Michelle Garcia Winner, author of Thinking About You Thinking About Me and Think Social (see also www.socialthinking.com), is widely regarded as one of the frontrunners of innovative programming for young people who experience difficulty in conceptualizing and responding to the thoughts and feelings of other people. Through her humorous, engaging methods for teaching children through direct experience that others have thoughts about them, Michelle supports the development of a “theory of mind.” Without a theory of mind, which allows us to guess with some degree of accuracy what others are thinking and feeling, many people with neurological differences are unmotivated to please others and have difficulty coordinating their ideas and actions with others. Michelle’s fun and straightforward curriculum has been adopted by more and more practitioners over time to support development of theory of mind, and has been in use with modifications at the Apprentice Program of The Monarch School since 2003.

This summer, Ms. Winner and her colleagues will host the first annual First Annual Social Thinking Provider’s Annual Conference. This event, to be held on June 21-22 in San Jose, CA, will feature invited guest speakers from all over North America. Representing The Monarch School and Diagnostic Clinic will be Dr. Bryant Shaw. Dr. Shaw will speak on ways he and the Apprentice Program team have tweaked the structure of Ms. Winner’s group outlines and guidelines to allow inclusion of students with more challenging behaviors, language development issues, and attention deficits. This opportunity could not be timelier, as it comes at a time when Dr. Shaw and other members of The Monarch School faculty are looking at ways to extend Diagnostic Clinic services to include offering small group experiences with a Social Thinking orientation to the community at large. This continuing expansion of our Clinic would be a solidly helpful way to extend to more clients the benefits of what we have learned through the therapeutic milieu of our Day School.