If you’re working on social skills with students and seeing poor generalization, the solution is not more therapy materials.
I’m often asked if I offer social skills activities that can be a quick “print and go” option for school therapists to do with students in a group therapy setting.
I’m fully aware that if I offered “print and go” social skills lesson plans, people would buy them.
It would be a short-term win for me, because I’d sell a lot of products. It may also be a short-term win for the therapist, because they’d get the satisfaction of checking something off their to-do list.
But it would not be a win in the long-run, especially the students.
Social skills groups are often seen as the entire intervention. When they’re delivered this way, they’re often done in an academic format; where an adult is leading the session, and kids are answering questions or discussing various social rules and scenarios.
Sure, there’s a place for discussions like this; but that is a very small piece of what needs to happen. When we think of social skills intervention as just a lesson plan or social skills group, kids get really good at answering questions about how they SHOULD be acting in hypothetical situations.
However, they often don’t transfer any of those things over to real-life. This is because real social interactions are not “academic” situations. We’re actually not working on the skills preventing kids from USING the information and knowledge we’ve tried to give them.
If we think about social skills under the umbrella of executive functioning, the issue with the “social skills group” becomes much clearer. In order to apply skills in real-time, kids need both knowledge of expectations and boundaries AND situational awareness.
The social skills group can be useful to build some of that knowledge, but it typically doesn’t give the opportunity to foster situational awareness.
In order to improve situational awareness, you need to practice it in real-time. No matter how much you role-play within your sessions, it’s not going to be as powerful as the real thing. This is not to say that role-play can’t be used to frontload and prepare, but we have to take it a step further than that.
That’s why social skills intervention should consist of 3 components:
Priming: This is where we can frontload, build knowledge, prepare, and role-play for upcoming situations or ongoing activities. This can happen within a therapy session or can be done with small side conversations with the student throughout the day whenever opportunities present themselves. It could be a parent having a conversation with their child in the car, or a teaching assistant talking with a student before lunch.
Real-life Practice: This is where we give kids the opportunity to have the experience we’ve prepared them for. Ideally, we’d have trained or at least had a conversation with an adult who is going to function as the “eyes and ears” to report back or potentially model and scaffold in those situations.
Review/Reflection: Here’s where we can talk with the students about the situation, how it went, and what we might do to prepare for next time. This can be done in therapy, or can also be done in conversations throughout the day, just like priming.
Now, if you’ve been struggling with the traditional way of planning for sessions, I get it.
I’m very familiar with this neverending lesson-planning cycle that goes along with social skills intervention.
It goes something like this:
👉Find a set of pre-made social skills lesson plans.
👉Feel a sense of control (temporarily) because I feel like my sessions are laid out for the foreseeable future.
👉Start doing them with my students, and immediately get derailed because they aren’t working. Go back to the drawing board.
Rinse and repeat.
This is why despite the many requests I get to offer social skills lesson plans, you will not see me emphasizing this kind of thing in my products and services.
When people ask for things like this, I invite them to make a paradigm shift:
Instead of “planning for therapy”, start “planning for service delivery”.
Before asking yourself, “What am I doing in therapy?”, ask yourself, “What support does this student need across their day and how can I make sure they have it in place?”
That can lead to a handful of other questions, like:
- What service delivery models do I need to use to make that happen?
- Am I training other support staff?
- How am I coaching other professionals or caregivers to put scaffolding in place?
- Am I using my sessions to frontload for a specific event or ongoing activity in a students’ life?
- What resources (people, materials, etc.) do I need to leverage to make this happen?
- What kind of support is in place already, and how can I fill in the gaps with my direct intervention?
If this sounds like a ton of work that will never be manageable, I get it.
But I promise you, the hard work put in up front will save you time in the long run. I explain how that’s possible in this conversation.
And you don’t have to completely ditch lesson plans and therapy materials if you establish a solid intervention framework first.
I know you need support from your leadership to make this happen; which is why I’ve been having regular conversations with school leaders about this very topic.
I had a great discussion about this very topic with elementary principal and life coach, Barb Flowers on the The Principal’s Handbook Podcast.
In this interview I share:
- What do school therapists and teachers need from their school administrators when it comes to supporting for students with disabilities?
- Where are common points of tension that happen between teachers and therapists, and administrators?
- Planning for service delivery: How to plan an ecosystem of support for students instead of planning siloed lesson plans.
- How I delegated language facilitation strategies to a 1:1 para and freed up therapy time to focus on other skills with an autistic student.
You can listen to the episode here.
