Frequently Asked Questions
Group and Individual Treatment Sessions
What range of diagnostic labels does Social Thinking® serve?
In our treatment model, we do not treat diagnostic labels, we treat the individual. While many of our clients have no diagnosis, we also serve individuals with: ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorder- Levels 1 and 2, learning disabilities, sensory dysregulation, executive dysfunction, twice-exceptional, gifted and talented, social anxiety, socially phobic, expressive-receptive language issues, specific language impairment, traumatic brain injury, Tourette’s Syndrome, PDD-NOS, Dysgraphia, etc.
What is the focus of your programs?
We encourage the development of social learning and self-regulation through the use of the Social Thinking® Methodology. We also utilize other professionals’ work that compliments our treatment approach, such as materials developed by Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobsen to help teach executive functions; Story Grammar Marker® by Maryellen Rooney Moreau to encourage social interpretations and social problem solving; sensory regulation strategies, etc. We develop treatment based on the best evidence available, the clinical experience of our highly trained staff, and feedback from our clients and their family members. By focusing on teaching functional strategies, we strive to enhance social learning by addressing executive functioning, perspective taking, emotional awareness, self-awareness and self-monitoring and central coherence.
what is the difference between the summer and academic year programs?
We offer two programs throughout the year:
Academic Year Program
Runs the length of a typical academic year from the end of August of one year through the beginning/middle of June of the next year (approximately 9 months).
Allows the group to spend time thoroughly exploring a range of concepts. Students are able to gradually build their conceptual knowledge and then are afforded ample time for practicing at the clinic and beyond.
Summer Program
Runs for 8 weeks during the summer, usually mid June to early August.
We have unique programming during the summers - look out for summer session announcements by February.
For new students, summer sessions are an excellent time for an introduction to the foundational Social Thinking® concepts and vocabulary. For returning students, attending the summer program allows their learning to continue. Whether a student has been in the clinic for some time or is just getting started, the summer, without the pressures of the school year, is often a prime opportunity to take in new information.
How are Social Thinking® sessions different than other social skills sessions?
Social Thinking® Clinics use the treatment framework and curriculum developed by Michelle Garcia Winner to teach the thinking that underlies social skills. In addition to helping the client understand the “why” behind the social norms related to relationships, being part of a group, and participating in a conversation, we also help to connect the dots between how the social mind impacts social academic tasks, vocational activities, organizational skills, and much more. We seek to teach students how to problem solve rather than to memorize. The social experience requires us to adapt our social behavior based on the situation and social situations constantly change!
We are rigorous in our grouping process and make every effort to ensure that each client is placed in a group with students who have similar social learning profiles so that all information explored and taught is relevant and meaningful to every student. We seek to keep our group size small; our groups rarely exceed 4 students, total. This is because we want each student to be an active participant during the session.
We also want the parents and other caregivers to be aware of the lessons we are teaching. We dedicate the last 10 minutes of each session to working with parents and caregivers on how to take these lessons back into the home and understand how these same lessons relate to the school, community, and job experience as well.
We deliver highly individualized services that seek to provide relevant lessons that parents, caregivers, and clients can further explore at home and in the community. When we consider the learning process, it is easy to see that teaching social skills will not go far if the client does not understand the concepts that support the development of these skills. Furthermore, our social mind is used not only to navigate our social skills but to also engage in social academic and vocational tasks. A common criticism of the behavioral-skill-based teachings is that this methodology is generally weak in encouraging students to transfer the use of a skill beyond the specific context in which the skill is taught. When we teach social skills without relating them back to the core concept of social thinking, it’s far more likely students will continue to fail to generalize what they’re learning.
How are your groups and individual sessions structured?
Our groups and individual sessions meet once a week for one hour during the school year. Each session consists of client treatment (generally 45-50 minutes) and a parent, caregiver, or family education component (10-15 minutes). During time with parents/caregiver/family members, the therapist will review the concepts taught during the session and how they can be carried over across the week. Our groups are highly individualized and carefully formed to be certain each group member will benefit.
We group clients with same-age peers based on perspective taking level, processing speed, attention, and may other factors. Our groups have no more than 4 clients, which allows our therapists to create a curriculum for each group based on their particular social learning needs. In addition to our purposeful and meticulous grouping process, our groups are also unique in that we actively teach students to think about how to think about others and how others think of them (take perspective). We also work on organizational, problem solving skills and forming social relationships. All of these skills can be worked on in isolation, but are more powerful when a student is guided to see how the skills are interwoven. Our groups do not follow a specific timeline, instead we adjust out teaching and lesson plans to the needs of the students.
How long is each weekly group or individual appointment?
Most treatment appointments are 60 minutes long. 50 minutes are dedicated to working directly with the client/student and 10 minutes are reserved working with the family members/caregivers to teach them how to use the concepts and strategies being explored in treatment.
How long DO STUDENTS ATTEND Social Thinking®?
All behavior change that is deep and more permanent doesn't happen overnight Complex behavior change is not based on a simple reinforcement system, but instead a combination of several forces, including thinking change. Before we can expect someone to effect self-regulation and change, much time and thoughtful processing has to be spent teaching the concept of social thinking. Social learning is SLOW learning!
For this reason, we inform our clients to expect to spend an Academic Year with us in order to experience deep and meaningful change. Keep in mind that a client’s social learning problems are deep and very real. They truly do not have access to the same social cognitive information as their peers. Our goal in Social Thinking is to help an individual develop more awareness and better use of social skills when compared to where they started - not compared to everyone else in their peer or age group. It's a slow process, but worth it!
How do you group students into treatment groups?
Students are grouped based on their age and the level of their social mind. Students are not grouped based on diagnostic labels. We determine the level of a student’s social mind using a profile created by Michelle Garcia Winner, Pamela Crooke and Stephanie Madrigal called the Social Thinking®-Social Communication Profile; we have a free article describing this scale. The philosophy behind this treatment model is explained in Michelle G. Winner’s book, Why Teach Social Thinking®?
How individualized are the group treatment sessions?
There is an art and science behind running Social Thinking® groups. As part of our group lessons we focus on teaching lessons and frameworks to encourage our students’ social learning process. However, students with similar levels of the social mind who are also similar in age can have vastly different personalities and experiences. The art of teaching our students is to be able to help each child learn about the Social Thinking® concepts and then help our students to recognize their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to utilizing these concepts and producing related social skills. The goal of each group session is to provide individualized feedback to students in a supportive, complex environment. Students learn and practice together while building their own social-awareness through helpful feedback, improving their observational skills and learning strategies to help them self-regulate around any range of social situations.
What type of professional is working with my student or family member?
The vast majority of our clinicians are master’s level licensed speech language pathologists. At times we have educators, counselors, occupational therapists, speech language pathology assistants, and psychologists working with us. Parents will be informed about the professional experience of their treatment provider.
HOW DO YOU ADDRESS TEACHING STUDENTS WITH DIFFERENT LEVELS OF THE SOCIAL MIND?
Our teachings are developmental, given that social thinking and our related social skills evolve across our life; we highlight the developmental social and social-academic expectations for students at different ages. However, we adapt our expectations based on a student’s level of their social mind. Some students are closer in their abilities to their typically developing peers and others need a different set of lessons to help them evolve in their own abilities even if it is not at the level of their peers. We focus our teachings based on a student’s developmental age paired with our understanding of a student’s social strengths. More literal students will receive more literal lessons, even if their typical peers at school are managing to decipher and express highly abstract information. Our goals is to place our clients in a treatment group with similar aged students who have similar social learning issues.
Do the lessons of Social Thinking® apply to home, school and/or community?
Social Thinking® teaches a set of concepts and related social skills at a deeper level. One of the first concepts we teach our students relates to helping them become better social observers. We also use language-based Social Thinking® Vocabulary to help students readily access the deeper concepts they've learned in the therapy session. We encourage parents, teachers and others who relate to the student on a regular basis to learn and use these concepts and vocabulary across the student’s day and activities.
No treatment will easily provide the student with the ability to learn and apply information if we have not taught them how to be aware of this information and their own social behaviors across a range of situations. Hence, we teach our students how to use this information outside of our clinical treatment sessions. This is a journey rather than a time-stamped process. Students will carry the concepts out the door more rapidly if adults also speak the language of Social Thinking® and help students recognize their own use of Social Thinking® concepts and related social behaviors across situations.
Do you use typical peer models in your treatment groups?
No. Students with social learning differences tend to have weak observational skills and struggle to learn inferentially. We explicitly teach students how to process and respond to social information by helping them to build stronger social learning concepts and related strategies. We do not believe that students’ lack of social abilities is due to their lack of previous appropriate social modeling; instead we believe that students are born with social learning differences based on their neurology and related learning strengths. We form our groups based on a student’s age and their social learning system.
Who Benefits From Our Clinical Treatment Services
Social Thinking® is a methodology for many but not for all. It is designed to help individuals with solid language and learning abilities - those who are using language to learn versus still learning language.
In our treatment model, we do not treat diagnostic labels, we treat the individual. While many of our clients have no diagnosis, we also serve individuals with: ADHD, Autism Spectrum Disorders- Levels 1 and 2, learning disabilities, sensory dysregulation, executive dysfunction, twice-exceptional, gifted and talented, social anxiety, socially phobic, expressive-receptive language issues, specific language impairment, traumatic brain injury, Tourette’s Syndrome, PDD-NOS, Dysgraphia, etc.
How are services different for adult clients?
When working with our adult clients, we use our core Social Thinking® concepts as well as concepts and strategies specifically designed for the individual.
We bridge social thinking, the social emotional experience, and social competencies. During our sessions we help clients better define their treatment goals, explore practical concepts and strategies that are practiced in our clinic as well as by the client away from our clinic.
We routinely work with high school students who are preparing for adulthood, university/college students, adults living with their families and a large range of professionals who are getting relatively poor feedback from their superiors on the job. All of our clients are dealing with confusion or frustration when trying to navigate the tricky waters of adult friendship and personal relationships.
It is more common for our adults to be seen individually but we also provide group services. If there is a good group for the adult client, and they are seeking social group services, we will have them try it out to see if it is a good fit for them.
When working with adult clients, we also like to meet with a family member when possible. Just like with our younger students, the social experience can happen any time of day and it is great to keep people who live with our clients abreast of concepts they can use to help encourage more positive social relations.
What is the role of family in the treatment process?
Since social communication is a 24/7 endeavor, we believe it is very important for parents and/or family members to be involved in the treatment process. The last 10-15 minutes of every treatment session involves talking with the parents about that day's lesson, providing carryover activities and ideas that they can use at home and in the community, and addressing any questions and concerns they might have. Parents are also encouraged to share our lessons with the student’s educational team.
Is Social Thinking® effective? Is it an Evidence-Based Practice?
There is an emerging body of evidence about the collection of techniques developed by Michelle Garcia Winner. Find out more information about current research here.
WHAT ARE LICENSED SOCIAL THINKING CLINICS?
Licensed Social Thinking® clinics are fully endorsed by and licensed through Michelle Garcia Winner and Think Social Publishing®. They are dedicated to developing and practicing innovative treatment approaches for assisting individuals of all ages with social learning differences..
Licensed Social Thinking® Clinics are independently owned. The staff at these clinics work closely with Michelle and her colleague, Dr. Pamela Crooke, by receiving ongoing onsite training as well as clinical grand rounds most months of the year. Currently, the only licensed Social Thinking® clinics are Social Thinking-Stevens Creek in San Jose, CA and Social Thinking Boston in Sudbury, MA.