The Social Learning Center
Our mission is to learn, understand, apply and communicate effective methods of social teaching for each individual and those who support them.
We offer individual and group services to our clients and their families. Treatment objectives range from teaching social skills utilizing a behavioral approach, to improving pragmatic language (i.e. understanding and using language to effectively communicate with varying partners), to developing a client’s social thinking by breaking down and explicitly teaching perspective taking and context awareness skills.
Our clinical staff strive to teach our students through a variety of effective research-based strategies to:
We also offer individual counseling services, individual speech/language therapy, social communication evaluations and professional development.
The core components that make up the Social Thinking Groups at the SLC were established by the works of Michelle Garcia Winner, a speech pathologist in San Jose. Individuals who may benefit from social thinking include, but are not limited to, persons diagnosed with:
When we talk about "teaching social thinking and related social skills” we are targeting and teaching:
The purpose of social thinking therapy is to improve a client’s social cognitive abilities. In social thinking, abstract social concepts are broken down and explicitly taught (social task analysis).
For more on Michelle Garcia Winner and her social thinking philosophy visit her website: www.socialthinking.com
Center Treatment Philosophy:
Our treatment staff embody the philosophy of “Good Work” which is a combination of excellence (where you’re doing work that calls on your best talents, engagement (where you’re enthusiastic, energized, and love what you do), and ethics (where work is aligned with your sense of purpose, meaning, and where you want to go in life) - Gardner