Inside Out

by Michelle Garcia Winner

Children and young people with diagnoses such as high functioning autism, Asperger's syndrome, PDD-NOS or nonverbal learning disabilities often have difficulty with "social communicating effectively and solving personal problems. For such students, these are skills that cannot just be absorbed from experience but need to be taught. In her accessible book Michelle Garcia Winner offers teaching techniques to help students identify and overcome their weaknesses, leading to the acquisition of skills such as initiating conversations or activities; listening and attending; understanding abstract language; taking others' perspectives; seeing the big picture and using humor. Winner demonstrates how to break down these skills into manageable concepts and suggests methods of teaching them so that the student can truly understand not just what to do but also why. Clearly written and easily readable, the book contains many photo copyable worksheets for teachers' use, and will be indispensable to educators and therapists working with young people with social-cognitive deficits.

Genres: Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Education, Psychology

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP, is the founder of Social Thinking 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 competency challenges. Across her 30+ year career she has created numerous evidence-based strategies, treatment frameworks, and curricula to help interventionists foster social competencies in those they support. Michelle's work also teaches how these competencies impact a person's broader life, including their ability to maintain relationships and their success in school and career. She continually retools her methods based on the latest research and inspiration from the clients she sees in her San Francisco Bay Area clinic.

Reviews

[Jonathan Peto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is subtitled “What Makes a Person with Social Cognitive Deficits Tick?” Social cognitive deficits includes people with social cognitive disabilities, such as Asperger Syndrome and High-Functioning Autism.

I was fortunate to attend a workshop in Tokyo last September led by Michelle Garcia Winner. This book is an excellent accompaniment to my notes. I’m not a special education teacher, therapist, or counselor. That may be the reason I found Michelle’s anecdotes extraordinarily eye-opening, but I suspect there are people in the field who could use her insights. In addition to children, her clients include adults who range in age from college students to senior citizens. Her experience is vast. Even better, Michelle is observant, resourceful, creative and funny. Her anecdotes really put you into the heads of people with social cognitive deficits.

Without the workshop though, this book probably loses some power. It is an outline that describes her framework. That framework is represented by an acronym, ILAUGH (Initiating, Listening actively, Abstracting & inferencing, Understanding perspective, Gestalt: the big picture, Humor & human relatedness). The text does not illuminate the framework as well as Michelle did in person. She sold it. You could see how it evolved from her practice. You could see how you could adopt and build on it. Just reading it here though may not make that obvious.

Her stories are hilarious. Go to one of her workshops. She is so empathetic and knows how to tell a story. They are astounding.

Some of her adult clients are financially successful. They’re just not happy, or they’ve discovered that their social cognitive disabilities interfere with new goals, such as being a parent or finding a spouse. Children with social cognitive disabilities may have strong verbal skills and may resist learning about social smarts because they feel they are so smart it doesn’t matter. Sometimes their parents slip into this kind of thinking too. Social smarts do matter. Ultimately, for a happy satisfying life, a lot. Winner's work is invaluable.