S.O.S. - Social Skills in Our Schools: A Social Skills Program for Verbal Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders and Their Typical Peers »

MICHELLE DUNN, Ph.D., is a pediatric neuropsychologist, who has worked with children on the autism spectrum for the past 25 years. She began as a special education teacher and went on to a career in research on brain-behavior relationships in children with developmental disabilities and a clinical practice in neuropsychology. She is first and foremost a teacher. Her great joy is in translating what she has learned from research into practice. Dunn has written numerous journal articles and book chapters about children on the autism spectrum and has provided staff training to many school districts. She calls New York her home, where she lives with her husband and two daughters, who often assist her in social skills intervention sessions.

S.O.S. Social Skills in Our Schools: A Social Skills Program for Verbal Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders and Their Typical Peers by Michelle Dunn is an innovative approach to social skills learning. Despite the often serious deficits children with pervasive developmental disorders exhibit, most schools do not provide social skills intervention through trained therapists to these students. However, simply exposing children with PDD to typically developing children does little to develop their social skills. They do not learn appropriate social interaction by "osmosis." The widely tested S.O.S. program addresses this issue head-on. Operating on a schoolwide basis, the S.O.S. program consists of four major components that come together to increase the social skills of children with PDD as well as create tolerance and a sense of fairness among typical children: Pull-out social skills lessons for children with PDD, social skills lessons in the classroom for all children, peer mentoring and parent information.