Get ready to engage social learning with Social Situation Shorts, a set of five video vignettes, featuring real kids in real-world social situations using their social thinking and social skills. These brand new videos are perfect for fostering discussions and engaging young students or clients with relatable social situations. Each video comes with 2 lesson plans to extend the learning, and some shorts feature a visit from Science Guy Brad for a little extra fun. Have fun exploring social concepts and skills for kids between the ages of 5-9+.

 

Note: This video is not eligible for continuing education credit.

Download this free visual with practical ideas for initiating social conversations, which Michelle Garcia Winner presents in this brand new course.

 

Loneliness is a dangerous national epidemic that has been growing in depth and complexity for many years. Loneliness not only endangers our mental and physical health, but it also can make us less kind and caring toward others, resulting at times in misbehavior at schools and within our communities. We’ll explore a range of research-informed ways we can cultivate meaningful relationships with others to foster our well-being, as well as kindness, empathy, and generosity of spirit toward others. Now more than ever, building social awareness, managing anxiety, and developing social communication strategies to combat this growing crisis of loneliness is critical for school-age children, tweens and teens, and all the way through the adult years.

What is alexithymia? It refers to challenges in developing awareness of one’s feelings, identifying, and distinguishing them from other physical sensations—and it’s gaining interest in the research, schools, and clinical arenas. Educators and parents have reported an increase in overall “regulation” challenges in the classroom, on the playground, and during small group activities. We’ll highlight select key aspects of emotional awareness and regulation and its role in perspective taking. Specifically, we’ll explore how alexithymia can impact the building blocks for spontaneous perspective taking across all contexts. We will suggest practical strategies to increase awareness of feelings within the perspective-taking process to use within the classroom, school, community, and home.

Tweens, teens, and young adults are expected to naturally develop social and organizational competencies needed in school and across their lives. However, students with social learning and organized thinking differences (e.g., ADHD, twice exceptional, expressive receptive language, sensory processing, autism spectrum levels 1 and 2, etc.) may not intuitively learn these concepts and skills. This course will explore 5 critical life skills related to social emotional learning and organized thinking that can and should be directly addressed and taught to students & clients ages 11-22 in our homes, schools, and clinics. We’ll also review a variety of explicit metacognitive frameworks and practical strategies for teaching and learning these critical social competencies.

Small talk and conversations are dynamic, and we cannot create reliable scripts for how they will unfold. We can, however, increase our students' awareness of why we engage in social exchanges such as small talk. In this online course, we will unpack the complexities of small talk and conversation. We’ll break these down into their component parts to build strategies that support engagement in initial and ongoing social connection for children, teens, and adults.

The ability to make and keep a friend is something most of us take for granted. However, when it’s hard to make a friend or a friendship dissolves into dislikes, it’s important to have metacognitively based concepts and strategies to help us engage to meet our own personal goals. In this livestream-recorded online training, we’ll unpack different aspects of peer-based relations, from friendship to dislike, and provide practical strategies and perspective-taking activities to encourage student motivation to continue to develop increasingly complex relational social competencies as they age.

When what a student says or does (actions or reactions) is out of sync with what the group is doing, they’re often labeled as a “behavior problem.” We’ll rethink “behavior problems” by teaching lessons that promote development of social competencies, including the power of hidden expectations, as well as other self-regulation strategies for use in the classroom, playground, and home.

Dr. Robert Brooks, clinical psychologist and author, will define seven core elements of resilience and tenacity, as well as discuss strategies to support their development. Using visual supports and frameworks from the Social Thinking Methodology, Michelle Garcia Winner and Dr. Pamela Crooke will focus on ways to help individuals better engage in social problem solving with their chosen mentors to encourage ongoing resilience and tenacity.

Dr. Nancy Rappaport, psychiatrist and author, will provide practical concepts and strategies to build long-term resilience, connect with and support neurodivergent youth, and address children’s worries and anxieties, including those who have experienced trauma. Michelle Garcia Winner and Dr. Pamela Crooke will also explain ways to encourage social learners to rally hope as they work toward their goals and use “cognitive pushes” to encourage a positive mindset and motivation to accomplish what they want for themselves.

In two keynotes, Dr. Damon Korb, MD FAAP and developmental behavioral pediatrician, and Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP and founder of the Social Thinking® Methodology, will connect the dots between executive functions—including self-regulation and perspective taking—and creative, practical strategies to foster organized thinking. Damon’s keynote will explain five important steps professionals can learn to guide parents in how to raise an organized child. He will also present strategies and lessons he has learned during his 20 years as a developmental and behavioral pediatrician to help foster children’s active engagement of organized thinking, the kind of learning and functions they’ll use throughout their lives. Michelle’s keynote will focus on how to help students/clients develop friendships. How do people make friends? How do we keep them? What creative strategies can we teach to help tweens and teens learn to invest in these important but complicated relationships?

Parents and caregivers are always asking about how to teach and support self-regulation. In this course designed specifically for parents and caregivers, we’ll talk about the ways the social mind can support social thinking and self-regulation for early learners. We will cover practical strategies including how we can use stories, activities, and play to build self-regulation; how to teach children to better understand their own and others’ thoughts and feelings, and the plan of the group and their role within it. Please note: this course is not eligible for Continuing Education.