As educators, therapists, and caregivers, we are often tasked with understanding how individuals navigate the social world and determining what types of supports may help them achieve their own social goals. Yet standardized assessments often fail to capture the nuanced strengths, differences, and challenges that influence social learning and participation. This course explores how informal neurodiversity-affirming dynamic assessment tasks can provide meaningful insights into how an individual gathers, interprets, and responds to social and non-social information.

Using the Social Thinking–Social Competency Model (ST-SCM) as a framework, participants will learn how social attention, social interpretation, social problem solving, and social responses work together to support social competencies. Through video examples, demonstrations, and guided discussion, attendees will explore informal assessment activities that reveal how learners engage in joint attention, collaboration, play, perspective taking, executive functioning, self-advocacy, and abstract thinking.

Assessment information becomes most valuable when it informs meaningful teaching. Building on assessment findings, participants will learn practical teaching strategies and visual frameworks from the Social Thinking Methodology to make abstract social information more concrete. Topics include teaching social attention, physical presence in a group, thinking with our eyes, social language and conversation, perspective taking, flexible thinking, social problem solving, emotional understanding, self-awareness, and self-regulation.

Throughout the course, attendees will examine how assessment and teaching are interconnected processes. Participants will learn how to identify meaningful targets for instruction, develop supports that build on learner strengths, and align teaching strategies with an individual's self-determined social goals. Clinical examples and practical applications will demonstrate how assessment findings can guide instruction across home, school, community, and therapeutic settings.

Content Disclosure: This course focuses exclusively on the Social Thinking Methodology and does not teach other methodologies or commercial programs.