Improving "Social Smarts" at Greenbrier

Since the beginning of the 2014-2015 school year, Ellen Hajek, Speech/Language Pathologist, and I have begun teaching all of the students at Greenbrier the Social Thinking Curriculum by Michelle Garcia Winner.  There are many elements to this curriculum.  We started the school year with Whole Body Listening, which teaches specific behaviors related to successfully participating in a conversation or listening situation.  We have begun to move into the Social Detective piece that teaches "expected" vs. "unexpected" behaviors.  Our classroom groups will incorporate practice with analyzing situations and identifying behaviors that are socially acceptable ("expected"; encourage others to feel calm or possibly even pleased ) and not as common ("unexpected"; encourage those who witness the behavior to feel stress or possibly become upset). A student’s ability to observe, evaluate and adapt to a situation can help to change their behavior in that situation.  We believe that integrating the program into all of the classrooms will benefit all students and teach common language that can be used throughout the school day.  Additionally, the curriculum connects to the Superflex character from Social Thinking who is part of our school-wide superhero theme this year.  We are very excited to be teaching this program in all of the K-5 classrooms and watching the students' "social smarts" grow each day.