A summary of social skills
So, what are the most important things to remember?
1. Being socially skilled has an impact on your quality of life
Social competence has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a critical variable in predicting success in future life.
We need social skills to make friends, fall in love, get a job and be successful. What could be more important? Jean Gross (2008) recently said that there are three factors that increase the likelihood of a positive life outcome for a child:
- Language, literacy and numeracy
- Parenting support
- Social and emotional competencies
Children need social skills to equip them for life and when these skills don't develop naturally, we need to know how to teach them.
2. Planning where to start - using a hierarchical approach to social skills
Choosing the right skill to work on first has to be the most important part of intervention as it is the difference between potentially setting a child up to fail and to success.
An assessment of social skills should help you identify the child's key strengths and areas of need and it is important to use a hierarchical approach to teaching social skills. This means teaching:
Using this hierarchical approach, children are able to start at a level that is appropriate to their needs and progress up the levels to reach their full potential. This hierarchical approach forms the basis of all the Talkabout resources.
As you can see from the assessment below (click here for the full chart as a PDF), this child needs work in all four areas of his social skills. He has good self and other awareness and so we will target his body language, prior to working on the way he talks, his conversational skills and then finally his assertiveness skills.
3. There should be three parts to any social skills interventions
Social skills are best developed when you:
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Create real opportunities within that child’s environment to practise skills
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Involve peers to support the use of social skills
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Use a variety of direct instructional approaches to teaching social skills e.g. group work, social stories, comic strip conversations, DVDs, and 1:1 work
4. Linking social skills work with SEAL or putting it onto the curriculum
If you work in a school setting, consider how you can have the greatest impact. In special schools, I believe that social skills can be put onto the curriculum and taught very effectively to every child for at least a couple of years.
I would therefore encourage you to always think about extending your approach to include all children and then you are meeting all three elements of the ideal social skills intervention approach (see previous point).
5. Running effective social skills groups
Teaching social skills within a group setting is often the easiest and most effective way to teach social skills.
However there are a few important things to remember:
- Membership: try to match children for social competence as well as likes / dislikes. Remember that children who get on well will work well together. Keep the membership closed.
- Size of the group will depend on age and ability of children but should certainly be no bigger than eight.
- Two facilitators will ensure the group runs better and will mean you can model behaviours between you.
- Accommodation: make sure you are in a room that is comfortable and where you are not disturbed.
- Group cohesion: take time to gel the group so that they want to work together.
- Format of the sessions: Keep the format similar every week. The basic rule is:group cohesion activity, main activity(s), finishing activity.
- A programme of activities: Use or develop a programme of activities that follow the hierarchical approach to teaching social skills.
- Have fun! Teaching social skills should be fun, so keep an eye on the stress levels in the group and keep them to a minimum.
So hopefully that has given you a brief recap of some of the most important aspects of working on social skills.
Next year, I thought I would start the year with a 'Frequently Asked Questions' article. So, if you have any questions that you would like me to answer, please do email me.
In the following article, I will talk about the link between social skills, self esteem and relationship skills.
I hope you have a very merry Christmas and happy New Year!
Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz
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