Why don't most schools offer social skills sessions?

[Anonymous]

In my experience, teachers basically told us "no, we don't do social groups here." They basically refused to change their schedules. It was ridiculous rigidity.

I have found teachers to be super unhelpful in this regard. Not saying it's any ONE teacher's job to run social groups, but somebody should be doing it.

Figure it out. I encourage parents to advocate and fight.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, teachers basically told us "no, we don't do social groups here." They basically refused to change their schedules. It was ridiculous rigidity.

I have found teachers to be super unhelpful in this regard. Not saying it's any ONE teacher's job to run social groups, but somebody should be doing it.

Figure it out. I encourage parents to advocate and fight.

Parents who want this need to advocate through the IEP process, and not ask teachers to skip things that either are mandated by their employer (like certain numbers of instructional minutes for each subject or attending IEPs) or that are required for the classroom to function like collaborating with colleagues.

If you can convince the IEP team to write this then I will show up as speech therapy or counseling or possibly special education hours and be assigned to the appropriate professional.

But asking a teacher to rearrange their complex schedule, and then calling them rigid for not being able to magically make time is absurd.

[Anonymous]

Federal law makes clear that the purpose of special education is to prepare students with disabilities for “further education, employment, and independent living,” all of which require social competency

You need very specific goals to make this happen. Like this, but aligned with your child’s needs:

In the context of a conversational small-group setting with similar-aged peers, Larlo will independently ask 3 consecutive questions of peers about the peers topic of interest. Data will be recorded 5 times per day until Larlo responds independently during an average 80% of recorded instances across 5 consecutive days. This skill will then be generalized across 2 different peers and 2 different settings meeting the same criteria.

If you get enough kids with goals like this they will hire a social skills teacher or at minimum create a social skills class.

That’s the way I’ve always seen it play out.

Hire an advocate and a lawyer if you’re getting push back from the school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, teachers basically told us "no, we don't do social groups here." They basically refused to change their schedules. It was ridiculous rigidity.

I have found teachers to be super unhelpful in this regard. Not saying it's any ONE teacher's job to run social groups, but somebody should be doing it.

Figure it out. I encourage parents to advocate and fight.

do you understand that this would be an IEP service?

[Anonymous]

In my experience, social skills groups are run by school psychologists, special ed teachers, or counselors - never the gen ed teacher. That way, it’s part of their job and not an extra task during their lunch time. This is really common in schools, so I’m surprised your school is different!

[Anonymous]

I’m a special ed teacher. One issue is I don’t have any time to run a social skills group in my day regularly. Sometimes I can pull a small group to do a morning meeting but I have about 10-15 minutes total and usually I use that time to get quick data updates or administer evaluation testing (not given time for that either). The rest of the day I am teaching academics. When there are group activities I work to help students collaborate with partners and model for them. I observe when I have recess duty (half the time) and try to help students engage with peers. Our guidance counselor does run lunch groups but those are not part of special ed services.

The speech teacher would do them as part of pragmatic speech related services but not everyone qualifies for that.

Finally, one issue as well is that students do not want to miss lunch in the cafeteria to do a lunch group, they don’t want to engage with peers on the playground (very common for students with autism- they want a break from engaging and to do their own thing and I think that’s okay), and they don’t want to participate in brain break games that foster interaction in the room. So I can only do so much when students don’t want to participate.

[Anonymous]

Sped teacher again- you are right that I am. It willing to give up my contracted duty-free lunch break or planning time. I need those times to eat and get my lessons and materials ready (I only get 3 planning times a week without meetings).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:In my experience, teachers basically told us "no, we don't do social groups here." They basically refused to change their schedules. It was ridiculous rigidity.

I have found teachers to be super unhelpful in this regard. Not saying it's any ONE teacher's job to run social groups, but somebody should be doing it.

Figure it out. I encourage parents to advocate and fight.

do you understand that this would be an IEP service?

Duh. That's what I'm talking about.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Finally, one issue as well is that students do not want to miss lunch in the cafeteria to do a lunch group, they don’t want to engage with peers on the playground (very common for students with autism- they want a break from engaging and to do their own thing and I think that’s okay), and they don’t want to participate in brain break games that foster interaction in the room. So I can only do so much when students don’t want to participate.

This is (potentially) a big bunch of bs, since kids with autism might not *know* how to socialize.

[Anonymous]

Lots of ignorant piling on here. OP didn't ask for anything from teachers. Good schools have a therapist on staff who can run a lunch bunch and have downtime at other time during the day.

[Anonymous]

It’s not on the SOL. They only teach to the test.

[Anonymous]

I know everyone wants to dogpile on schools but I actually think they do a good job at social skills. Frankly that’s all my kids learned in K and there was still courses in later grades. One of their 5 extracurriculars is weekly “counseling” which is mostly about how to be nice to others, fill buckets, play with the kids on the playground that are by themselves.

I think maybe the issue might be the tons of pullouts there are. Some kids miss most of the day with so many so maybe they’re missing a lot of the social aspects of school because they’re off doing one on ones with teachers. I think instead of pullouts they should have afterschool tutoring offered instead.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Lots of ignorant piling on here. OP didn't ask for anything from teachers. Good schools have a therapist on staff who can run a lunch bunch and have downtime at other time during the day.

Multiple posts, maybe from one person or multiple people have specifically said that teachers are ridiculous or rigid for refusing to run these groups at lunch time, or that they asked the teacher (instead of the IEP team), or that teachers should use their "downtime", which is not a thing that teachers have.

If those weren't from OP then the people writing about how it's not a teacher's job are not talking to OP.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm a newbie to public school (kid is about to start K) so sorry for the dumb question but could this not be integrated into the general ed curriculum? I have heard from an educator friend in a very low income community that by middle school the kids in general ed with ASD diagnoses do the best with social skills because they have received explicit instruction (maybe outside of school?) in this area, whereas those without diagnoses have a lot of social skills gaps. I think more kids need this than are identified.

As a former teacher, this is so triggering. Please don’t say this out loud. When I first taught, we had X minutes for reading, x minutes for writing, x minutes for math, etc. The problem is that all of the minutes added up to more minutes than we had in a week. So teachers are basically integrating all of science and/or social studies and/or health (Yes, we had elementary health lessons in fcps in the 00s.) There are no more margins. If you want to add in social skills training, you need to take something else out. Lessons are already really short in the primary classes as well. A first grader can only sit still for 10 minutes in September. You can’t effectively teach most concepts in less time. So if you add social skills in, which some children need, something else will come out, something that all children need.