Involving peers

Involving peers can accelerate the success of any intervention program and a lack of peer involvement can result in social behaviours never truly becoming functional.  But how can we do this? Two of the most common and successful ways are Circle of friends and Peer mediation or Mentoring. 

Circle of friends
Circle of friends is an approach that is used in mainstream settings to enhance the inclusion of any young person who is experiencing difficulties in school because of a disability, social skills difficulties, personal crisis, or because of their challenging behaviour towards others.

The ‘circle of friends’ approach works through setting up a group of 6-8 peers to provide practical support to the focus child. 

Volunteers meet weekly and have 3 main tasks:

1. To help identify difficulties that the child is having
2. To set goals and devise strategies for reaching them
3. To offer encouragement and recognition for success and progress.

Volunteers are encouraged to talk openly about the difficulties they encounter with the child’s behaviour but the whole approach does obviously need to be well facilitated and it is important to ensure that from a hierarchical perspective that the focus child is not set up to fail by being encouraged to develop a skill that is too difficult. 

It is also important that the whole approach is seen to be supportive by the individual.  This will hopefully be worked through with good facilitation but one factor that might be important to consider is the name of the group.  ‘Circle of friends’ may be inappropriate as it infers something that it is not and so it may be more appropriate to either call it ‘Circle of support’ or to allow the group to choose their own name.

One advantage of this approach to developing social skills is the fact that difficulties are shared and discussed with their peers and therefore the peers are involved in helping the focus child develop skills that are particularly relevant to them.  They may also have interesting view points as to why the focus child is having difficulties initiating conversations in the playground for example, or is struggling at lunch time, and this insight will be invaluable for the focus child. 

Another advantage of this approach is that it does not involve a major commitment of time from teachers or therapists.  Teachers will need to facilitate the group and in particular their problem solving but some groups end up becoming largely self sufficient with only minimal input from teaching staff.

Peer mediation
Peer mediation can also be used to improve social skills.  It is mostly used in schools as a process where students are trained in the skills of mediation to help resolve conflicts with their peers and younger children.  Peer mediators are taught to facilitate communication, negotiation, understanding and problem solving and they have been used successfully in primary, secondary and special schools.  Even though the primary goal of peer mediation is to resolve disputes and conflicts, schools that have introduced this have also found an improvement generally in social behaviour. And some schools are using peer mediators to improve social skills.  So how could it work?

Well it will depend on whether you are introducing it in a primary or secondary school.  With younger children, volunteers can be taught to model targeted behaviours and reinforce new social skills through role play with adults.  They are then encouraged to act these out with targeted children with reinforcement and cuing from the adult.  This is gradually faded over a period of time. For example, a targeted behaviour, such as maintaining attention, is subdivided into several steps: the peer moves in front of the child, the peer looks at him and the toys, the peer says his name and repeats if necessary etc. These strategies can be powerful at increasing social interactions within the classroom and both generalisation and maintenance has been found to be good (Mastergeorge et al, 2003).  

In secondary schools they may use different models of intervention to facilitate the same outcome.  For example, some schools have started a ‘friendship bus stop’ which is manned by peer volunteers who are trained to resolve difficulties other children may be experiencing. They will encourage appropriate social interaction and will model good social skills.  Other similar approaches include a friendship bench and playground mentors / buddies. 

So using peers wherever possible as part of your intervention is essential to ensuring carryover and maintenance of skills. 

In the next issue we will begin to consider the different ways you can teach social skills using direct instructional approaches and we will start with comic strip conversations.

Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz

Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.

Reference

Mastergeorge A, Rogers S, Corbett B and Solomon M (2003) Nonmedical interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorders Chapter 6 in Autism Spectrum Disorders Ozonoff, Rogers and Hendren (Ed). American Psychiatric Publishing Inc

Read more about peer mediation at Teaching Expertise

Read more about circle of friends at Teaching Expertise

Click here to learn more about SEAL