You Are a Social Detective! Teaching Curriculum & Support Guide: Lessons and Practical Activities
About this ebook
Bring social emotional learning into the classroom! Thousands of schools, clinics, and homes have found the award-winning storybook, You Are a Social Detective! (Winner & Crooke, 2020), to be a practical, engaging addition to their libraries. While simply reading the storybook is educational, the social and emotional concepts are ripe for deeper teaching in whole-class and small-group settings. Piloted and tested over years in large school districts, the You Are a Social Detective! Teaching Curriculum and Support Guideis just the tool you need to bring this important social emotional learning (SEL) into the classroom.
Help your students become Social Detectives with this easy-to-use curriculum that fits into your current teaching day. Designed as a companion guide to teach the concepts explored in You Are a Social Detective!more deeply, this curriculum provides 10 structured lesson plans and visual tools to support building students’ social attention, social interpretation, and self-awareness. Discover practical strategies for teaching students to define social situations, make smart guesses, and uncover hidden social expectations. The concepts taught in these 10 lessons support the SEL areas of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and problem solving for decision making.
Each chapter is a lesson plan that includes:
• Big picture context for each lesson
• Lesson objectives
• Key vocabulary to emphasize
• Suggestions for how to introduce the lesson
• Discussion prompts
• Extension activity ideas with photo examples
• Writing prompts to extend the learning
Appendices includes downloadable and printable activity visuals (Thinksheets) for each lesson, a family letter template, a professional letter template, a literature resource guide, and writing prompts to expand teaching.
Also availableincluded: Supplemental PowerPoint Visual Teaching Visuals Tools available online for curriculum purchasers.
Each lesson has a short teaching PowerPoint to make your lessons come alive with visuals from the storybook and Turn & Talk activities. Also available are downloadable and printable Thinksheets from the curriculum. These online tools can be used to support large group, small group, or tele-education.
The multiple award-winning You Are a Social Detective! is the first book in the Superflex series. It teaches social learners the power of observation, reading context, and interpreting clues to figure out how to respond in ways that meet their social goals.
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About the author
Pamela Crooke, PhD, CCC-SLP, is Chief Curriculum Officer and Director of Research, Content, Clinical Services, and the Social Thinking Training & Speakers’ Collaborative, Think Social Publishing, Inc. She served as a clinical faculty member of three universities and worked as a speech-language pathologist in the Arizona public schools for 15 years. Pam is a prolific speaker both in North America and abroad, and has co-authored, with Michelle Garcia Winner, five award-winning books related to Social Thinking. Their book, You Are a Social Detective!, 2nd Edition (2020) won the 2021 Creative Child Magazine Preferred Choice Award, the 2022 Mom’s Choice Gold Medal Award, and 2022 Best Book Awards Finalist. She and Winner collaborate on writing articles and blogs that appear on the Social Thinking website and in a wide array of publications. Her current research focuses on using practice-based research to examine how professionals and parents utilize frameworks and strategies within the Social Thinking® Methodology.
Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP, is the founder of Social Thinking® and CEO, Think Social Publishing, Inc. and a globally recognized thought leader, author, speaker, and social-cognitive therapist. She is dedicated to helping people of all ages develop social emotional learning, including those with social learning differences. Across her 35+ year career she has created numerous evidence-based and evidence-informed strategies, teaching frameworks, and curricula. Michelle’s work also teaches how social competencies impact overall well-being, including one’s ability to foster relationships and their academic and career performance. She and her team continually update the Social Thinking® Methodology based on the latest research and insights they learn from their clients. She was honored to receive a Congressional Special Recognition Award in 2008 and a Lectureship Award (2019) from the Society of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatricians.
Kari Zweber Palmer, MA, CCC-SLP, first became interested in Social Thinking as a graduate student when she conducted research on the Social Thinking informal assessment procedure, the Double Interview. She started her career as a speech-language pathologist in the public schools in Minnetonka, MN, working in early childhood and at the elementary level. She then worked as a full-time therapist at the Center for Social Thinking in San Jose, CA. Currently Kari owns a private practice, Changing Perspectives, in Excelsior, MN. Her diverse caseload includes preschool-aged children to young adults, all with varying levels of social cognitive differences and/or challenges. Kari is a peer reviewer for ASHA’s continuing education program. She is also a Social Thinking consultant at multiple school districts around the country. She enjoys collaborating with dedicated educators (early childhood through high school) on implementing social cognitive teaching into the school day. Kari is an active presenter as part of the Social Thinking Training & Speakers’ Collaborative and enjoys sharing the power of Social Thinking with international audiences.
