Karen Liberato, MSW, LCSW

The other day I was attending my daughter’s college graduation. While watching the students called to receive their diploma, a family of five adults stood in front of the people seated. When asked to sit down because they were blocking the view of many people, one of the men responded, “Hey, I’m not moving, my daughter is graduating!” and continued standing until security came and escorted the family out.

This man’s response is an example of poor social thinking. He was only thinking of himself and did not take into account the arena full of people who were at the graduation for the very same reason! He put his needs in front of everyone else.

At The Calais School, we have “Social Thinking” groups that teach our students how to be social thinkers. In our groups, every student would be able to identify the actions the family mentioned above as “only me” thinking. The family did not understand that their actions made everyone else feel uncomfortable.

Perspective taking is the ability to consider the point of view of others. Many of the students enrolled at The Calais School experience impaired perspective taking. Without an understanding of perspective taking, our students will have great difficulty navigating their world. It will affect how they are perceived in the world of work and in interpersonal relationships. People without the ability to understand this concept will unwillingly make others uncomfortable and not want to spend time with them.

The importance of understanding how others view us cannot be underestimated. This is why we incorporate teaching this concept across the curriculum. We utilize the curriculum of Michelle Garcia Winner, who coined the term “Social Thinking” in the mid-1990s. Her curriculum provides “social thinking” strategies and is refined for students of all ages and abilities . She states,

“The challenge in educating students with social thinking learning disabilities is that we need to teach them explicitly what most of us do intuitively.”

At Calais we make it a priority to teach this skill to everyone. Teaching “social thinking” to students at Calais takes place in every classroom and all activities. In order for students to understand the complex nature of perspective taking, they must be shown how it appears often. Our teachers are trained to be sensitive to the needs of our students with “emerging perspective taking skills.” These students are going to make mistakes and misunderstand what is expected of them. It is only through a curriculum that consistently and sensitively guides students that we will see progress and we are witnessing significant progress!

Karen Liberato is the counselor for all high school students at The Calais School, where she has been conducting her Social Thinking groups since 2009. She is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a private practice in northern New Jersey.