Thursday December 1, 2022
Using the Social Thinking® Dynamic Assessment to Guide Teaching Strategies: Understanding the Abstract Social Mind
ages 5 - young adult
Most of us can walk, skip, and run, but few of us can explain how we do this. It’s the same when it comes to our social selves. While we participate with others in our community, most of us can’t explain how we do this. In this course, we will demonstrate and explain practical assessment ideas, tools, and tasks to explore some of the many foundational competencies which help us to form and maintain relationships with classmates or friends. We’ll show how to implement and analyze findings from four informal assessment tasks found in the Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment. We’ll include video footage of actual dynamic assessments to reveal how individuals process and respond to social information in real time.There is so much to explore within the social world to better understand how individuals we work or live with process and respond to socially based information that is foundational for development and expansion of their social competencies as they age. This talk has evolved and expanded across the years, and it incorporates the use of practical and easy-to-access materials, such as static socially based pictures, as well as movie, TV, or YouTube clips. The bullets below summarize the strategies we’ve developed over the past 26 years to help both professionals and parents (e.g., general education and special education teachers, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, administrators, social workers, psychologists, counselors, therapists, behavior therapists, other family members) learn concrete ways to explore the abstract nature of the social mind. The information can be used with children and adults, starting at age four, who have solid to strong expressive and receptive language abilities. The goal is to help all conference attendees learn strategies to unpack abstract aspects of the social world, not only to better understand the individuals with whom we live or work, but also figure out what type of lessons will benefit these individuals moving forward. The following are some of the many points we will cover during this course:
- Explore the Social Thinking–Social Competency Model to navigate the four-step assessment pathway
- Examine how the social brain is designed to zoom in on social relevance and inhibit unrelated responses to maintain social attention
- Consider aspects that are central to relationship development and how we can assess them
- Explore why standardized testing is not designed, nor is it an accurate measure, of face-to-face communicative abilities
- Learn how to examine engagement in two levels of joint attention
- Learn how to conduct a Double Interview
Content Disclosure: This course does not teach about any other methodologies or programs aside from the Social Thinking Methodology.
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