Why is my student not generalizing their Social Skills?

Diana Cortese Author

When teaching Social Skills, make sure you are not inadvertently teaching black & white thinking. Social Skills are nuanced and complex.

“My students know their social skills but have such difficulty using them outside the classroom.”

How many times have you heard that or said that yourself?

Why is it so hard to get our students to transfer the skills they exhibit so well in the structured environment?

It’s most likely not WHAT you are doing but HOW you are doing it.

Let’s take the “Size of the Problem” activity as an example. This is a fairly typical subject covered in Social Skills Groups. We teach kids to categorize problems into some version of big, medium or small. We also then associate a response to those problems.

Here’s the important part. Are you teaching students that their responses to this activity are correct or incorrect? Are you reinforcing them when their answers and opinions line up with yours?

Or are you listening and perhaps asking open ended questions about it in the form of pure curiosity? 

I recommend teaching your students to express their opinions and see for themselves how it lands in the group or with their peers. 

That is the feedback that matters. Bring their attention to how their opinion is being received. This is what is going to naturally reinforce and shape more context appropriate responses. The kids need to really “feel” how their behavior is coming across. You can do that through activities such as role plays, teamwork projects and just group discussions.

Resist the temptation to attach your value system to their response.

Students want to please their teachers. They want to either get their affection, respect or to tell them what they want to hear so they can be left alone.

When we teach and reinforce black & white correct social responses, the student learns to memorize that exact response for that exact scenario.

But then what happens when the are in their natural environment and something slightly different happens? How do they respond? They are not prepared because they have learned the RESPONSE not the CONCEPT.

Therefore, if we really want our students to use their skills, they have to think critically about them. This involves self-reflection and discussion with peers. An activity I like to do with my students that gives them this exact type of practice is Speak Up or Let it Go. 

It gives kids various social scenarios and has them categorize them as they see fit. Again, we don't want to say if they got it right or not. We do want to bring it back to the group to see how their responses landed with their peers. That's the context in which they live and experience their social life. And if the whole group feels one way and one student feels another, so be it. It's important that they hear the group but it's up to each individual child to think for themself in the end. 

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Categories: social skills, social skills group