An engaging activity that increases students’ awareness of their listeners’ needs and improves their ability to limit their content to fit those needs
Conversation Narratives: Set The Scene
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Conversation Narratives
Set The Scene
Narratives: Set the Scene is a great tool for teaching individuals with attention deficit disorders, with any impairment of executive skills functioning, or on the autism spectrum how to tell a story in an organized, comprehensive, and communicative partner-friendly manner. So many of my students with A.S.D. or attention deficit disorders have trouble answering simple requests for information, such as “tell me about your summer” or “tell me about your internship experience.” Often, they will start a story without providing any orienting information, such as where they were, who was with them, or when the event took place. Individuals who struggle with theory of mind have a hard time putting themselves in others’ shoes. So when they tell about something that happened to them, they know what happened, and they struggle to understand and keep in mind just what their listener doesn’t already know, and hence needs to know. I created Narratives: Set the Scene to target this skill, and have found that it provides a simple and tangible way for students to keep in mind what information they need to provide to listeners at the start of a verbal narrative and to practice providing that information.
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