Course Details: Implementing Social Thinking Concepts and Vocabulary
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 behaviours 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.
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.
Aim of the Course:
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.
Outcomes of the Course Participants will be able to:
• Describe why the context or situation is key for figuring out social expectations and related social skills.
• Describe the core steps of Social Behavior Mapping to help teach social responsibility.
• Define at least five (5) Social Thinking Vocabulary concepts.
• Describe how Social Thinking Vocabulary concepts facilitate generalization across settings.
• Describe the difference between sharing an imagination and a singular imagination and their relationship to conversations and reading comprehension.