2.2. Social Skills Reflection
Instructor Preparation and Summary
People who have challenges with navigating the social world and often make mistakes in social situations can benefit from performing a social autopsy on the situation. This process involves guidance from an instructor to help a student look back at the social interaction and figure out what went wrong. Using the social autopsy worksheet provided, instructors can help students learn from their social mistakes, correct them and perform differently in future social situations. This approach is an explicit reflection strategy that works well for concrete learners who may struggle with abstract thinking.
The principles of Universal Design for Learning are incorporated into the variety of activities in this unit.
This unit will help some students to:
- List the parts of a social autopsy for social skills improvement.
- Demonstrate the steps of using a social autopsy to improve social skills in a practice scenario.
- Apply a social autopsy to a real-life social error that has occurred.
Classroom Activities
Click through the following interactive video carousel to view each video. There are 2 in total.
Applied Learning Assessments
Text Description
- Use the social autopsy sheet to guide a student through a situation where they made a social mistake. Assist them in making suggestions on how they could correct the mistake in the future.
- Use the social autopsy sheet to guide a student through a situation where they made a social mistake. Encourage them to come up with their own suggestion on how they could correct the mistake in the future. If they need more assistance, give them 3 options of how they might correct the mistake in the future, and they can pick one.
- Both the instructor and the student will answer the questions on a separate social autopsy worksheet about a social mistake made by the student. After they are both done with their autopsy, each person explains their autopsy answers and compares the two autopsy solutions. After the discussion, both parties agree on a new strategy or behaviour to correct the mistake in future social situations.
Instructor Tools
Resources
Foundations of Academic Success: Words of Wisdom by Thomas Priester is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Interpersonal Skills for Life and Work for College Students on the Autism Spectrum by Dr. Michael W. Duggan, LCPC, CRC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
Ohio Center for Autism and Low Incidence. (n.d.). Social autopsy. OCALI. Retrieved February 4, 2022, from https://www.ocali.org/project/resource_gallery_of_interventions/page/social_autopsy
