Why Social Skills?

Your student’s or child’s social skills learning is the most important factor in his or her academic and personal success.

What is Social Learning?

• Demonstrate that a change in understanding has taken place in the individuals involved.
• Demonstrate that this change goes beyond the individual and becomes situated within wider social units or communities of practice.
• Occur through social interactions and processes between actors within a social network. (Reed et al., 2010)

A large body of research indicates that social skills learning helps ensure positive short- and long-term academic and personal outcomes for students, and higher levels of teaching and work satisfaction for staff.

Social skills learning:

• improves students’ positive behavior and reduces negative behavior,
• is associated with significant improvements in academic performance and attitudes toward school, and
• prepares young people for success in adulthood.

Read more about these specific benefits and the research supporting them.

Children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders, Social Communication Disorder, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders, Oppositional Defiant Disorders, Nonverbal Learning Disabilities, as well as those who may not reach criteria for a mental health diagnosis, often have significant social skills impairments and require direct instruction in order to address these deficits.

Social information processing (SIP) is a widely-studied framework for understanding why some children and adolescents have difficulty getting along with peers. A particularly well-known SIP model developed by Crick and Dodge (1994) describes six stages of information processing that individuals cycle through when evaluating a particular social situation:

• Encoding (attending to and encoding the relevant cues) Interpreting (making a judgment about what is going on)
• Clarifying goals (deciding what their goal is in the particular situation)
• Generating responses (identifying different behavioral strategies for attaining the decided upon goal)
• Deciding on the response (evaluating the likelihood that each potential strategy will help reach their goal, and choosing which strategy to implement), and
• Performing the response (doing the chosen response).

These steps are assumed to operate in real time and frequently outside of conscious awareness.

Many studies have demonstrated that children and adolescents have deficits at multiple stages of the SIP model which impact their development of appropriate peer interactions and the demonstration of aggressive behaviors (e.g., Lansford, Malone, et al., 2006; Losel, Bliesener, et al., 2007). They tend to have difficulty with attending to and interpreting social cues, adopting pro-social goals, and utilizing safe, effective and non-aggressive strategies to handle conflict situations.

On the other hand, the development of strong social skills has been shown to contribute to the initiation and maintenance of positive relationships with others and as a result contributes to peer acceptance.

Many social skills teaching approaches conceptualize social skills as a set of narrow, discrete responses (i.e., initiating a greeting) or as a broader set of skills associated with social problem solving. This approach results in the generation of an endless list of discrete skills that are assessed for their presence/absence and are then targeted for instruction.

The POWER-Solving® Curriculum instead focuses on teaching a social problem solving model that the learner would be able to use as a “tool box.” The social problem solving approach offers the promise of helping the individual with social skills impairments to become a better problem solver, thereby promoting greater independence in social situations and throughout life.

Instead of teaching an ever-expanding set of individual skills, The POWER-Solving® Curriculum uses a model of social problem solving that incorporates 5 steps, easily learned as the acronym, POWER, as follows:

1. Put the problem into words
2. Observe your feelings
3. Work out your goal
4. Explore possible solutions
5. Review your plan

The curriculum is comprised of several modules, each with their own materials for facilitators and students. While it is critical for the child or adolescent to learn the POWER-Solving® Steps first (i.e., the “toolbox”), the facilitator can determine the sequence of the subsequent modules. For example, one may prefer to move to the Anger Management module after the Introduction. Alternatively, one may decide to move to Social Conversation or Developing Friendships.

Click here for more information on the 5 steps of POWER-Solving®, the coaching techniques the steps enable, and how they are taught.

The authors’ goal is for children and adolescents to learn valuable POWER-Solving® skills that they can apply to an infinite number of social situations throughout their lives.