Setting Goals for Social Skills Group

We’ve talked before about why individualizing goals for the kids in your group is important, but what exactly does it mean to set a goal?  Every goal should have a sheet with the current target, the purpose of the program, the procedures of implementing the program, how to collect data on the target, and what constitutes as mastery. Here’s a basic rundown of the elements that go into setting goals for autism spectrum kids in a social skills play group:

Purpose

n  Why are you setting this particular goal? Which behaviors are you looking to increase or decrease? When setting goals, think about whether or not those goals will improve the individual’s life. If the answer is no, it’s not a good goal to set. We’re always looking for social validity, so for example: your 5 year old student keeps making jokes about poop. You think poop jokes are gross, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to write a program to decrease the jokes, because that’s typical behavior for a 5 year old, and other typical students are also making similar jokes. We’re not looking for cookie-cutter perfect kids, we’re helping kids interact with other kids in socially acceptable ways. Knowing which skills your kids are working on and why they’re working on them is important for understanding how best to implement the program’s procedures. Often times the social skills group goals set for your kids will be related to goals set for one-on-one therapy sessions. For instance, let’s say a student’s home therapist is working on increasing wh- questions. The same program may be tweaked to fit social group by asking peers to ask the student wh- during group to track generalization.

Procedures for Implementation

n  What steps go into this goal? For instance, if you’re working on a tacting program (labelling objects and people based on visual cues) using picture cards, your procedure might look like this:

                                                                                                 i.    Take out picture card

                                                                                                ii.    Hold up picture card of preferred item

                                                                                              iii.    If child responds appropriately, put a correct trial mark in trial box. If child responds inappropriately or does not respond, give correct answer and return to step two.

That’s just one example, and procedures can (and almost always will) have many more steps than that. Knowing your procedure is important because following the same procedure across different environments and therapists, teachers, parents, and caregivers is the only way to get reliable and accurate data across the board. This is especially important to note when individualizing goals for social group, as we’ve discussed here. Here’s what an example procedure might look like:

As you can see, it’s specific and doesn’t leave room for too much interpretation, which is important. Everyone implementing the program should be able to quickly read and understand the procedures to keep them consistent.

Collecting Data

n  There’s an entire post on collecting data during social group here, but the basics of it are as follows. You’ll most likely have a few group-appropriate goals to focus on with a description of their procedures, and then a row of small square boxes in which to mark whether the target behavior was completed or not, with each box representing one trial. If a correct trial occurred, you would record a +. If a prompted trial occurred, you would mark a P. This is called trial-by-trial data collection, and it’s what’s most often used during social skills groups with anecdotal data (general notes) kept as well. Keeping accurate, consistent data is important for several reasons, but above all data will tell you when a target has been mastered so you can move on to the next target.

Mastery criteria

n  The idea behind mastery criteria is to set a level of performance that lets the instructor know the student is ready for the difficult of the target to increase. Mastery should be a certain percentage above the child’s current performance. Mastery criteria are set somewhere between 80% and 100% correct performance across multiple sessions or days. The high level of accuracy is included because the skill must be established before moving on to the next target. Including a time component or multiple session component to the mastery ensures that phenomenal performance on a given day is not a fluke.

Targets

n  Finally we have targets, which are different levels of program mastery. Many programs will have similar procedures for several targets. For example, let’s say that Barry’s target is 1 peer response (responding when a friend asks a question or says hello) with one prompt, with the program purpose being increased intraverbals. Once he’s mastered that target, his next target in this program might be 1 peer response with no prompts. Targets build off of each other to increase or decrease the target behavior. In the ABA world this is known as shaping, which we’ll talk about more in a later blog. All of these elements put together form a solid program that can be used to make social group a better, more efficient process!

4 Tips on Taking Data During Social Skills Group

 Taking data during social skills group can be a challenge. Generally, group sessions are more chaotic than one-on-one therapy sessions, and with more kids running around, it can be seriously hectic. Here are a few tips on how to get those data points in before the end of the day:

1. Be ready

n  Try to set out data sheets before kids start arriving, and review goals so you can address whatever questions you may have about a given goal or program. Getting your data sheets ready early prevents a little bit of the stress that comes with the start of the day, and knowing you’re already on top of data can help put you in a confident mindset that you might find yourself valuing when one of your kids has just thrown your glasses across the room for the 11^th time.

2. Narrow your goals

n  Any kid can have a ton of programs in their therapy binder, so pick the goals that are most appropriate for group and reinforce social skill building. You probably aren’t going to be able to fit math drills into the schedule in between art time and team relay race, but you can definitely practice intraverbal skills or manding. Narrow your goals to what fits best for social group, and make sure they’re appropriate for an environment where there’s going to be a lot of peer interaction. If one of the goals involves a kid being separated from the group for extended periods of time, it’s probably not the best goal to be working on during social group. Your social group goals should be ones that could naturally be accomplished during the normal course of group play. For more information on individualizing goals for social group, check out our post here.

3. Make sure you know your goals!

n  Make sure you know goals for each of the kids, and what counts as a correct versus a prompt in the data box. It is always a good idea to precisely define correct and incorrect responses so there is no confusion. Find ways to remember all the various goals that your kids have, whether you’re working with specifically one kid out of the group or several. I sometimes write abbreviated versions of my kid’s goals for the day on my hand in washable marker so that I can glance at it throughout the day and wash it off before I leave. Post-it-notes, symbols, or just plain memorization work just as well. While the goals are already written down, it’s a good idea for you to have some way to remember them easily.

4. Find time to take data!

n  Finding time to actually record data can feel impossible in the middle of activities. Correct trials or prompt marks are probably best recorded as they occur at the risk of forgetting exactly what happened, but written summaries of behavior, demeanor, and activities can be written during any semi-down time you have. Good times to get some of that writing in are during lunch or snack time, as most kids will probably be preoccupied with eating. Timed reinforcement periods, if you have any, when your kid will be busy playing with whatever preferred object serves as their reinforcement during social group are also a great time to hunker down with a pen and one ear out for commotion and get some of your writing done. Take some time to figure out the natural flow of the day-when do you need to be most actively involved? When are there a few minutes to jot down some notes? It’s going to be rushed no matter what, but the rush of social group is what makes it fun!

Why Individualizing Goals During Social Skills Group is Important

Imagine walking into a class on English Literature and finding that the first several classes were going to go over basic words like “cat” and “car,” and your first exam was on short novels like ones you read as a kid. For some people who are just starting to learn and read English, those classes would be valuable and necessary to learning more complex words and building reading comprehension. To a native English speaker, it seems like a waste of time and you’d be bored and frustrated having to spend your time learning about the silent “e” all over again. In this case, your goals and the goals of everyone else in the class, regardless of skill, have been mashed together and you need to catch the less-skilled classmates up before you can learn anything new.   

Lucy may excel at gross motor function, but maybe one of her goals should be listening to directions.

This is why individualized goals at social skills groups are important. Some of the kids might really need to work on basic intraverbal interactions (“What’s your name?” “Barry, what’s yours?” “Richard.”), but some of your kids may already have mastered those intraverbals and don’t need to practice asking peers what their name is or what their favorite color is. Get to know each kid in the group and understand what each one needs to work on, and what’s appropriate for them to work on. Knowing what each kid needs to work on means it’s easier to pair them up with each other for practice; if Barry and Richard both have goals for initiation, they can both be presented with natural opportunities to initiate with each other. Or, if Barry is great at reading comprehension games but needs to work on initiation, maybe he could get paired up with Lisa, who's great with initiation but needs help working on reading comprehension. Knowing individual goals makes it easier to help kids help each other in age appropriate ways. If a kid has an Individualized Education Plan for social and behavioral goals at school, they should have something similar at group.

Barry could use a friend who's a good with sportsmanship to help him develop that skill.

Just a few of the folders we use to organize individualized goals and data sheets for our social groups.

            There’s a saying in special education: “If you’ve met a kid with autism, you’ve met one kid with autism.” No two kids are going to be the same, have the same goals, like the same things, and it’s unfair to treat them like they all popped out of the same mold. It’s important to remember to treat kids with autism with the same respect and nurturing as you would treat any typical kid. Individualized goals keep those kids from fading into the hectic background of social skills group and keep them improving and growing into the awesome adults they’re going to become. Individualized goals reduce frustration during groups and keep minds active and learning, which is the most important part of any group. It is a disservice to give the kids anything less than individualized goals and the attention and guidance they need to reach those goals. Think about the earlier example of the English Lit class; you wouldn’t want to have to sit through Cat in the Hat again when you know you could be doing more advanced work. You also wouldn’t want to launch headfirst into Dickens before you can work out the rhyme schemes in Hop on Pop. Remember to have the same consideration for the kids in your social group and put yourself in their awesome light-up shoes.