Reading the Research: Where Best to Learn Social Skills

Welcome back to Reading the Research, where I trawl the Internet to find noteworthy research on autism and related subjects, then discuss it in brief with bits from my own life, research, and observations.

Today's article is a step forward in social skills teaching.  It is traditional, as the article points out, to assume that people with the same diagnosis will learn best together.  Or in some cases, to not care at all and simply throw everyone together, heedless of whether learning will happen or not.  Some special education classrooms are like that.  

It may be better for the schools, because it's convenient, but it's not better for the students.  When you raise a child, you don't give them too easy of tasks, or they'll get bored.  Nor do you overwhelm them with too hard of tasks, because they'll get frustrated and give up.  You give them tasks appropriate to their ability.  Social skills, truly, are no different.  

Instead of simply chucking all the autistic students together, or all the special ed students, the social skill levels of each student should be assessed, and each student put into an group with roughly the same level of skill.  Peers will learn together, and even help teach each other.  It helps to see other people make similar mistakes to yours, as well as learn from your own mistakes.  Some inclusion-based classrooms do a limited version of this mutual learning by assigning a neurotypical student to the autistic student, but it's not as good as having a whole group to learn from each other.  

As I was reading about this, it occurred to me that the autism social group I sometimes attend already sort of does this.  There are three subgroups in this group: the teenagers, the young adults, and the older adults.  While they're technically age-separated, some people in the teens group will stay there longer rather than advancing to the young adult group because it's a better fit for them, socially.  Their social skills best match that age range, so they're most comfortable there.  

I never attended the teens group, but I did attend the young adults group for a time.  I met some pretty cool people, and had some pretty good times.  But as I got older, I started being more comfortable with the older adult group, and eventually opted to only visit the young adult group every once in a while.  Somewhat amusingly, I'm the youngest in the group by a decent margin, even though I'll be 30 this year.

Regardless, it'd probably do the whole world a good turn if we stopped assuming special needs are all the same, or even that autistic needs are all the same, and started getting more serious about having really diverse groups of people learning from each other.  The better we understand each other, the fewer misunderstandings ensue.  This is a two-way street, too.  While autistic people are expected to learn social skills so as not to upset neurotypical people, for a society to work, neurotypical people need to also accommodate us as well.