Get ready to engage social learning with Social Situation Shorts, a set of five video vignettes, featuring real kids in real-world social situations using their social thinking and social skills. These teaching videos are perfect for fostering discussions and engaging young students or clients with relatable social situations. Each video comes with two lesson plans to extend the learning, and some shorts feature a visit from Science Guy Brad for a little extra fun. Have fun exploring social concepts and skills for kids between the ages of 5-9+.

Note: This video is not eligible for continuing education credit.

The way most of us concentrate and focus our attention on things that matter has undergone a dramatic disruption in the past two decades. While what we need to do can be enhanced by technology, there are potentially even more digital factors that get in the way of meeting one’s academic, employment, and/or social goals. In this course, we will use a developmental lens as we introduce strategies to help students problem solve and self-evaluate how they set goals, make plans, and stay on task to foster executive functioning, while simultaneously and constantly being distracted by digital tools such as screens, phones, and watches. We’ll also take a deeper look at the latest research related to concentration and focus.

Both teachers and learners need practical ways to think about the social world. In this introductory course, you will learn 15+ practical teaching strategies using Social Thinking Vocabulary and visual frameworks. The activities from this course focus on making abstract social information more concrete through lessons to teach social learners how to socially attend, interpret, problem solve, and respond to social information. Activities will also focus on strategies for teaching emotional understanding, theory of mind/perspective taking, and executive functioning to help learners meet their own social goals. Note: This course is introductory and designed for those who are new to Social Thinking or just want to expand how they teach lessons from the Social Thinking Methodology.

This three-hour course will kick off with 90 minutes of Dr. Tracey Marks, a practicing psychiatrist of over 20 years, whose mission is to increase mental health awareness and understanding by educating people about well-being and self-improvement. Dr. Marks has an enormous following on YouTube where she produces educational videos for managing stress, anxiety, and improving executive functioning. Dr. Marks’ has published a book called, Why Am I So Anxious?, which is available on our website. In part 2, Michelle Garcia Winner, Founder of Social Thinking, will talk about teaching executive functioning, mental time travel, and self-reflection for tweens and teens.

This course explores the role of executive functions across school and home environments. We explain strategies for tackling motivation, time prediction, prioritizing workload, and tracking multiple assignments simultaneously. We review key executive functioning skills and practical metacognitively based strategies to help individuals track and tackle homework and other deadline-based responsibilities.

Discover an array of concepts and strategies that bolster social learning and help students meet socially based educational standards. Explore the ILAUGH Model of Social Cognition to help break down and make sense of the social world. Uncover how differences and/or challenges in social communication, executive functioning, and perspective taking impact written expression, reading comprehension of literature, organizational skills, and working in a group. Learn strategies to support students, clients, and patients in each of the above! Rounding out the day: learn tips for student-driven goal writing and data keeping. Note: This course is introductory and designed for those who are new to Social Thinking or just want to expand how they teach lessons from the Social Thinking Methodology.

Educators, therapists, and caregivers have been asking for a motivating and fun way to teach elementary students social, emotional, and academic concepts. This short course will focus on the theory underlying core lessons and how to implement a detective and superhero themed social, emotional, and academic learning (SEAL) teaching series with fidelity. Consider this to be the essential crash course for implementing the Dynamic Duo Curriculum series with fidelity. Content is designed for students 7-11+ years.

In this 90-minute course, we’ll explore motivation-based myths. We’ll then contrast this information with research-based, as well as tried-and-true methods, to help individuals rally their motivation so they can tackle basic to complex social and organizational goals. In this journey we’ll also explore factors that get in the way of motivation, such as anxiety, perfectionism, lagging social and organizational competencies, and/or digital device distractions, and then review practical strategies and tools to help individuals feel “they can” rather than “they can’t.”

This strategy-filled course delves into crucial aspects of building social competencies in preschool and early elementary-age students (ages 4-7). Explore how flexible thinking, social language, self-regulation, and social and emotional development are vital for developing collaborative interactions in group settings, both on the playground and in the classroom. Gain insights from a research perspective on the impact of executive functioning, social attention, and social problem solving through the lens of our award-winning We Thinkers! curriculum series. Walk away with practical strategies and examples to seamlessly integrate social learning concepts into your existing teaching methods.

Download this free visual with practical ideas for initiating social conversations, which Michelle Garcia Winner presents in this course.

Loneliness is a dangerous national epidemic that has been growing in depth and complexity for many years. Loneliness not only endangers our mental and physical health, but it also can make us less kind and caring toward others, resulting at times in misbehavior at schools and within our communities. We’ll explore a range of research-informed ways we can cultivate meaningful relationships with others to foster our well-being, as well as kindness, empathy, and generosity of spirit toward others. Now more than ever, building social awareness, managing anxiety, and developing social communication strategies to combat this growing crisis of loneliness is critical for school-age children, tweens and teens, and all the way through the adult years.

What is alexithymia? It refers to challenges in developing awareness of one’s feelings, identifying, and distinguishing them from other physical sensations—and it’s gaining interest in the research, schools, and clinical arenas. Educators and parents have reported an increase in overall “regulation” challenges in the classroom, on the playground, and during small group activities. We’ll highlight select key aspects of emotional awareness and regulation and its role in perspective taking. Specifically, we’ll explore how alexithymia can impact the building blocks for spontaneous perspective taking across all contexts. We will suggest practical strategies to increase awareness of feelings within the perspective-taking process to use within the classroom, school, community, and home.

Tweens, teens, and young adults are expected to naturally develop social and organizational competencies needed in school and across their lives. However, students with social learning and organized thinking differences (e.g., ADHD, twice exceptional, expressive receptive language, sensory processing, autism levels 1 and 2, etc.) may not intuitively learn these concepts and skills. This course will explore 5 critical life skills related to social emotional learning and organized thinking that can and should be directly addressed and taught to students & clients ages 11-22 in our homes, schools, and clinics. We’ll also review a variety of explicit metacognitive frameworks and practical strategies for teaching and learning these critical social competencies.

Small talk and conversations are dynamic, and we cannot create reliable scripts for how they will unfold. We can, however, increase our students' awareness of why we engage in social exchanges such as small talk. In this online course, we will unpack the complexities of small talk and conversation. We’ll break these down into their component parts to build strategies that support engagement in initial and ongoing social connection for children, teens, and adults.

The same abilities to think socially that are required to relate effectively to others are also essential for success in academics. Dynamic practitioners and award-winning coauthors, Kari Zweber Palmer and Ryan Hendrix team up again to explore the use of concepts within the Social Thinking Methodology that can be used from the start of a new school year or any time in between. This course explains how to set up for social connection and academic success in schools. Review core strategies and tools to support students in learning more about the social world around them and navigating to regulate to meet their own needs and social goals. We’ll focus on practical strategies and ideas for use in classrooms, as well as schoolwide implementation, building a bridge between environments and people to support the social mind and learning across a student’s day.

In two keynotes, Dr. Damon Korb, MD FAAP and developmental behavioral pediatrician, and Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP and founder of the Social Thinking® Methodology, will connect the dots between executive functions—including self-regulation and perspective taking—and creative, practical strategies to foster organized thinking. Damon’s keynote will explain five important steps professionals can learn to guide parents in how to raise an organized child. He will also present strategies and lessons he has learned during his 20 years as a developmental and behavioral pediatrician to help foster children’s active engagement of organized thinking, the kind of learning and functions they’ll use throughout their lives. Michelle’s keynote will focus on how to help students/clients develop friendships. How do people make friends? How do we keep them? What creative strategies can we teach to help tweens and teens learn to invest in these important but complicated relationships?

Parents and caregivers are always asking about how to teach and support self-regulation. In this course designed specifically for parents and caregivers, we’ll talk about the ways the social mind can support social thinking and self-regulation for early learners. We will cover practical strategies including how we can use stories, activities, and play to build self-regulation; how to teach children to better understand their own and others’ thoughts and feelings, and the plan of the group and their role within it. Please note: this course is not eligible for Continuing Education.