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| CANCELED: Developing Social Skills Groups for Students With Autism and Other Development Disabilities |
| Friday, May 25, 2012 |
| 8:00 AM–3:00 PM |
| 4C-4 (Convention Center) |
| Area: EDC/AUT; Domain: Service Delivery |
| CE Instructor: Jill E. McGrale Maher, M.S. |
| BENJAMIN R. BRUNEAU (Crossroads School for Children), MICHELE D. BROCK (Crossroads School for Children), RACHEL ABRAHAM (Crossroads School for Children), KEVIN HARDY (Crossroads School for Children), IAN T. MELTON (Crossroads School for Children), JILL E. MCGRALE MAHER (Crossroads School for Children) |
| Description: One of the most prevalent challenges for students with autism is in the area of social skills, including difficulty with play interactions, social pragmatics, and sharing enjoyment. To date, instructional models have been minimally successful in the acquisition, durability, and generalization of meaningful social skills (Bellini, S., Peters, J., Benner, L., & Hopf, A., 2007; Quinn, Kavale, Mathur, Rutherford, & Forness, 1999). Moreover, when faced with the task of developing and implementing social skills groups, practitioners are confronted with resources that are insufficient and incomplete, and that fail to meet the needs of students with a variety of learning profiles. The model used in the current workshop utilizes an empirically validated social skills group model to teach children to emit novel discrete social skills, as well as strategies for generalization. This workshop will provide participants with a comprehensive model intended to teach a systematic method of designing, implementing, and evaluating homogenous social skills groups for children on the autism spectrum. Skills acquired will be generalizable across all age groups as participants will review the process from development of the social skills assessment, grouping students, writing lesson plans, running groups, designing data collections systems, training staff, and evaluating progress. |
| Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this workshop, participants should be able to:
Identify skill domains and develop an initial scope and sequence, including behavioral definitions, to create a social skills assessment
Develop a format to expand on their social skills assessment
Create guidelines for constructing homogeneous groups
Identify key components of a staff training program
Write a lesson plan for a group, including selection of appropriate activities for teaching skills, using empirically based group management techniques and interventions for addressing challenging behaviors
Determine empirically based teaching techniques, including prompting strategies and reinforcement systems
Develop data collection systems that target up to three behaviors for individual students
Develop a plan to teach generalization strategies to students' family members
Incorporate the use of best practices and ethical standards into social skills groups |
| Activities: This workshop will involve didactic instruction, role-play, development of data collection systems, development of reinforcement systems, development of staff training protocol, development of assessment protocol, practice data collection, and development of lesson plans. |
| Audience: This workshop is appropriate for practitioners and administrators. |
| Content Area: Practice |
| Instruction Level: Basic |
| Keyword(s): Social Skills |