Using the 4 Steps of Communication and the Social Thinking–Social Competency Model as a backdrop, attendees will learn about the role of social attention, interpretation, problem solving, and social responses as part of navigating and self-regulating in the social world. We explore how to teach, and learn the evidence base for, core teaching frameworks and a handful of unique and practical strategies based on the Social Thinking Vocabulary. Attendees will learn how one’s social attention to the situation and people in the situation can encourage understanding of the expected behaviors for that social context. We also describe ways to teach interpreting and responding by making smart guesses to discover hidden social rules and the relationship to social emotional learning.
The foundation of our work provides interventionists (teachers, speech-language pathologists, therapists, clinicians, parents) and social learners with frameworks, tools, skills, and a shared language for understanding the social world. Our goal is to help people learn explicitly how to engage in social information processing: how to attend, interpret, problem solve, and respond in any situation—the thinking and doing skills that will promote well-being.
At some point we all struggle in social situations. Engaging in a social emotional thinking/feeling-based process can be difficult at times for everyone in the social world. Our role as interventionists is to help empower social learners with strategies for understanding that we all share social expectations, thoughts, feelings, make mistakes, and try again as we learn to navigate our way toward our social goals. The practical nature of our teaching and the concrete way we explain social concepts helps engage people in social learning not only about themselves but about others.
Counselor
Gen. Ed. Teacher & Mom
Social Worker
Gen. Ed Teacher
Social Worker
