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.

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?