How do I teach my students or clients social skills?

Some kids struggle with learning how to play with their peers. Play isn’t always easy for everyone. The goal would always be to have children be able to play and interact without adult support. But for some, that’s not realistic. For those kids who struggle, they’ll need additional adult scaffolding until they can play on their own.

What can you do?

“Social competence simply cannot be taught in a structured, artificial classroom setting.”

— (Lavoie, 2005)

When I first started out as a counselor, I ran more traditional social skills training, which focused on worksheets or only specific instruction around one particular social skill at a time. I found that kids learned the words to say, but they didn’t use those skills in real life moments when they needed them, like on the playground at recess or when playing a board game. Kids could tell you precisely what taking turns meant in theory, but in practice, they struggled to do it.

Over time, I found that what worked best was to do some explicit teaching around a particular social skill, then create real-world experiences where they would use the skill we were focusing on during that session. I found that explicitly talking through a particular social skill, then allowing time for activities with supervision and scaffolding, followed by a time to debrief afterward, worked very well. You create a teachable moment right in the room. Those created teachable moments allow a therapist or counselor to work with children during real experiences to help them figure out what they should do differently and reinforce what is working well.