First, the presentation will review aspects of social learning that can be supported with media learning. This includes: (1) improving the child’s ability to identify feelings, thoughts, and motives (plans) of characters; (2) solidifying perspective taking skills and collaborative problem solving; (3) expanding students’ feelings vocabulary; (4) developing empathy; (5) facilitating narrative language; (6) supporting pleasant engagements while viewing interesting and engaging material.
The next part of the presentation will provide a rubric that can be used to organize social cognitive work using electronic media. This part of the presentation will draw from my book Movie Time Social Learning (Think Social Publishing, 2012). Three classifications of tasks will be presented, each targeting specific social concepts, all of which are crucial to successful and fulfilling social relationships.
Spy Eye: Dynamic Social Thinker Tasks are the first classification. These consist of foundation “mindreading” skills, including identification of feelings/thoughts/plans, reading of visual referencing/gaze/nonverbal information, and considering multiple perspectives, including that of the viewer.
Detective Head: Social Relationship Maps represent more sophisticated relationship-based discussion considering transactional influences between characters, including multiple perspectives and greater social nuance. These tasks include how feelings, plans and relationships change over time. Social indirectness and politeness become more prominent issues in Detective Head tasks, and are often new ideas for many children with social cognitive deficits.
Me Too!: Empathy Mirrors focus on building the foundations of empathic awareness, developing the ability to identify a broader range of feelings states, and encouraging connections between personal and movie character experiences. Me Too! tasks allow children to share and listen to each other’s personal experiences — a new form of conversation for developing social thinkers.
After these classifications are presented, we will move to putting it together – figuring out what we want to focus on in a given session and carefully selecting appropriate electronic media. For each example, there will be a description of the social cognitive needs of a specific child or group of children, overview of how particular media was selected, review of the specific goal(s) for that scene, discussion of appropriate prompts and supports (non-verbal, visual, verbal), a video clip of a child(ren) working with the scene, and slides showing any products developed during the discussion (visual sequences, formulated narrative). There will be multiple examples using a range of ages, skill levels, and media formats. A number of YouTube video clips will be reviewed in spreadsheet form, clearly delineating which social learning concepts are contained in each example.
There will be a brief discussion of video games, encouraging audience members to consider what aspects of video gaming are applicable to social learning, and using the concepts of gamification and flow theory to enrich our work in social cognition.
The final portion of the presentation will focus on accountability. I will discuss various ways to track progress when using electronic media as a social cognitive material, ideas on how to incorporate media work into goals, and ways to present this type of work to parents, staff, and administration so that they can understand that this is not just “watching tv”, but a valuable tool in expanding social awareness and ability.
Time frame:
15 min – background and overview of social cognitive concepts available in electronic media as related to IEP goals
15 min – presentation of classification for students
30 min – presentation specific movie examples with task breakdown and video clips
45 min – review of YouTube videos to support social learning with video clips
15 min – future of video games, wrap up
Learner outcomes:
Participants will be able to explain how using electronic media can support IEP goals and student social learning.
Participants will be able to describe four social cognitive concepts that can be addressed using electronic media.
Participants will be able to give two examples of visual supports in social learning work that can be used in conjunction with electronic media.
Anna Vagin
Speech and Language Pathologist
Private Practice
Anna Vagin, Ph.D., is a licensed speech/language pathologist. She received her Ph.D. from UCBerkeley, writing her dissertation on “Mother-Child Interaction in Children with Bilateral Cleft Lip and Palate.” Her work focuses on social cognitive abilities of children from 6 months-high school. She is the author of Movie Time Social Learning.