Course Short Description
The ability to make and keep a friend is something most of us take for granted. However, when it’s hard to make a friend or a friendship dissolves into dislikes, it’s important to have metacognitively based concepts and strategies to help us engage to meet our own personal goals.
In Part 2 of this course, Michelle will unpack different aspects of peer-based relationships, from friendship to dislike. Participants will receive practical strategies and perspective-taking activities you can use with your kids/students/clients to develop increasingly complex relational social competencies as they age.
This course explores:
- General social expectations tied to friendship across different developmental ages
- Visual frameworks, teaching scaffolds, and practical strategies to help students understand and engage in relationship development
- The role of metacognition in making and keeping friends
- Tips for managing social anxiety and developing relationships
Long Course Description
For many children, making and keeping a friend is as easy as learning to hop, skip, and jump. However, as we age, friendships become more layered and complicated. For some students, peer-based friendships, even as younger children, are something that’s never made sense to them. Based on Michelle’s work with older students and mature adults, she has learned how important relationship development and maintenance is to one’s mental health and sense of belonging in any community, around the world.
In Part 2 of this course (afternoon session), we’ll seek to make implicit information about friendship explicit, using visual frameworks, teaching scaffolds, and exploring practical strategies to help our students engage in relationship development in a manner that meets their own goals.
Michelle will begin by teaching you concepts and strategies to help social emotional learners understand how to make a friend. Michelle will define and explore the value of “we-thinking” vs “me-thinking”, related hidden social expectations, as well as describe a visual and language-based tool to help students define what friendliness looks like to them. To this end, we’ll also explore nuanced dynamics in different types of friendships through the use of the Friendship Pyramid and demonstrate how this dovetails with the “Pyramid of Dislike”.
Frankly, the concept of “friend” is complicated, and friendships are living organisms that take work to maintain. Once you have a friend, there is no guarantee you’ll keep that friend. Friends come and go within our lives, and even if we are friends on Instagram, we may not be friends in our face-to-face lives.
To further muddy the waters, one person can at times be a friend and at other times be someone we want to avoid or even make fun of.
Friendships can provide enjoyment and satisfaction, but they can also make us feel angry, socially anxious, and/or sad. Michelle will provide tips on how to help individuals develop awareness of possible social anxiety and learn strategies to navigate through it (click the link for pre-reading in preparation for the training on 10 December).
In this course Michelle will share information regarding:
- General social expectations tied to friendship across different developmental ages
- How friendships with teachers and other adults are different from friendships with peers
- The role of metacognition in making and keeping friends
- An overview of different types of “friends”: The Friendship Pyramid
- Relationships are not always friendly: The Pyramid of Dislike
- Feelings are at the core of friendship: Introducing the Friendliness Detector
- Am I really your friend?
- How do I figure out who I might want to be friends with?
- Step-by-step teaching how to appear approachable: The 4 Steps of Face-to-Face Communication (click the link for pre-reading in preparation for the training on 10 December).
- Social Feedback Loop: Detecting when’s a good time vs. a not-so-good time to approach others in a friendly manner
- Helping students identify their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to making friends
- Our inner voices (e.g., inner critic and inner coach) have something to say to us: When is it a good idea to listen?
- Tips for managing through one’s social anxiety (click the link for pre-reading in preparation for the training on 10 December).
Who Should Attend
This training is suited to a wide variety of professionals; including speech-language pathologists, special and general education teachers, teaching assistants, social workers, counselors, clinical and school psychologists, occupational therapists, behaviour specialists, medical practitioners and school administrators to name a few. It’s also suitable for family members and caregivers.
Objectives
At the end of the training participants will be able to:
- Describe why “we-thinking” is an essential ingredient when making and sustaining peer-based friends
- Describe the six levels on the Friendship Pyramid
- Describe the purpose of using the Pyramid of Dislike when teaching about friendship
- Explain how a student’s inner voice can promote or discourage attempts at making friends
Agenda
1 hour and 30 minutes
- General social expectations tied to friendship across different developmental ages
- How friendships with teachers and other adults are different from friendships with peers
- The role of metacognition in making and keeping friends
- An overview of different types of “friends”: The Friendship Pyramid
- Relationships are not always friendly: The Pyramid of Dislike
- Feelings are at the core of friendship: introducing The Friendliness Detector
- How do I figure out who I might want to be friends with?
Break
1 hour and 30 minutes
- Step-by-step teaching how to appear approachable: The 4 Steps of Face-to-Face Communication
- Social Feedback Loop: Detecting when’s a good time vs. a not-so-good time to approach others in a friendly manner
- Helping the students identify their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to making friends
- Our inner voices (e.g., inner critic and inner coach) have something to say to us: When is it a good idea to listen?
- Tips for managing through one’s social anxiety
