Thinking About You Thinking About Me ((product review!!))

I was provided with the opportunity to review “Thinking about YOU Thinking about ME” book by Michelle Garcia Winner.  This book teaches perspective taking and Social Thinking to persons with Social Cognitive Learning Challenge. 

This book contains 11 chapters which are all designed around the different aspects and steps towards teaching social thinking and perspective talking.  The chapters include:

-Perspective Talking: Thinking, Learning, and Teaching

-The keys to perspective talking

-The four steps to communication (an overview and the breakdown of each step)

-Social behavior mapping

- The me binder: teaching students about their IEPs

-About the Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment Protocol

-Standardized Assessments: comments and critiques

-and an entire appendix filled with forms and materials related to the Social Thinking Dynamic Assessment Protocol

I am not going to lie; to go through this entire book will take the entire summer!  But I have flipped through it to the parts that caught my eye and I know you will want to know about most!  This book is a great reference tool for those teaching perspective talking and other social thinking skills.  There are tons of charts and forms for teachings, school psychologists, SLPs, TAs and more!  No need to create your own! 

Some aspects that caught my eye and will be extremely helpful next year with my students:

-The various charts provided that compare typical and impaired students in the areas of perspective talking.  These charts will be useful in the RTI/evaluation process and justifying services.

-The different game activities that can be photocopied such as the “thinking about you vs. just me” activity. 

-Handouts that can be photocopied and used with older students such as one to teach students about creating files in their brains to remember facts about others.  This is great to teach students that it is important to know information about others not just yourself.  This will help them know how to initiate and maintain conversations.

-Questions used to engage others in social interaction.  This is a great visual for you to prompt or your students to prompt themselves.

-Conversation Tree concept:  take one topic and create branches or subtopics of conversation based on the base of the tree.  Trees can keep on growing with many branches and so can conversations.  LOVE this idea!

-Conversation Street concept/vocabulary:  Similar idea to the tree but instead of one base and growing into branches, a street can change, turn, stop and go just like a conversation.  I LOVE this idea as well!!  Any way to teach pairing with a symbol makes it easy to each, use, carryover and practice.  Can you picture the drawings your students can make with this idea?!

-Worksheets/charts that relate to the “I’m A Social Detective” book such as the excepted and unexpected behaviors based on contexts.

-Prompts to elicit conversations, story scenarios to read to your students, and activity suggestions for a variety of activities for each aspect of social thinking and perspective talking.

-Teaching students about their own IEPs.  There are worksheets for them to fill out such as their own strengths/weaknesses, about their therapists/TAs/teachers, and goals.  This helps students learn to be advocates for themselves and understand what they need to work on.   This will also help you create IEPs with students’ input.

-Questionnaires for teachers and other professionals working with the students.  This will help maintain constant communication with other team members.  This will help you address needs in the classroom in your therapy rooms.  This will help with progress monitoring, identification/data collection for RTI, and keep lines of communication open.  We, as SLPs in the schools don’t always see the same behaviors/issues as teachers in a large classroom with other students/distractions.

Things I like about this book:

-Great resource for SLPs & those working with students with social skills goals

-Tons of handouts, activities, and resources to be used to teach social thinking and perspective talking

-Love the suggestions on how to introduce and teach the various concepts

-Great charts, questionnaires, and handouts that will be helpful with the RTI and IEP writing process

-Great reference material when trying to find ways to teach and break down the various skills necessary

I definitely recommend this book and other reference materials related to Social Thinking by Michelle Garcia Winner.  This 316 page book costs $48.  Have you been to any of her workshops?  What materials do you use and recommend??