Promoting Generalization of Social Skills to Inclusive Play Settings for Children With Autism and Their Peers

The Council for Exceptional Children's Division for Early Childhood's (DEC; 2014) recommended practices indicate that teachers should implement strategies to prepare children to be successful in a variety of inclusive settings (DEC, 2014, INS2). Children on the autism spectrum often experience difficulty with pragmatic language and play skills, which can affect developing friendships and limit success in inclusive settings. They also may not develop joint attention (i.e., shifting gaze between another person and an object) or social imitation skills. These features impede children's ability to observe their peers and do as they do during play (e.g., seeing another child roll the car down the ramp and taking another car and rolling it to join into the activity). This means that young children may need specialized instruction in socialcommunication skills to benefit fully from early inclusive learning environments (Hansen et al., 2014, 2017). Ms. Poston is a social communication support teacher at Spring Creek Elementary School. She works alongside many general education teachers, paraprofessionals, and related service professionals to support children's social-emotional learning needs. Ms. Poston works with children in kindergarten through second grade, designing instructional supports focused on social skills and behavior. This school year, she has two kindergarteners who are on the autism spectrum and benefit from moderate supports, Carmella and Olive. Both children are in Ms. Williams' kindergarten classroom and are thriving academically with individualized supports in place, including priming of behavioral expectations, visual supports for self-management, and frequent praise. They are on task, following directions, and making great progress on their goals! After Thanksgiving break, Ms. Poston hears secondhand that Carmella and Olive were the only children not invited to a recent birthday party of one of their classmates. She is shocked. How could this happen? After hearing this, Ms. Poston reflects on the social skills instruction and supports that she is providing. Currently, Ms. Poston meets with the children two times per week for a small social skills group. Because of the low teacher-to-student ratio, she is able to provide intensive instruction with various lessons targeting pivotal early childhood social skills, including turn-taking, sharing toys and game pieces, and initiating conversation with peers, among others. In this intensive instructional setting, Ms. Poston utilizes explicit instruction techniques that include viewing video and live models, followed by having the children practice the skills while receiving high rates of feedback. Ms. Poston has faded her prompts and scaffolds, and Carmella and Olive are able to demonstrate the newly learned social skills accurately and independently in the kindergarten pod. When Ms. Poston pops into Mrs. Williams's class unexpectedly to observe during unstructured social centers, however, Carmella and Olive are usually playing in a solitary or parallel fashion. Her intensive instruction is not producing durable behavior change that transfers to the inclusive play setting. She would like to find a way to support the transfer of these newly acquired social skills to their daily social centers-something that would be easy for Ms. Williams to use. She decides to investigate strategies that promote generalization of social skills.