Interpreting a Social Skills Assessment
The hierarchical approach to teaching social skills
The Talkabout hierarchy of social skills includes:
Awareness of self and others
Non verbal behaviour - body language
- the way we talk
Verbal behaviour (conversational skills)
Assertive behaviour
Using a 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.
I have chosen three children to demonstrate how you would interpret the Talkabout Assessment, to decide on intervention.
David
David is an 11 year old boy with a moderate learning disability. He lacks confidence in his ability to communicate effectively with people around him, and is often passive and withdrawn.
He has a good basic self awareness but his social skills assessment shows that he has difficulties in all areas of social skills.
TheTalkabout Assessment uses a 4 point rating scale: never good, not very good, quite good and very good, and sections of the assessment wheel are filled in accordingly.
The assessment can also be done online at www.alexkelly.biz
David's Talkabout Assessment
From this, we can see that he needs work in all areas: body language, the way we talk, conversational skills and assertiveness. As he has a good basic self awareness, we do not need to work on that first, so we therefore need to start working on his body language.
The choices for type of intervention were to either include David in a body language group or to do some 1:1 work with him on his specific areas of need: eye contact, facial expression, gesture, fidgeting and posture. I chose to work with David within a group with some other children in his year and we worked on body language following level 3 of Talkabout and using activities from Talkabout Activities. However, we also used 'good sitting' and 'good looking' as classroom goals to back up the work on eye contact, posture and fidgeting.
Following this work I did some individual work with him on his volume and rate, which in turn affected his clarity. I did this through writing a social story on 'my nice voice'. One year on, we are currently working on his conversational skills.
Annie
Annie is a 15 year old girl with a mild learning disability. She has good self and other awareness.
Annie's Talkabout Assessment
From this, we can see that Annie has very good non verbal behaviours. She has good body language and paralinguistic skills (the way she talks). We therefore need to start working with her on her conversational skills as she has a number of areas of need within that area: starting a conversation, asking questions, being relevant, repairing and ending a conversation.
Conversational skills are easiest worked on within group settings and so Annie was seen within a group and we used Level 5 of Talkabout and activities from Talkabout Activities as a basis for the group. Following this, Annie was able to progress onto working on her assertiveness skills.
Peter
Peter is a young adult with a mild learning disability who is keen to seek employment and has very good self and other awareness.
Peter's Talkabout Assessment
From Peter’s assessment, you can see that he has most difficulty with his assertiveness. He has good conversational skills and only has 2 behaviours that are not so good within his non verbal skills: fidgeting and posture. With someone like Peter, it is important to recognise all these strengths as well as work with him on his needs.
A wrong decision for him would be to put him in a group to work on his body language as he only has 2 behaviours that require work and he would be far more socially skilled than the rest of the group. The choices therefore are to either work with him on a 1:1 basis on his posture and fidgeting, prior to working on his assertiveness; or to put him into an assertiveness group and help him to work on his posture and fidgeting within that setting. I chose the latter option and Peter did well.
So hopefully that has given you a few ideas on how to interpret your social skills assessments. In the next issue I thought I would tell you how we have managed to put social skills onto the curriculum in one school that I am working in.
Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant www.alexkelly.biz
Alex Kelly is the author of Speechmark's best selling Talkabout series.
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See the Talkabout online assessment tool at www.alexkelly.biz
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