Social Skill Builders^sm
ssb@communityresourcesforautism.org

Key Principles of Practice

• Schools are ideal skills for teaching social skills because of their accessibility to children, teachers, and families.  Below are recommendations for enhancing schools' ability to improve students' social competence.
• Implement social skills programs to establish a positive learning and teaching environment for all students and school staff across the school settings.  This means exposing the entire school to a social skills curriculum.
• Integrate social skills instruction into the school curriculum.  Formal social skills instruction should be planned, focused, and scheduled within all teaching and learning activities.  Informal social skills instruction takes advantage of naturally occurring opportunities to teach appropriate social behavior such as hallways or in the cafeteria.
• Match the intensity of the social skills instruction and type of social skills difficulty.
• Incorporate strategies in all social skills interventions to facilitate the generalization of social skills  The success of social skill instruction should be judged on the degree to which students use acquired social skills across settings, people, and time.
• Evaluate the success of social skills based on
  a)  accuracy and fluency with which a student can display a skill.
  b) degree to which peer and adult acceptance is enhanced.
  c)  degree to which significant adults judge the student positively.
• Make social skills assessments and interventions culturally relevant.  Culturally relevant factors, such as ethnicity and race, influence the student's social behavior, as well as the social environment in which those behaviors are preformed.