Breaking down social situations and the skills needed to be successful in those situations can be difficult. Social language is very complex and one wrong move can destroy a social exchange. Today, I wanted to show you how you can use social behavior mapping in speech therapy to teach perspective taking and how a person’s behavior affects others.
I am a BIG fan of materials that are easy to store, require little to no prep and can be used flexibly in therapy. Today, I am going to share a great resource from Social Thinking. If you aren’t familiar with the social thinking curriculum, I would recommend buying their Thinking About You, Thinking About Me book or Think Social! book to get started. They are awesome resources that will help enhance your social skills therapy! Today, I am going to be sharing about there Social Behavior Mapping Poster.
Social Behavior Mapping Poster
Social Behavior Mapping Dry Erase Poster is a tool to help visually show your students the effects of someone’s behavior in a certain situations, both expected and unexpected.
Some of the vocabulary taught with this curriculum, uses the terms expected behavior and unexpected behavior. In different social contexts, we have to adjust our behavior, so that we are being expected because we want people to have pleasant, good thoughts about us. For example, when we are watching a football game, it is expected to scream and cheer loudly at the television. However, if we did that behavior at a library, we would be exhibiting unexpected behaviors because what is expected at the library is for everyone to whisper or stay quiet while looking for books.
For our students with social skill deficits, understanding how their “expected” and “unexpected” behaviors affect people is very difficult. They struggle with picking up on non-verbal cues, tone of voice and interpreting ambiguous/sarcastic verbal messages. Some of my students struggle with “seeing” how their behavior affects others as well as understanding that you have to change your behavior in different contexts.
This poster allows the therapist or student to write information on the poster with a dry erase marker, so you can use it all the time. This allows the therapist to tailor the lesson to specific situations the student may need to process through.
What the Social Behavior Mapping Poster Includes
There are four columns with different questions to answer about the behaviors. Here is what is listed in the four columns:
- My behavior that is expected/unexpected for the situation
- Others feelings about our behaviors
- How others treat me based on how they feel about my behavior
- How I feel based on how I am treated in the situation
You can chose a general situation such as “lunch time” and map out behaviors that are general to all students, or you can tailor the behavior mapping specific to what the student is exhibiting during that time. I have done both because I have some students that become very resistant and escalated in behavior when I point out their not so great behavior.
I love how we can analyze the different feelings/emotions others may feel as well as how the person may be feeling. We can compare/contrast the affects of expected/unexpected behavior and then think of ways to use more expected behavior in that situation. I am also able to incorporate “thinking bubbles vs. talking bubbles” with this lesson as well.
The only downfall of using a dry erase poster is that you don’t have anything tangible to send home with parents or to give to teachers. So, a quick fix I thought of was snapping a photo with your IPAD or phone and emailing it to parents/teachers!
This poster is only $13!! What a deal! I have found working at the middle school that less is more in terms of materials and this helped me tremendously with planning effective therapy. This is a great tool to use as a warm up if you are having students practice having expected behaviors when playing a game, having a conversation, working in a group, etc. It gets their brains ready to be social thinkers. Do you have this poster? What do you love about using it?
Social Thinking wants to give one of MY followers a Social Behavior Mapping Poster!!! Enter below to win.
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The post Social Behavior Mapping Poster: A Social Thinking Therapy Resource appeared first on thedabblingspeechie.