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- Significant social challenges have increased the need for schools to be sensitive to the social and emotional needs of their students.
- A strong repertoire of social skills can impact many areas of a student's development and is important to ensure positive relationships with others.
- Social skills education can be individualized, part of a school-wide approach, or embedded into the classroom curriculum.
- Social skills education can be embedded within all aspects of the student's experiences at school.
- Opportunities to practice social skills such as working in groups, engaging in a conversation, and taking turns can be added into existing curriculum.
- Several curricular programs that teach skills such as empathy, problem solving, impulse control, and anger management are available at a school-wide level.
- Establishing clear expectations and goals for the entire school offers a sense of consistency and direction to students as well as staff members.
- A strong theme in positive behavioral support research has been the use of assessment to design curriculum in social skills education.
- A functional assessment identifies the events that predict and maintain problem behavior, and allows you to design intervention strategies that modify the environment and teach a student new social skills.
- Assessment strategies should identify scenarios in a student's environment that describe specific situations and routines in which the student needs more support.
- Identifying the situations where a student is experiencing social success is important.
- Encouraging peer involvement can create a positive learning environment for all students.
- It is often difficult to find one social skills curriculum that will fit every situation or student you encounter.
- Social skills interventions will not automatically generalize to non-trained situations.
- Identifying all of the people the student may encounter and situations where it is appropriate for the student to use a social skill will help identify positive training conditions.
- It is equally important, however, that a student knows when it is not appropriate to use a specific social skill.
- With some careful planning, however, social skills education can be easily integrated into the every day experiences for all students.
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