About - Michelle

Across her 35+ year career Michelle has created numerous evidence-based and evidence-informed strategies, curricula, and teaching frameworks and continues to co-develop the Social Thinking® Methodology with Dr. Pamela Crooke to help individuals of all ages develop social competencies by deeply connecting social, emotional, and cognitive development. Michelle's work emphasizes the impact of social competencies on individuals’ overall well-being, including relationships, academic performance, and career success. She and her team continually update the Social Thinking® Methodology based on the latest research and insights they learn from their clients.

Michelle maintains a private practice, The Center for Social Thinking, in Santa Clara, California, where she works with clients who continue to teach and inspire her. She travels globally presenting courses on the Social Thinking Methodology, an evidence-based approach she created and continues to evolve and expand with co-developer, Dr. Pamela Crooke. Michelle helps to develop educational programs, consults with and trains families and schools, and is a guiding resource for a wide range of professionals, politicians, and businesses on the topic of social emotional competencies. She is a prolific writer and has written and/or co-authored 38 books and more than100 articles about the Social Thinking Methodology.

Michelle receives accolades for her energetic and educational conference presentations, as well as her down-to-earth approach to teaching social competencies. The strength of Michelle's work is her ability to break down abstract social concepts and teach them in practical, concrete ways to help people develop their social problem-solving strengths and improve their social responses.

Career Summary

Michelle’s interest in autism while attending the University of California-Santa Barbara in 1979 became the catalyst for becoming a speech-language pathologist (SLP). Her first two mentors in the field were the late Dr. Carol Prutting (an early pioneer in the study of social pragmatics) and Dr. Robert Koegel (founder of Pivotal Response Therapy, aligned with ABA). While attending graduate school at Indiana University-Bloomington she became involved in the Indiana Resource Center for Autism (IRCA) under the leadership of Nancy Dalrymple, who became another strong mentor for Michelle. At IRCA in the 1980s, Michelle worked extensively with teens and young adults who would by today’s standard be referred to as “classically autistic.” Her students experienced significant intellectual learning challenges, weak speech/language development, and very limited social learning abilities. Michelle excelled at combining her knowledge of communication with behaviorism to help her more cognitively challenged students develop basic functional communication and social skills through behavioral teachings.

After returning to California in the late 1980s, Michelle transitioned to working in hospitals and post-acute hospital rehabilitation centers with neurotypical learners who suffered from head injuries or strokes. There she learned about higher-level brain functioning and cognitive rehabilitation. In 1995, her career transitioned once more when she became the SLP for a public high school district. Her caseload comprised many older students who had relatively strong intelligence and language, but who lacked more refined social communication skills. The Social Thinking Methodology was born out of necessity as a way to reach those students who were literal interpreters and often socially less aware, who would benefit from more information about how to navigate the social world than just memorizing dialogue to use in conversation. They needed to know why they should bother to converse at all, or even interact with others in their environment.
Michelle opened her private practice, the Center for Social Thinking, in 1998 and was met with high demand that continues to rise to this day. Trained professionals work with individuals ages four through adulthood in individual and group settings. Michelle continues to carry an active caseload of clients, in addition to consulting with families and schools on the Social Thinking Methodology and designing programs tailored to the individual’s needs. Michelle also founded the company now called Think Social Publishing, Inc. to handle the growing public speaking demand from the national and international stage, as well as to publish her own and others’ books on the Social Thinking Methodology. To date, Michelle has written and/or co-authored 38 books on Social Thinking. And the Social Thinking Methodology (STM) is now used to teach and support neurotypical and neurodivergent children, teens, and adults, including those with diagnoses of ADHD, social communication differences, social anxiety, autism levels 1 and 2, other social, emotional, and cognitive learning differences (with diagnoses or without). The STM also supports students with more nuanced social learning differences and is being adopted by educators and school districts to help all students (and adults in vocational and professional settings) improve their executive functioning, self-regulation, and core social relatedness.

Click here to download Michelle's CV.

Praise

In 2016, her approach led GreatSchools.org, a leading national nonprofit organization, to call Michelle, "...the leading expert in the field of social skills."

In 2008, Michelle was honored with a Congressional Special Recognition Award for her "groundbreaking work in the field of social learning."

 "...one of my favorite authors in the field of teaching emotional intelligence. Michelle Garcia Winner has pioneered some very helpful ways of conceptualizing and helping educators understand the social challenges that students on the autism spectrum face." - Stephan Borgman, 2010, Psychology Today, "Spectrum Solutions"

Research

To check out the Social Thinking Research homepage, click here.

Research published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders supports using Social Thinking Vocabulary with individuals with autism levels 1 and 2. Learn more here.

Personal

Michelle lives in San Jose, CA with her partner and has two daughters, Heidi and Robyn.

Financial Disclosure

Financial: Michelle Garcia Winner is employed by Think Social Publishing, Inc. as an author/speaker and receives compensation for her presentations, as well as for the sale of her books, and receives compensation from The Center for Social Thinking as a clinician. Michelle owns the companies Think Social Publishing, Inc., as well as The Center for Social Thinking, Inc. and their related intellectual property.

Non-financial: No relevant non-financial relationship exists.