You’ve been told that social skills interventions are ableist.
But you’ve also been told that we need to prepare students for real-world expectations. You have teachers and administrators coming to you with concerns about behavior, participation, and social interaction, and you’re expected to address it.
Then you’re told to make your intervention more “functional.” To collaborate more.
To focus on generalization.
And somehow, all of that responsibility gets funneled into a 20-minute social skills group.
What are you supposed to do when you know that a short, isolated session isn’t going to result in meaningful carryover?
The issue isn’t that social skills intervention is a bad idea.
The problem is we’re using the wrong model to support them.
When we think of “social skills intervention” as beginning and ending within a siloed therapy session, we’ll continue to see poor skill transfer.
A therapy session with students is ONE layer.
We can keep that layer, but we need to add more layers to it to bridge the gap.
In this video, I walk through how to shift from relying on one intervention bucket (a.k.a. the isolated social skills group) to building a service delivery model that frames social skills as “executive functioning for human interactions”:
We go from ONE bucket to three distinct buckets:
1. Priming/frontloading
2. Real-life practice
3. Review/evaluation
I share how to implement executive functioning intervention frameworks like the one described in the video in the School of Clinical Leadership, my program that shows SLPs and other related-service providers systems for supporting executive functioning on their school teams.
You can learn more about the program at drkarendudekbrannan.com/clinicalleadership
