Social Skills Curricula
Several commercial social skills curricula use a direct-instruction approach and may be helpful in guiding social skills instruction (see Table 4.4 in Chapter 4 for a listing of social skills curricula). The ACCEPTS (A Curriculum for Children’s Effective Peer and Teacher Skills) and ACCESS (Adolescent Curriculum for Communication and Effective Social Skills) curricula are highly structured, even providing a script for teachers to follow. These are easy to use, and teachers who have never taught social skills appreciate the guidance that the script offers. The Skillstreaming series [Skillstreaming in Early Childhood, Skillstreaming the Elementary School Child, and Skillstreaming the Adolescent (all McGinnis, 2011)] are less structured, presenting each lesson in a brief outline form. Helpful features include the fact that each skill is task analyzed, and several self-monitoring forms are included for use with each skill. The Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) Intervention Guide is coordinated with the Social Skills Improvement System (SSIS) Rating Scales (Gresham & Elliott, 2008; see Table 7.3 ).
However, commercial curricula should be used with three caveats in mind. First, most commercial social skills curricula have been field tested with students with autism. Second, the skills included in each curriculum may not match the skills needed by your students, as indicated by your ecological assessment data. Finally, the instructional procedures recommended may need to be slightly modified, depending on your students’ language levels.
Instructional Scripts
One variation on the direct-instruction approach involves using social scripts as a part of social interaction training. Haring and Ryndak (1994) describe social scripts as “routine social interaction patterns that can be repeated many times in a variety of contexts” (p. 303). As you have learned, social skills deficits and communication deficits are strongly interrelated. Children and youth with autism may have difficulty generating situation-appropriate words and phrases because of their language and communication deficits. Social scripts are useful in prompting students to use appropriate words in social interaction situations. Students are able to focus on other variables of the social situation without the obstacle of not having the words to say. Social scripts have been shown to be an effective intervention component with both preschoolers and adolescents with autism (e.g., Camargo et al., 2014; Goldstein & Cisar, 1992; MacDuff, Ledo, McClannahan, & Krantz, 2007).
To use social scripts, first identify situations in which scripts may be beneficial to facilitating social interaction. For example, perhaps the teacher’s assessment reveals that peers without disabilities often extend verbal greetings to one of his students in the halls as the student is walking to class in the morning, but the student does not respond. The teacher could develop a generic script that would enable the student to respond appropriately to any greeting, such as “Hi, how are you?” or “Hey, how’s it going?” or “Hi, see you later!” The teacher could then use a direct-instruction approach to teach the student to say these words in response to greetings.
Social scripts may be written or pictorial and can provide specific instructions or general prompts. As students begin consistently exhibiting the target social behaviors, the social scripts should be altered or faded to reduce the likelihood of the student becoming dependent on the script (Ledbetter-Cho et al., 2016).