Guidelines for Social Skills Instruction
From the August 2001 Education newsletter.


Fostering social competence in children who display challenging behaviors will reduce their risk for academic and social problems later on. The Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) has prepared a series of fact sheets on educating children with challenging behaviors and features them on their web site. As a service to our subscribers, we're offering a portion of the fact sheet on social skills instruction below.

Key Principles of Practice

• Children learn social skills as they grow and develop. These skills are acquired and demonstrated in a broad social context-the home, school, and community. Schools are ideal settings for teaching social skills because of their accessibility to children, teachers, and families. Below are recommendations for enhancing schools' ability to improve the social competence of students.

• Implement social skills programs to establish a positive learning and teaching environment for all students and school staff across all school settings. This means exposing the entire school to a social skills curriculum.

• Integrate social skills instruction into the school curriculum. Formal social skills instruction should be planned, focused, and scheduled within all teaching and learning activities. Informal social skills instruction takes advantage of naturally occurring opportunities to teach appropriate social behavior such as in the hallways or in the cafeteria.

• Match the intensity of social skills instruction with the intensity and type of social skills problem.

• Incorporate strategies in all social skills interventions to facilitate the generalized use of social skills. The success of social skills instruction should be judged on the degree to which students use acquired social skills across settings, people, and time.

• Evaluate the success of social skills based on the: (a) accuracy and fluency with which a student can display a skill, (b) degree to which peer and adult acceptance is enhanced; and (c) degree to which significant adults judge the student positively.

• Make social skill assessments and interventions culturally relevant. Culturally relevant factors, such as ethnicity and race, influence the student's social behavior as well as the social environment in which those behaviors are performed.

For more information on teaching students with challenging behaviors, see OSEP's web site.

For information on teaching children with challenging behaviors, check out Learning Disabilities and Challenging Behaviors: A Guide to Intervention and Classroom Management, by Nancy Mather and Sam Goldstein.