Dr. Lisa Dieker, a professor at the University of Kansas in the Department of Special Education, and Dr. Rebecca Hines, a professor at the University of Central Florida in the College of Community Innovation and Education, have worked with schools and parents across the country. Dr. Dieker directs a center in the Achievement and Assessment Institute called Flexible Learning through Innovations in Technology in Education (FLITE) and Dr. Hines directs several doctoral grants and the teacher preparation program. In this podcast, they take a fun and informal look at "practical" solutions from teachers, parents, and people with disabilities. The approach in this podcast is to provide fast, flexible thinking about "real" life problems. This podcast is not about the "legal" approach but their best advice from personal and professional experience.
Drs. Rebecca Hines and Lisa Dieker, UCF faculty, share their thoughts on social cues and manners This episode provides practical ways to address teaching students with disabilities manners while ensuring high expectations. We hope you enjoy our thoughts on this topic. Please follow us @accesspractical
Lisa Dieker:
Welcome to practical access. I'm Lisa Dieker. And I'm Rebecca Hines. And today, Lisa, I think our topic is manners in this episode and in social skills, obviously. But I do like the idea of thinking just about manners in general. So why don't you kick it off with some thoughts and then you'd love to hear I can't wait to tell a story because I know how much you love that. Oh, God, I skills that we do for academics or like job coaching, I think we need to do for social skills. So that's kind of my first thought. It's an interesting topic.
Rebecca Hines:
Well, I think I agree, of course, there's nothing controversial in what you said, I, I do think that, that being able to operationalize a few of those basics, you know, I, very early in my career taught students with significant emotional behavioral issues. And I had one young man who actually was a young man with Tourette's and had very high anxiety and was not very aware of Fortunately, Mark was about my height. And so for the next week, he would walk straight up to me with his arm extended, to talk to me and touch me in the most inappropriate place, and then had to teach him that you actually stopped before you get to the person back, but it was not. Exactly so it did it we did at least get to where he better understood exactly where to stand. And I would say in this day and age, just thinking about all of it. As the stores are putting the six feet apart, you know, tape on the floor. If you're trying to teach kids especially kids, maybe with autism or kids who are lower functioning, you can't really fully understand it, I would, I would
Lisa Dieker:
Yeah, I think the other one I go back to is turn take cake. I think many times, people with disabilities either don't want to take their turn, which is equally frustrating. I'd like to be your friend, but you just look at me go, Ah, no, yeah. Or you never let me have a chance to take a turn. And so that turn taking one is, I think important. And we must about the same student because I
Rebecca Hines:
That's a great, that's a great point, and building it out a little more broadly to that idea of manners in general. Also, early in my career after I left the world of self contained SCD I did go into an inclusive setting, but I was asked to, I was asked to lead a a remedial reading class that was not just kids with disabilities, it was just middle school kids at our school. And I to show interest in them. We worked on not only conversation we worked on how do you set the table and you know, what is what is a nicely set table look like? I researched it. I didn't know either. But when the day came to actually have our luncheon. You know, they didn't learn it in a social skills class, they learned it because we were going to put on this luncheon, and ended up going so well, to come over and help my kids learn to organize things. However, I can't teach them manners, and then they go to school and they have manners but if other kids never learned that we should have presumed that they know it coming in no matter if they're in elementary or middle or high school or beyond. Yeah, and you were going to teach us how to laugh when things got bad with us. So you know,
Lisa Dieker:
Watch the best athlete if they're, you know, a swimmer golfer, we asked them to, you know, look at who you know the the LSAT prep block if we want them to go to college, but what we forget is have them look at somebody that's got really good social skills. You know, who is it that in the classroom, you know, backfired for me in kindergarten because Josh was really struggling, got But But I like the fact that early on in kindergarten, Josh said, Oh, I know what it looks like. And if your kid can't even tell you who in the class they should look like, then maybe you need to have a further conversation with the teacher. Can they see somebody? Can you model that? Can you tell them? And I think too many times we blame kids with disabilities when they don't know you didn't get to
Rebecca Hines:
Absolutely. And you mentioned kindergarten, if my one message for preschool and kindergarten teachers would be to really think about customizing those goals for kids. And I don't know if I've told this story on our podcast in the in the past, but when my daughter entered kindergarten, after two weeks, she came home and said, Mom, can I can I give Donny some of my points in class. you know, if they do it, they get a sunshine. And that equals X number of points. And if if if they do it sometimes to get the cloud and get some points, and if otherwise, you get a Thunder Strike, and you get no points. And so apparently Donnie never earned points and was constantly the Thunder Cloud. And I said, Can you can you show me what exactly how you define this. And when she showed me it was, you know, I went back to that Oh, talks nice to others stays and says, you know, the problem is that you are rewarding my daughter for things that I taught her. My daughter talked nicely to other people, because she learned that from me and I talked nicely to other people. She didn't learn it from you, kindergarten just started. So you are giving her points that she doesn't need for something she already knows, again, give her points if she organizes her desk, because her mother never taught her that. But why not give Donnie you know, some training in whatever it is. Because he obviously came to you not understanding fully what it means to talk nicely to others. And because this was a great responsive teacher, she totally
Lisa Dieker:
Then he said, I won't be able to do better to see anyway. I said, Well, what's your strategy and he lit up because he knew the minute he met the guys like, all I have to do is stay awake, and he'll give me a C, because he's nice, I'm gonna lecture and I'm gonna fall asleep. So he said his Apple Watch, again, get a privilege, I get that. And every five minutes, it would make sure he was
Rebecca Hines:
Absolutely. And be be specific and explicit in what you want a child to be able to do. Don't Don't, don't wait for them to guess. If you want to say something a certain way, be sure you've told them to say it a certain way. And I think if we can start being specific and start chunking some of these skills instead of expecting everyone to have them all at once. If we can chunk
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