusiastically received by parents, counselors, mainstream and special education teachers, administrators, psychologists, speech language pathologists, occupational therapists, and others. As with most Social Thinking courses, hands-on activities help attendees relate their own experiences to the challenges discussed. We go beyond a general description of the issues, guiding attendees to actively explore key concepts and elucidating the pivotal role parents and professionals play in teaching these concepts.

While this course was designed to support individuals with social learning challenges, the cutting-edge information provided is relevant for all populations—mainstream teachers love this conference day!

It’s time to get practical! Using Social Thinking’s Social Competency Model, learn to guide individuals to better socially attend, interpret, problem solve and respond to social information. Explore how to teach three core treatment*-based frameworks and more than 20 unique strategies based on Social Thinking Vocabulary and related activities. Teach students to better interpret and respond to their social world by making smart guesses to discover hidden social rules. Learn systematic and logical ways to encourage social responsibility by learning about our own and others’ social thinking. Explore how our thinking about a situation and what we know about others can help us create the expected behaviors that support our relationships. Learn how we make these abstract concepts more concrete by reviewing a variety of activities through clinical examples. Our evidence-based Social Thinking Vocabulary is the foundation of our teaching programs, and research published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (Crooke, et al.) demonstrates how individuals benefit from learning these concepts. The study found that once children were taught how to think about these concepts, they were able to generalize the information.

Social Thinking’s treatment-based frameworks and strategies can easily be used in conjunction with programs such as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), Response to Intervention (RTI) and other social and emotional learning (SEL) programs for all students.

Motivational developmental tools such as our We Thinkers! curricula for 4- to 7-year-olds, You Are a Social Detective! and Superflex… a Superhero Social Thinking Curriculum will also be reviewed to help participants see how these materials teach key lessons.

Participants will work in groups to learn how to use Social Thinking concepts to create their own lesson plan. We explore how to make lessons applicable across a variety of environments and focus on enabling students to apply these lessons in their lives. Most lessons are further explained in the book Think Social! A Social Thinking Curriculum for School-Age Students (Winner, 2005), which is used in schools around the world.

How does improving social competencies also improve academic performance? The Social Thinking Methodology recognizes that the social mind not only helps us interact with others, but also has a considerable impact on our success in school and later in life. We use our social competencies to understand the relationships of characters in a novel (impacting our reading comprehension), to write an effective essay that acknowledges the reader’s perspective, to understand that it’s not enough to do your homework, you have to turn it in for the teacher to know you did it! We use our social mind in almost everything we do throughout our life. In this course, we’ll discuss the important connection between social competencies and academic performance. For more information on this topic, check out the book: Why Teach Social Thinking? Questioning Our Assumptions About What It Means to Learn Social Skills.

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

How do we teach individuals to hold a thought in their heads? How do we explore the fact that there is a difference in how others interpret the statements: “I wish ____” vs. “I am ____?” What strategies encourage the ability to pay attention to others' thoughts, motives, and intentions? What does it take to improve conversational interactions? (Hint: more than we think.) How do we perceive each other’s physical movements? How do we create teaching strategies to help our clients with more subtle challenges improve their face-to-face communication?

In this conference, we will explore treatment* frameworks and hands-on strategies not currently taught in other Social Thinking courses. We will use video clips of individuals in treatment sessions to demonstrate the scope and sequence that we use to teach important Social Thinking concepts. We will also provide samples of specific treatment tools for the audience to use to develop a deeper understanding of social conversational engagement. A special Cascade of Social Attention assessment tool, not provided in any of our other materials, will be provided attendees to help guide their observations of an individual’s social input (interpretive) and output (social skills) to better understand how to develop a treatment plan as well as gain related prognostic information.

We will discuss how executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence form the heart of social thinking and related social skills. As always, we will connect this information to educational standards to show that we teach social concepts—not in addition to the educational standards—but as part of core social-academic instruction. We will also brainstorm lessons and strategies in teams, give tips for writing solid IEP goals, and developing rubrics for data collection.

Guided observation of specific individuals’ longitudinal (10–20 years) video footage will also be shown to explore how specific students evolve socially across time.

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

Course Content Disclosure: While this course includes information on other products and the work of other authors, it focuses primarily on the content included in the We Thinkers! Volume 2 Social Problem Solvers curriculum, storybooks, and the GPS assessment and treatment guide for the purpose of teaching this information with fidelity.

Social-executive functioning is at the heart of successful play, social interaction, and learning as part of a group. In this course, we’ll teach how to move from the five basic Social Thinking lessons in We Thinkers! Volume 1 Social Explorers (formerly The Incredible Flexible You!) to the more complex lessons presented in We Thinkers! Volume 2. Attendees will engage in research-based group learning activities and learn strategies to apply in the classroom, clinic, or home the next day. Explore concepts such as the role of play and working as part of a group in the development of self-regulation, social problem solving, and executive functioning. We will also look at why a child who has difficulty with social attention will have trouble with sharing an imagination and interacting/playing with peers. Learn to teach kids to become better social observers and decipher the hidden rules and social expectations of a situation. From there we move to teaching strategies around the concepts of flexible versus stuck thinking, recognizing the size of the problem, making smart guesses, and sharing an imagination. Learn to use Social Thinking’s newest tool, the Group Collaboration, Play and Problem Solving (GPS) Scale, to understand the five different levels of play and how they relate to classroom participation and academic standards. Understand how this scale interfaces with and expands upon other known scales such as the Westby Play Scale (2000), a highly regarded standard in the literature of play assessment. Learn how the lessons and activities in the We Thinkers! curriculum are adapted for each level of Social Thinking’s GPS and how the information can be used in Pre-K–2 mainstream classrooms as part of social and emotional learning (SEL), Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), and Response to Intervention (RTI) programs. Our goal is to teach how to use We Thinkers! Volume 2 and related treatment* ideas with fidelity. The information presented on this day builds on the five core Social Thinking concepts presented in our precursory course “Teaching Social Thinking to Early Learners Through Stories and Play-Based Activities.”

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

You have been asking about how to use some of our core curricula with different types of learners and ages, and—voila—here is the answer. This course will focus on teaching the strategies in our core curricula You Are a Social Detective!  and Superflex with fidelity, and will share developmentally appropriate tools to foster social attention and self-regulation for students in kindergarten through middle school. Learn creative ideas to help students understand self-awareness, self-monitoring, and self-control through our more advanced teachings of Superflex's Five-Point Power Plan. We demonstrate how to help children become social detectives to figure out the hidden rules, and how to foster your own super-flexible creativity when teaching these lessons to your own children or students. We’ll also examine developmental adaptations to our teachings for different age groups, and provide strategies for helping students who no longer think Superflex and his team of Unthinkables are “cool.”

This interactive course is filled with creative group activities to help our students move from being “Me” thinkers to “We” thinkers, and explores the core concepts applicable throughout the school-age years. We examine how lessons connect to educational/academic standards in the mainstream classroom—our strategies help everyone improve reading comprehension, written expression, conflict resolution, and work as part of a group. We also discuss the connections between the Social Thinking Methodology and Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) programs, Response to Intervention (RTI), and Positive Behavioral Intervention Supports (PBIS).

PLEASE NOTE: This course focuses on the use of Social Thinking’s books You Are a Social Detective!  and Superflex… a Superhero Social Thinking Curriculum to teach concepts related to Social Thinking. Our intention is NOT to market the products, but instead to show how to teach an appropriate scope, sequence, and pacing of the curricula in the manner they were designed. Our hope is to increase the consistency and fidelity in the ways these concepts are taught. If you (or your district or place of employment) are uncomfortable with a full day focusing on strategies related to products, please select another course to attend.

Content Disclosure: This course does not teach about any other methodologies or programs aside from the Superflex Curriculum within the Social Thinking Methodology.

The Zones of Regulation is a framework and curriculum designed to foster skills in self-regulation, including emotional control, sensory regulation, and executive functioning. It is a systematic, cognitive behavioral approach that uses four colors to help students visually and verbally self-identify how they are functioning in the moment given their emotions and state of alertness. The model incorporates Social Thinking concepts to help students use perspective taking to understand the social context and how their management of their feelings and states impact those around them. Through using the curriculum, individuals become more self-aware and learn tools they can use to regulate emotions to meet environmental and social demands. Zones can be used effectively in home, school, and clinical settings, as well as in conjunction with other social and emotional learning (SEL) strategies.

This presentation provides teachers, therapists, and parents with hands-on knowledge on the nature of self-regulation and strategies for improving self-regulation and emotional control in individuals of all ages. The presentation addresses topics such as: the brain’s involvement, typical development, sensory processing, emotional regulation, social cognition, and executive functioning. Participants will learn an explicit, stair-stepped method and tools to guide students in using the Zones framework across situations and environments to regulate sensory needs, impulses, and emotional states based on social demands.

Visuals, videos, and student work samples are highlighted to illustrate numerous learning activities. A variety of tools (sensory supports, calming techniques, and thinking strategies) are explored to help students recognize their internal emotions, sensory needs, and thinking patterns in each zone, when shifting from one zone to another, and then self-regulate within zones. Participants explore ideas on how to support students using tools effectively across environments. The presentation also incorporates core concepts from Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking framework to help teach students about perspective taking, so they better understand how being in the different zones impacts the thoughts and feelings of other people around them and use this insight to guide them in self-management.

Students with Social Thinking challenges, such as those with ASD, ADHD, NLD, Social Communication Disorder, and other social- and behaviorally based disorders often struggle in the areas of organization, attention, social engagement, group dynamics, and self-regulation, all of which make learning difficult. In this presentation, we will explore how the Social Thinking framework and methodology can be introduced as a school-wide model and incorporated into existing school initiatives. The class will offer strategies to differentiate Social Thinking instruction across three tiers of intervention and describe effective tools for universal screening, data collection, and progress monitoring.

The model presented is based on the frameworks of RTI and PBIS. Response to Intervention (RTI) is a multi-tiered method of academic intervention designed to provide early, effective assistance to struggling learners at increasing levels of intensity. It is designed to address the learning needs of all students school-wide, through academic supports aligned with individual student need. Positive Behavior Supports (PBS/PBIS) is another school initiative that uses a differentiated system of supports to increase learning and decrease problem behavior. RTI and PBIS are both used at the group and individual level and help educators and intervention providers ensure that instructional practices are high quality, based on scientific evidence, and are assessment driven, differentiated, and specific. Information gained from an RTI or PBIS process is used by school personnel and parents to adapt instruction to facilitate student learning in the area of Social Thinking.

This course will explore how to work with individuals who struggle with self-regulation, social anxiety, and depression, who are described as Nuance-Challenged Social Communicators on our Social Thinking–Social Communication Profile. Individuals in this group may represent a range of diagnoses such as ADHD, Asperger’s, PDD-NOS, ODD, OCD, NVLD, social anxiety, perfectionism, twice exceptional—or may be undiagnosed. Nuance-based social learners tend to have significant issues and are the most likely to be bullied by peers and adults—we introduce the concept of the “forgiveness factor” to detail this phenomenon. (See this article for more common characteristics of people described as Nuance-Challenged Social Communicators.)

We will explore the characteristics and social-emotional learning needs of these individuals starting at four years old, across childhood, and throughout adulthood. We will investigate the different levels of interactive play and collaboration with Social Thinking’s Group Collaboration, Play and Problem Solving Scale (GPS) for use with 4- to 7-year-olds and then examine how patterns in our little ones can extend into adulthood. 

We will explore sophisticated ideas that foster the development of an individual’s perspective taking, executive functioning, and social-emotional self-management. More specifically we will examine different aspects of emotional awareness of self and others, flexible thinking, social problem solving, self-advocacy while guiding the audience through different assessment, and treatment* ideas to foster self-regulation, effective communication, and a sense of well-being. Reviewed within this day are:

• Examples of cognitive flexibility and its relationship to dysregulation
• How social problem solving and emotional expression are linked
• Strategies to promote emotional self-regulation including our emotion scale and how our emotional expression is expected to shift with age
• Learning about one’s own strengths and weaknesses
• Exploring social anxiety and some related treatment ideas
• Enhance social competencies by utilizing Social Thinking’s Friendship Pyramid to explore specific strategies to help teach more sophisticated greetings, and development of acquaintance-based relationships and situational friendships.

Many of our adult clients tell us they wished someone had “taught me this information when I was 10 years old.” Attendees report this course is beneficial for both helping school-age students and better understanding themselves!

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

Adolescence. Developmentally, this time is called the transition to adulthood, and we as teams develop plans, outline trajectories, and write goals to facilitate the process. We teach the importance of both academic and social skills, but at the end of the day it's not uncommon to hear, "No thanks, I'm just gonna design video games so I don't really need to learn that other stuff." No matter where we travel around the globe, we answer similar questions about helping teens transition from childhood to young adulthood. Parents and professionals welcome information on realistic planning and preparation to guide our students to better prepare for the social demands of the adult world.

This transition can overwhelm individuals born to social learning challenges, even if they are considered bright and have solid to strong language skills (e.g., ASD level 1 & 2, ADHD, twice exceptional, learning disabilities, nonverbal learning disabilities, specific language impairment, sensory dysregulation, etc.). This course focuses on helping parents and professionals (including teachers, counselors, psychologists, speech-language pathologists, etc.) prepare for—and respond to—this transition. Specifically, we will relate research-based concepts to an exploration of the more nuanced expectations that come with the emergence into adulthood and the strategies to help individuals develop a more mature social mindset.

The day is organized into five chapters:

Chapter 1: Learn to understand a teen’s perspective of their own and others’ social minds and related expectations, individualized learning of strengths and weaknesses, the social-academic connection, the power of our inner-coach, the power of our self-defeater, the connection to cognitive behavioral therapy, social competencies, and the Five Levels of Social Conformity.

Chapter 2: Adulthood and independence don’t always go together. We will define and explore many levels of achieving independence. We will also review how the law changes as a student moves out of K–12 education and into adulthood.

Chapter 3: Briefly explore the different levels of the social mind and tips for teaching and job coaching our more literal-minded individuals. A case study will be reviewed.

Chapter 4: Discuss our clinical experience and related research in working with students who seem resistant to social-emotional learning and working as part of a group. In this very popular chapter, we will examine the perspective of the resistant (self-protective) learner as it relates to the strategies that encourage self-learning and increased collaboration and those sure to meet further resistance. Student examples will be shared along with other resources we find helpful.

Chapter 5: Teach teens who have subtle but significant social learning challenges to establish and manage their own public relations and self-management campaigns. We will also discuss related mental health challenges such as social anxiety. Strategies to encourage motivation and guide learning about one’s own executive functioning, the perspective of self and other, friendship, and the subtleties of social communication will be reviewed with another case study, related video, and hands-on lessons.

All information draws from peer-reviewed published research but is translated into hands-on strategies, clear frameworks, and concepts to explore and discuss. The goal of this course is to help all parents and professionals develop a larger toolkit to better assist students to learn about their own executive functioning, sharpen their perspective taking, and begin to manage their own social lives. We focus on the fact that a successful treatment* program is one that helps the student achieve his or her own goals. This course receives stellar reviews!

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

The Social Thinking Methodology provides strong tools for engaging adults across the lifespan in the social-emotional learning process. Incorporating 15 years of experience with this population, this course shares what we have learned to help adults with strong language and learning skills interpret and respond to social subtleties expected of adults in the workplace. We set aside diagnostic labels and discuss the broader concept that we all live within social boundaries and want others to include us and show they value us, whether or not we realize it. Exploring the social-emotional undercurrents, we introduce the Five Steps to Social Thinking Psychology and the Social-Emotional Chain Reaction to which we all subconsciously react and respond. Through review of dilemmas encountered by bright adults who have struggled due to social-emotional learning challenges, we demonstrate where social breakdowns happen and discuss strategies to avoid them—including strategies for coping and for working as part of a team.

We’ll explore treatment* strategies to encourage self-management and self-regulation for clients experiencing anxiety, depression, and inflexible thinking. This highly regarded course will tackle strategies to promote executive functioning, spontaneous and advanced perspective taking, and problem solving to help individuals who experience “me thinking” evolve toward collaborating with others as “we thinkers.” Our Intention-Driven Social Behavior Map will be reviewed. Explore case studies to teach specific concepts, such as being an Information Informer versus a Social Relator. Watch videos of adults discussing how their social competencies have evolved over time. This is one of our more compelling and important courses!

*Treatment refers to using conceptual and strategy-based frameworks to help individuals improve their social thinking, skills, and competencies.

Michelle sought out research to assist her in developing strategies to help her clients—children through mature adults—who were presenting with powerful anxiety and depression in addition to their weak development of social communication concepts and skills. This course discusses how emotions are part of the inter- and intrapersonal experience and provides concrete strategies to assist those with complex social learning challenges. Many of Michelle’s clients have high IQs but a weak ability to understand their own and others’ emotions, and therefore struggle with personal problem solving and relationship development.

Many of the questions Michelle addresses in this course have been part of her own learning as she reviewed the research and treatment literature: What are emotions? How many ways do we use emotions to regulate ourselves and our interactions with others? Why do negative emotions draw so much attention in our own self-processing? How do different types of emotions impact our learning and expression of what we notice about ourselves in the world? How can we help individuals who get stuck on negative emotions notice that those emotions signal a need to problem solve? How are emotions critical for reading intentions and developing social competencies for increasingly successful social engagement?

To help answer these and other questions, the following topics will be covered:

The role of emotions

• How emotional processing is accounted for in academic standards and “college and career readiness”
• How emotional processing is included in 21st century work skills as defined in a report by Google
• The role of emotional processing in executive functioning, perspective taking, and central coherence
• What mature adult clients teach us about how we can help children improve social-emotional learning
• The power of emotions in reading intentions and how one’s intentions are read by others
• Interpersonal social-emotional communication skills and related strategies
• Why language falls short when trying to understand our own emotional experiences

Working with depression and anxiety

• The power of negative emotions and how mood shapes memory as well as narrative language
• Why the depression?
• Why do compelling anxieties need to be accounted for during the social learning process for most students?
• How social anxiety is different from generalized anxiety and, possibly, social phobia
• How the treatment process must validate new learning while recognizing emotional vulnerabilities on the road to social-emotional learning
• How social self-awareness can fuel anxiety and depression

Strategies to help

• Strategies to move past stuck thinking about negative emotions
• Introducing three levels of teaching with Social Behavior Maps to encourage social self-reflection of the Social-Emotional Chain Reaction
• The use of emotional journaling as a tool for developing a broader understanding of one’s emotional self
• How visual manipulatives help to figure out the cause of negative social interactions
• Specific questions to help individuals define personal problems
• Realistic social relationship development strategies; exploring the development of the Pyramid of Dislike to be used in conjunction with Social Thinking’s Friendship Pyramid
• Intrapersonal emotional self-regulation and related strategies
• Logic and emotion—what’s genuine about not telling the complete truth?

We look forward to hearing your questions as we explore treatment activities and encourage self-exploration. Attendees will learn strategies to use immediately at school, work, and home!