The Science of Making Friends
Course Description:
Making friends and behaving appropriately in social situations is just as important as academic success for students who have Autism, Asperger Syndrome, ADHD, depression or anxiety. Learning and using positive social skills will benefit not only their personal relationships, but will help them find and keep employment, as well as being able to function in daily social events. The skills taught in this course are evidence based strategies from the University of California-Los Angeles' Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS). Participants in this course will learn how to teach their students lifelong skills such as: how to start, maintain and terminate conversations, finding and choosing good friends, using electronic communications appropriately, how to show good sportsmanship, and how to plan and act during social gatherings. Other topics will include teaching strategies to handle the negative aspects of social challenges, for example, cyberbullying, physical bullying, teasing, gossip, rumors, dealing with arguments and changing a bad reputation. The DVD accompanying the textbook will give participants concrete examples of the above social situations and can be used with students in the classroom to teach these skills. Participants will also have the opportunity to design their own social skill interventions for use with the students in their classroom.
Goals and Objectives
As a result of participation in this course, students should:
- Learn how to teach their students specific rules and steps for a variety of social skills they will need to use at school, home and in their communities to develop healthy friendships and relationships with peers and adults.
- Teach their students appropriate conversational skills for a variety of social environments.
- Learn how to support socially challenged students and teach them how to expand their social opportunities (such as choosing and maintaining friendships, navigating social occasions and planning gatherings, showing good sportsmanship and managing electronic communication).
- Support and teach socially challenged students how to deal with peer rejection, bullying, rumors, gossip and how to handle arguments.
- Assist their students with developing and enhancing current peer friendships using research- based practices.
Texts/Readings
The required texts are:
Laugeson, E. (2013). The Science of Making Friends: Helping Socially Challenged Teens and Young Adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.