Accepting Feedback: Social Skills Activities

Me: “Oh, let’s look back over our work. I think we need to try to spell ‘clover’ again. Let’s try it together.”Kid:”UUUHHHHGGG. I already sounded it out and I spelled it right. C-L-O-V-R. See.. Clover, that’s it.”

This little drama plays out often in my speech office. Accepting feedback can be really difficult and it is a pervasive issue throughout the student’s day. I have tried a few different conversations with kids about the reason they are at school – to learn! If they got everything right the first time, why would they even bother needing school? Those weren’t really clicking so I ordered a new book and I’m having a lot more success!

The last few weeks we’ve had a ton of success using another one of Julia Cook’s books. My favorite part is the step by step process to talk about accepting feedback. We know our students with ASD, ADHD, or cognitive deficits learn best when given structure, I just don’t know why I never thought of adding structure to learning this skill!  When a student automatically argues with me I can just point to our poster and we talk through it (especially the don’t argue part :))

The book is called Thanks for the Feedback, I Think .  Amazon affiliate links are provided here for you. In the book, the main character, RJ, struggles to know what to say when people compliment him or offer constructive criticism. RJ struggles to maintain friendships because of this difficulty accepting feedback appropriately. I really love the Thanks for the Feedback… I Think! Activity Guide  because it has all the extension work and planning done for me! It also includes things for multiple ages. I printed the steps  to accepting feedback from the activity guide to make the poster seen at the top of the post. My student also made notes on a similar sheet to keep in their speech folders or desk.

One of the extension activities I really liked was watching how others receive others feedback. The book recommends using reality tv! So we watched some American Idol auditions from this season.

I found one where the girl got positive feedback and one were a man got mostly negative feedback.

There are pages to print off and describe the types of feedback and what happens. It was a great activity because the feedback is so obvious. Next week we’re going to complete another activity  by using feedback to decide if we should purchase something. We’ll use amazon reviews to finish this!

How do you help your students learn to accept negative and positive feedback?

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