Scroll down to listen to the newest podcast interview with Skillstreaming author Ellen McGinnis!
The purpose of Skillstreaming the Adolescent: Lesson Plans and Activities is to facilitate and support the use of this approach with adolescents in school classrooms and other direct learning settings.
Each of these lesson plans are adaptable to meet the individual needs of each child or teenager. This resource helps practitioners teach the fundamental life skills necessary for adolescents to reach their goals, both academic and personal.
This book additionally places emphasis on the integration of academic and behavioral learning in order to increase its utility in a variety of classroom settings.
Lessons include structured activities for teachers and others to sustain instruction in a set of skills and reinforce student skill use throughout the day. A wide variety of teacher-friendly common school practices such as listening, questioning, discussing, and applying critical thinking skills are included for each skill.
The lesson plans and activities in this book supplement the Skillstreaming text by providing specific learning activities, appropriate for whole classes or smaller skills groups. Activities are included for each of the 50 skills included and are grouped as follows:
Group I: Beginning Social Skills
Group II: Advanced Social Skills
Group III: Skills for Dealing With Feelings
Group IV: Skill Alternatives to Aggression
Group V: Skills for Dealing With Stress
Group VI: Planning Skills
These lesson plans and activities are not intended to replace the direct instructional procedures included in the Skillstreaming the Adolescent Guide for Teaching Prosocial Skills, but instead are to be used after the actual direct teaching of each skill.
NOTE: It is essential for successful implementation of this curriculum to first have the adolescent program book before attempting to utilize other Skillstreaming products.
From the book’s Preface, Dr. McGinnis writes: “The Skillstreaming the Adolescent program text (McGinnis, 2012) provides the content that educators need to carry out direct Skillstreaming instruction. Toward the end of developing more socially competent young people, the lesson plans and activities in this book supplement the Skillstreaming text by providing specific learning activities, appropriate for whole classes or smaller skills groups. These plans create opportunities for prosocial skill instruction to be more intense and extend over a longer period of time because skill learning is integrated in classrooms with academic learning. Doing so further creates opportunities for youth to practice and generalize these important, life-long skills.”
How the Program Book and Lesson Plans Work Together
The Lesson Plans and Activities manual is a supplemental tool that expands on the program by providing ready-to-use, classroom-friendly lesson plans and structured activities designed to reinforce and deepen the skills taught in the program book.
The Skillstreaming the Adolescent program book is the essential foundation of the curriculum, offering a complete guide for teaching 50 prosocial skills through a structured approach of modeling, role-playing, performance feedback, and generalization.
While the program book delivers the core instruction, the lesson plan book supports ongoing skill development and integration into academic and behavioral learning, helping students generalize and apply prosocial skills in real-world classroom and social situations.
Listen to the latest podcast interview with Skillstreaming author Ellen McGinnis as she discusses the scope and usage of Adolescent Lesson Plans and Activities.
Shown below is episode two of Prosocially Yours, a podcast produced by Research Press. In this episode, host Elizabeth Hess interviews educator and author, Dr. Ellen McGinnis, about the social-emotional Skillstreaming program.
Praise for the Skillstreaming series
“The third edition of the Skillstreaming series is my first choice as the go-to resource for a research-based, user-friendly, and level social skills curriculum for professionals in all settings serving children and youth.”
Sheldon Braaten, PhD,
Founder and Executive Director,
Behavior Institute for Children and Adolescents
“There are a multitude of social skills programs on the market. . . . This program cuts out the gimmicks, and hammers home what is really needed: Identify the skill that is missing in the student, model it for the student, role-play it with the student, and provide opportunities for them to generalize it to real life situations.”
Nan Gordon, Communiqué
