Social Skills
At Good Talking People LLC, we believe that social skills are the end product of well-developed social cognition or social thinking and communication. In additional to the research of many well respected professionals in the field of social learning, emotional regulation and executive functioning but largely based on Social Thinking ® teaching framework created by Michelle Garcia Winner (www.socialthinking.com), our programs teach skills ranging from joint attention and shared interests, adapting to expected behavior, emotions and self-regulation to verbal and nonverbal social cues to perspective, flexibility and problem solving.
Our programs are individually designed for each group to explore the communication, social interactions and social thinking that support successful and rewarding peer relationships, family interactions, recreation, occupational and professional relationships and academic achievement. Our methodologies work to develop better social cognition, including social reasoning, social interpretation, social memory and social expression, utilizing a multi-sensory, developmental and pragmatic approach to social skills training.
Good Talking People LLC provides individual and group therapy to assist in the development of pragmatic language, social communication and social learning. We teach strategies for understanding social rules, what is expected in social situations, ways to increase social comfort and how to communicate and connect with others.
Individual Social Skills Sessions
Individual sessions are available in 45 or 60-minute sessions, specifically created for more targeted goals and specific support to help understand and navigate the social environment. Individual sessions are also recommended for clients who require more opportunity to develop the necessary prerequisite social tools to improve success in the group experience
Group Social Skills
Good Talking People LLC’s cutting edge Social Thinking® programs and groups are for clients with social learning challenges, preschool through adulthood designed aimed to meet the ever-changing demands across a lifespan. Offering year round social skills groups including intensive summer camps.
All group sessions run for 60-minutes with the last 5-10 minutes devoted to parent/caregiver education and feedback so that concepts can be generalized to home, school, work and community.
Social Prep
A beginning program designed to introduce the concepts of social thinking® created by work of renowned expert Michelle Garcia Winner. This program has been developed to jump start social learning and prepare one for inclusion in one of our social thinking groups. Social Prep will focus on the 10 basic concepts of the Social Thinking® model, including, thinking thoughts and feeling feelings, the group plan, thinking with your eyes, body in the group, whole body listening, hidden rules and expected & unexpected behaviors, smart guess, flexible and stuck thinking, size of the problem and sharing an imagination. Sessions will be designed according to each individual’s needs and learning style.
The client will:
- Develop and increase social awareness and functional listening behaviors
- Become familiar and learn social thinking® vocabulary and concepts
- Learn how to use social tools to understand what is expected
- Learn how to make smart guesses and become better social thinkers
Social Gatherings
Social is not just about being able to make friends. It is more than just being around other people, talking and just hanging out. Social involves using your brain to think, to figure out how to be around other people. The really important part of being social is thinking about other people and what they’re thinking about you. Social thinking is a 24/7 skill. It happens whenever you are near another person, even if you have no plans to ever talk to that person! Now the doing part of social thinking is what we usually call social skills.
In our society, we have to interact with other people in order to survive. We interact with our family members, our classmates and teacher/professors, when we shop for groceries or browse in a store. When we are at our work place, at the copier, in the break room or in a conference room, we are always expected to be using social thinking and subsequent good social skills.
A Social Gathering will provide you with a chance to learn or refine your social thinking abilities so that you can enhance your interactions with others in all settings. A Social Gathering will also provide you with the opportunities to enjoy fun recreational activities with similar peers (maybe form new relationships) all while learning to practice those newly tuned social thinking skills. Besides you might actually have fun!
Kids – a place where children ages 5-12 “fit in” with like-minded peers to enjoy an afternoon of fun.
Teens – a time for teens 13- 18 to “hang – out” and engage with others, to develop peer relationships, reduce social anxiety and practice social strategies.
Adults – a dynamic forum designed by adults for adults. Gatherings will focus on various topics/concerns/issues/skills and abilities related to social thinking
Social Learning programs are largely based on the Social Thinking® teaching framework created by Michelle Garcia Winner. For more information visit her website at www.socialthinking.com.
This program, including its teacher or leader, is not affiliated with, nor has it been reviewed, approved, or endorsed by Michelle Garcia Winner and Think Social Publishing, Inc