Social skills and hard conversations

This summer has been a difficult one as the news has been full of upsetting images happening across our country.  I was visiting family in Dallas, Texas the week of the police shootings and like the rest of the country after an extraordinarily violent week, I was stunned.  I watched the peaceful protests in Atlanta on the local news when I got home the following week.  I had to turn off the TV for a while to process all I was thinking about, away from the rhetoric of social media. While I am not a mother to a police officer or an African American son,  I am a mom. My heart broke for these families and broke for us as a country. How can we begin to discuss these big issues-racism, trust, personal safety- in our homes, schools and places of worship, if we cannot begin to take the perspective of someone else?

To be able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is hard.  It’s even harder when we define ourselves by how we are not the same, rather than what we have in common.  In social language therapy, helping my kids shift their point of view to at least try and consider what someone else might be thinking or feeling, is challenging.  All the lessons that we address in a social language framework , as Michelle Garcia Winner states, are life skills to help us work and live with others successfully.  Pause and consider this for just a minute. Understanding basic Theory of Mind, that my thoughts can be different from your thoughts based on our experiences and what we know, is a foundation to getting along with others.  Even the basic social rules we learn on the playground still apply in the grown up world; take turns, help someone if they get hurt, include others and play fair. Why is it so difficult for us to apply these lessons as we grow up?

It is critical that we teach the concepts of thinking about others and trying to consider another person’s point of view (even when you don’t agree with it) to all kids, not just students with social language impairments. It is equally as important as academics, in my opinion.  Self-control and emotional regulation are also necessary social skills that we need to teach, to get along with others in this world. Bullying people into listening to your point of view and screaming that you are right and they are wrong, are not going to solve anything, whether you are five or fifty. Like I tell my own boys, you have the right to your own thoughts and feelings, but you do not have the right to use them to purposefully hurt others.

I realize that this is simplifying a very complicated series of problems. I don’t have the answers, although I sure wish I did.  What I do believe, is that in a very “me” centered culture, we need to shift hard to thinking about other people, starting in our homes and in our schools.  We need to listen to and talk with people who think like us and those who don’t. These opportunities for difficult conversations are going to continue to present themselves to you and me, so how are we going to handle them moving forward?  I can take a step in the right direction by teaching children that I work with the life skills and social language concepts needed to think about other people, and practicing this myself.

Share your thoughts here.

Theory of Mind and Cognition

My metacognitive skills have been getting quite a work out lately. Thinking about thinking is exhausting, but it’s one of the many things I find amazing about our brains!  These past few weeks have been full of opportunities to talk about Theory of Mind with a variety of my favorite SLPs. If you haven’t downloaded this FREE ToM assessment, click HERE (you’ll thank me later)!   We have been chatting about how our kids with language impairments, ASD, mild cognitive impairments and Down Syndrome perceive sarcasm, tone of voice, perspective taking and Theory of Mind tasks differently.  I started googling to see what research is out there, particularly in regard to children with DS.

I came across a few articles (including THIS one) that speaks to beginning research on Theory of Mind in kids with mild cognitive impairments vs. children with Down Syndrome, functioning in the same cognitive range.  The preliminary findings suggest there is a difference in perception, and that while both groups have the desire for social engagement, children with DS have a more difficult time taking on another person’s perspective and switching their behavior because of it.

I see four very verbal boys with DS and feel that this may be a piece to some of the social behaviors they struggle with.  They understand that sometimes their choices are not making others happy, but have a hard time changing their behavior to affect others in a positive way.  They get stuck and often it’s written off as ‘stubbornness’ that people assume is part of DS, but I suspect there might be more to it than that.

I use a LOT of visuals and activities that center around emotions and problem solving strategies in our therapy sessions.  Giving language to feelings helps keep my boys from shutting down as often and gives them the tools to talk about what happened (after the event, not in the moment).  That’s the first step.  I then try to get them to connect other people’s feelings, what others might be thinking and how what we say/do can change that.  This is a BIG cognitive jump and isn’t going to happen in a few sessions, it’s an ongoing goal.  I try to follow a visual template when we talk through an event, like this one:

*If it’s too much visual information on one page for your student,  fold it in half or cut the steps apart to sequence one at a time.

I also printed out these cute clip art emotions I bought from Whimsy Clips to use when working on problem solving, emotion identification and Theory of Mind activities. You can find them HERE or use actual pictures of your students.  A visual representation of someone physically leaving a social scene can help our kids connect the idea that when everyone doesn’t have the same information, you may have an incorrect perception based on what you do know.  I cut out the people and glue them to upside down solo cups to make them moveable on a table, but you could put Velcro buttons and use a flannel board, magnetic tape to use on a white board or craft sticks to make a moveable puppet show.  As low tech as these are, you can use them in a million ways in therapy!

Do you work on ToM and social language with your students that are not on the autism spectrum?  Share your thoughts here.

You Crack Me Up!

The Dollar Store is quickly becoming my go-to place for inexpensive social language materials.  I found this pack of eggs with different expressions and immediately thought of my kids who are working on Theory of Mind (ToM) and reading nonverbals.  Doesn’t everyone? NO?!  Well,that’s where my speechie brain wandered that day 🙂

We brainstorm (or review) different feeling words and what it means to think about other people’s thoughts and feelings. It’s easy to get stuck at “happy/sad” but emotions go much deeper and wider than those fortunately! Now I know at least one of the kids will protest that eggs don’t have feelings and brains, much less faces. This is a great teachable moment to talk about using our imagination to wonder about things and it can be fun to do this!  Thinking about what someone else might be feeling or thinking is a hard thing to do, especially for kids who struggle with ToM.

I have them pick an egg-spression (sorry, couldn’t help it) and then give them strips with two choices:  a thought bubble and a heart. You can find a free, printable copy of the sheet below HERE.

I have the students make a guess and write down (or dictate to me) what the expression might be telling us as a feeling (angry, silly, shy,etc…) and what the egg might be thinking. I can extend the activity by cutting the sentence strips up and putting them in the eggs for the kids to check their guesses at another speech therapy session, or put them in the wrong eggs to see if the kids can identify if the thoughts and feelings match or not!

You can also read the thought/feeling strips aloud and see if the kids can match them to the correct egg/expression. If your students have enough language and you have the luxury of video in your session (hello camera phone!), have them create little videos about thoughts and feelings using the eggs as the actors.  How much fun would it be to have them make a video about “egg-spected” vs. “un-eggspected” behavior?!

Any other ideas on how you would use these crazy eggs in speech?  Share them!

It’s what’s inside that counts.

I came across a great idea in  Games (& other stuff) for Teachers: Classroom Activities That Promote Pro-Social Learning that used empty boxes to touch on theory of mind perceptions.  Theory of Mind is the developmental concept summarized as “Do I know what you know is different from what I know?”   Many students with ASD have difficulty with this concept and it negatively  impacts their communication and social skills daily.  The gist of the game is to present students with a variety of boxes and ask them what they think is inside.  They will most likely predict the food or items that are represented on the box.  You, sneaky therapist that you are, will have switched the items inside before the students arrive.  The goal of the lesson is to start a discussion that you can’t judge a book by it’s cover (or a cereal by it’s leprechaun).

I think that’s a fabulous idea, and it gave me another idea when I was observing a therapy session with a student who has ASD and theory of mind (formerly known as an Aspergian).  He kept launching into discussions about basketball without giving a referent to his poor therapist.  He was going to talk about what he was going to talk about, therapy plan be darned!!  A lot of our students have this issue of speaking without context, leaving peers, parents and teachers confused.  This often translates into written expression as well.  So how can cereal boxes be used to teach context?

I think you start the lesson the same, with guessing what’s inside the box.   You can’t know what another person put in the box if you weren’t there or they didn’t tell you, right?  Our brains and thoughts are the same. I can make a smart guess about the topic of conversation based on your words and expressions (the cover of the box) but I can’t know what you are thinking inside your mind (the cereal box) or when you switch the topic (cereal) either unless you tell me. It would be great to include items such as toy cars or paper clips that aren’t at all what is shown on the box to illustrate the discussion.  We need to teach our students to give connecting thoughts to help others know what they are thinking about.  We also need to practice maintaining topics of conversation (even when it’s not what we are dying to talk about!) and asking connecting questions to show we are interested in other people’s thoughts and ideas.  Michelle Garcia Winner has a great activity for a visual conversation tree to illustrate these skills.

What other magically delicious ideas have worked for you to teach context?