Dedicated to Advancing Social Learning for a Lifetime of Well-Being

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 competencies.

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 competencies.