Multidisciplinary Spotlight on Practice: This conference day is designed to teach professionals frameworks, concepts, and strategies so that they may better understand the social learning experience and guide others toward improved social processing and social skills. Attendees will gain new insights into the power of their own social emotional intelligence as they explore their social motivations and how they process and respond to social information. We will dissect the hidden rules, contemplate how social rules change with age, and discuss how social problem solving is at the heart of social skills, and affects how one interprets and responds to social-academic information and assignments. Social Thinking has developed a large range of treatment* strategies, and attendees will walk away with a number of them including those for helping students avoid "the blurt", cope with "boring moments", and develop conversational language. Additionally, we will focus much of our attention on the ILAUGH Model of Social Thinking. The ILAUGH model is an acronym to represent treatment ideas and research related to: Initiating communication, Listening with the eyes and brain, Abstracting and inferencing, Understanding perspective, Getting the gist, and Humor & human relationships. The ILAUGH model not only demonstrates why people with social learning challenges have weaker social skills but also how social interpretation is linked to academic tasks such as written expression, conversational language, reading comprehension and organizational skills. As we wrap up the day, we will explore how we want to "teach in the roots" and not through the leaves of Social Thinking’s Social Learning Tree. We will then discuss how to write achievable IEP goals based on rubrics. General Education teachers find the information presented on this conference day applicable to all students as it pertains to social emotional learning, and audiences around the world love that it furthers their own social emotional insights! NOTE: *Treatment refers to conceptual and strategy-based frameworks for building understanding and use of social skills and social thinking.
Special Consideration: This conference will have limits on attendance based on the district and disciplines. Districts are encouraged to be strategic about selecting special education staff to represent their district. Ideally a district team will be comprised of: Principal, Resource Room Teacher, School Psychologist, School Social Worker, Speech-Language Pathologist, District Administrator.
Registration deadline: 2/24/17