Day 1 | Monday May 26th, 2025

How Do We Do What We Don’t Want To Do? Exploring strategies to problem solve, rally motivation, and get things done

Speakers: Michelle Garcia Winner and Dr Pamela Crooke

Many students intuitively learn strategies to foster executive functioning, without significant direct instruction, such as organizational skills, social problem solving, time management, and self-regulation of their actions and feelings based on the situation and the people. But there is a significant number of students in Tier 1, as well as Tiers 2 and 3 who do not and it’s up to us, as educators, caregivers, and therapists to provide supports and teaching. In this day, we will unpack a range of concepts and provide a variety of related strategies for different age groups. These include, but are not limited to, the power of metacognition, exploring positive and negative feelings and emotions, rallying motivation, use of the Like-Dislike Scale as well as The Risk Scale, and a deeper look at how our mind travels across time (past and future) to guide what we do in the here and now.

Throughout the talk, we’ll also bring these and other concepts to life with the help of selected artwork within two new teaching tools with embedded stories to be published in 2025. One is a graphic novel for tweens, teens, and young adults called Brain Hacks: Strategies to Build Motivation and Inspire (Sojat &Winner), for students from about 10 years old through young adulthood. This graphic teaching guide will introduce the Like-Dislike Scale as well as the Time Travel Wall to encourage youth to consider a range of strategies they can learn to use to help them help themselves. The other visual teaching guide is called Let’s Solve it! (Winner & Crooke, 2025). This colorful visual tool is designed to unpack and engage younger children (ages 4–8) through 23 problem-solution story sets and related thinksheets to help kids work through a four-step process when solving socially based problems and recognizing their solutions.

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Day 2 | Tuesday May 27th, 2025

Implementing Social Thinking in Schools: Effective Social-Academic Learning Strategies for All Students

Speakers: Dr Pamela Crooke and Chithra Kathiresan

The Social Thinking® Methodology and its practical concepts and strategies are being used in schools around the world. Social Thinking was originally developed for individuals with social emotional learning differences. More recently, however, the value of the frameworks, concepts, and strategies is being recognized on a wider scale and adopted as part of social learning programs for all students. In this course, we will explore how individuals, schools, and systems can implement Social Thinking in a systematic, effective, and sustainable way.

While many programs are designed to teach basic “social skills” or simply ways to teach children to “behave,” Social Thinking teaches the underlying why we use social skills and the deeper metacognitive connection to the process of social interpretation and problem solving. Tools and materials support teaching self-awareness, self-regulation, executive functioning, and perspective taking—competencies the social mind has to access across the school day.

The same social thinking required to relate effectively to people around us is also essential for success in academics. Students use social thinking constantly at school, to work effectively as part of a group, stay on task, figure out the expected times to talk in class, and share space well with others in the classroom, cafeteria, and on the playground. Social thinking is also critical for individualized academic tasks, such as reading comprehension, writing a paper, or presenting work to others.

Throughout many years, Social Thinking has collaborated with a variety of schools. From large to small, public to independent, this conference day will share our collective work in elementary schools. Ideas on how we age the concepts up to secondary school will also be included.

We’ll provide practical examples and stories of how schools have implemented Social Thinking to support social competencies. When classroom teachers, specialists, and caregivers share the same language and strategies, it creates more cohesive learning environments. We will explore how the Social Thinking Vocabulary can be used across social landscapes (all aspects of home, school, and community) to build a bridge between environments and people.

Ideas and inspiration on setting up classrooms and other social learning spaces using visual supports will be featured. We will provide example lesson plans, including ways to teach social observation, support daily transition times, and set expectations. Through video clips, administrators, classroom teachers, specialists, and support staff will share their experiences with implementing the Social Thinking Methodology. We will share lessons learned, challenges tackled, and advice for the journey.

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