Social Story Assignment

It's time to explore some educational tools in-depth! We will do this through the creation of a "social story," a specific type of learning strategy developed by Carol Gray to support "the safe meaningful exchange of information between parents, professionals, and people with autism of all ages" (Gray, 2017).

The successful student will be able to:

• Identify and use a variety of online instructional resources and tools in instruction.
• Discuss and use the social story model in creating stories that are audience appropriate and teach distinct concepts that reinforce behavior and social interaction skills.
• Create attractive, useful, and accessible online resources using current website building guidelines and tools.
• Use assistive technology tools to create lessons using the Social Story model for students with special needs.

How to Complete - Your Task

Carol Gray developed social stories to help explain important concepts to students with autism in a way that helps them put things into perspective. Since their minds work a little differently than others, it is important to match stories with pictures, and have a very patient and unassuming way of explaining.

Our goal is to create stories that use positive, supportive language, attempt to meet all of Gray's criteria, and are implemented on the Web using one a few tools of your choice to convey accessible and fun social stories.

Your social story should consist of the following basic components:

1. At least one learning objective, written in the ABCD method (see below).
2. Follows the 10 Social Story criteria to describe a behavior or concept for a specific audience (which might be just one person, or a group of students).
3. Is published online with CAST UDL BookBuilder (http://bookbuilder.cast.org) or TarHeel Reader (https://tarheelreader.org).

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Let's take a moment to discuss the important concepts related to each of the components you'll need for this project.

Writing a Good Objective: The ABCD Method

Developed by Robert Mager, the ABCD system is a nice, formulaic approach to writing good objectives, which are key to good instructional design, or the systematic design of quality instruction (see Don Clark's website for more information). By following the ABCD formula, you will be able to create strong, measurable, and complete objectives in no time.

• Audience: Who are the learners? In other words, this is where "The student will be able to..." typically comes in.
• Behavior: What do you want your learners to do? This means that you will be using action verbs, so that you can actually see the person performing the behavior. You cannot see someone learning, understanding, appreciating, or knowing, so those verbs should be avoided at all costs. Instead, use concrete action verbs, preferrably based on a level within a cognitive or performance taxonomy, as we'll explore in a moment.
• Condition: Under what conditions must the behavior be performed? Often, this is summarized in phrases like, "After completing the unit on [blank], the student will be able to..."
• Degree: To what degree should learners perform the behavior? This is where assessment comes in, and how you will summarize how you will know learners met your conditions. You might say something like, "with an 80% success rate on a unit test" or "after assessment on a scoring rubric," and that could suffice.
  

So, a few examples of well-written ABCD objectives might be as follows. Note that because of grammatical rules and for style, often objectives are really written more as CABD, rather than ABCD:

• After completing a lesson on World War II France, ninth grade students will be able to describe the conditions in French cities during the time of German occupation and name at least three facts relating to this period using an online discussion forum.
  • SAMR level (remember this from the last discussion?): Augmentation - the discussion forum takes the place of traditional talk, but has the advantage of letting students talk across distances in writing rather than speech
• Upon completing a course in art history, college students will be able to evaluate paintings from the Renaissance era and collaborate together on an interactive website explaining and debating critical views on selected art pieces from both an artistic and a historic perspective.
  • SAMR level: Redefinition - the interactive website allows students to collaborate, share, and debate across distances, as well as explore the works of art themselves in detail, something that would be difficult to do without technology
• Let's try one more appropriate for a social story: After viewing and hearing a social story about riding the bus, Johnny will be able to get on the bus on time, do his best to keep his hands and feet to himself while riding, and get off the bus without pushing the other children.
  • Note the difference and the use of language - we refer specifically to one student in our Audience - Johnny - and his specific Behavior of how we'd like him to ride the bus is broken down to become our Degrees in our ABCD formula.
  • Your objective is likely to look something like this for your story. Remember, you only need one, but you can have more than one if it's appropriate.

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The Ten Criteria of a Social Story

Social Stories follow ten basic criteria (based on Gray's 2015 book, The New Social Story Book: Revised and Expanded 15th Anniversary Edition - click for more information).

1. A goal to share accurate information using content, format, and voice that is descriptive, meaningful, and physically, socially, and emotionally safe for the intended audience.
2. Two-step discovery: we want to understand the behavior the student needs help with, but we also want to applaud what the student is already doing well.
3. Has a title and three distinct parts: introduction, body, and conclusion, or simpler yet, a beginning, middle and end. Each section answers specific questions:
   - Beginning - What do people do? 
   - Middle - Why they do it?
   - End - What behaviour is expected?
4. FOUR-Mat: The Social Story format is tailored to the student's abilities, attention, learning style, and interests.
5. Voice and Vocabulary: Social Stories are patient and supportive, speak in the 1st or 3rd person (never use "you", use "they" or "I" language), and use words that are efficient, clear, and accurate even if take literally.
6. Answer the basic questions of who, what, when, where, why, and how for the audience, even if it's information you might otherwise assume or take for granted.
7. Uses both descriptive sentences (describing observable features and behavior) and "coaching" sentences (guiding behavior via descriptions of effective responses).
8. The GR-EIGHT Formula: Total number of descriptive sentences divided by the total number of coaching sentences should be greater than 2.
9. Review and revise until your story matches all the Social Story criteria.
10. Consider your plan for implementation and use with real students - how would you introduce it? How often do you expect to read it? How would you assess if it's working?

So, what does all this mean? It means that you will make up a basic story describing a behavior or concept for students with Autism that may be in your future classroom, using these criteria. It might be a story on how Billy should go safely to the playground or get on the bus, or how Sally should raise her hand when she wants to talk in class, or what Autism means and how it is different for every person.

Click here to see a short slideshow for further information on how to write a great social story

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Putting It All Together Online

Your next step is putting the whole thing together in BookBuilder or TarHeel Reader. These two tools are suggested because they are fully accessible even to students who might be using assistive technology like a screen reader to use the computer, and because they employ text-to-speech capability. Both will require the creation of a free account and allow you to publish your story as a Web link that you can just copy and paste for others to view. You can also download the story to play offline, but for our purposes, publishing online is best and easiest.

Tutorials are available to use both sites, and you will likely find them sufficiently easy to use. Note that CAST has a few extra features that you may not see with TarHeel, such as animated talking characters.

Your online book should have at least 6 pages, including a title page (which is a good place for your learning objective) and a conclusion. This assumes one sentence and one picture per page, and remember the criteria - the number of descriptive sentences divided by the number of coaching sentences should be greater than 2 (i.e., 3 descriptive, 1 coaching, plus title and conclusion might be your whole story).

• CAST BookBuilder: http://bookbuilder.cast.org
• TarHeel Reader: https://tarheelreader.org (NOTE: to register for your account here, use the secret code Literacy! - this includes the capital and the exclamation point; you can also email tarheelreader@cs.unc.edu for a code)

Examples (note that these were not created for our class, so they may not have their learning objectives listed):

• Rebecca Witowski: http://bookbuilder.cast.org/view.php?op=view&book=122503&page=1
• Kelly Mulhall and Eric Morency: http://bookbuilder.cast.org/view.php?op=view&book=116533&page=1
• Taylor Hughes: https://tarheelreader.org/2017/07/25/super-e-finds-his-cape/
• Michelle McKonly: http://bookbuilder.cast.org/view.php?op=view&book=122150&page=1
• "When I need a favor": https://tarheelreader.org/2014/09/10/when-i-need-a-favor/

For extra credit:

You can get up to 5 additional points of credit by creating your Social Story (or a second one, if you wish!) in another program: Weebly (website builder that we will use later this semester) or Prezi (presentation builder). These are perhaps more familiar tools, but they also both allow for more options and yet also have some limitations. It might be interesting to try to implement your story in a few different modes to see the difference in how it can be presented for students. Which mode do you like better?

Turning it in

Submit your link to your Social Story site in the corresponding assignment dropbox in BlackBoard - Module 3.

How you're graded

	Unacceptable	Beginning	Developing	Proficient
Use of the Online Book Builder Image and sentence on each page, at least 6 pages 4 points	Not submitted or link not accessible	Formatting of student's social story is not consistent or easily readable, and there are no images. There may be numerous spelling errors and missing pages.	Formatting of student's social story is mostly consistent. There may be images present, but they may not be appropriate or present on each page. There may be at least two spelling or grammar errors, and/or there may be missing pages.	Formatting of student's social story is consistent and easily readable, and appropriately chosen images are provided on each page. There are few or no spelling/grammar errors and no missing pages. Student may have used additional features of the book builder system to enhance the story.
Learning Objectives At least one objective must be stated (suggestion is to place it on the title page) 3 points	Not submitted or link not accessible	Objective is poorly written or much of the necessary information is missing (3 or the 4 criteria are not clear).	Objective is fairly clear and most of the necessary information is included (1 or the 4 criteria may not be clear).	Objective is concise, clear and complete, and written using the ABCD format.
Content 3 points	Not submitted or link not accessible	Does not teach about a behavior or concept in an appropriate manner for a social story.	Teaches a good social story behavior or concept, but may use vocabulary that is not appropriate for the audience.	Teaches a good social story behavior or concept, using vocabulary that is appropriate for the audience.
Structure - Must have a beginning, middle and end - Beginning - What do people do?  - Middle - Why they do it? - End - What behavior is expected? 3 points	Not submitted or link not accessible	The social story does not have a clear beginning, middle or end. It does not answer the question for each section.	The social story does have a beginning, middle and end but does not answer the questions in clear way.	The social story does have a clear beginning, middle and end. The questions were answered in a clear, succinct manner.
Tone of the Story 4 points	Not submitted or link not accessible	The social story has a negative, or authoritative tone. The writing was to sophisticated for the intended audience (or not sophisticated enough). The goal of the social story is unclear or confusing.	The social story provide some positive tones but was at times too directive. It was written with some sophisticated language (or not enough). The language in the story was sometimes vague making the goal of the story somewhat unclear.	The social story was positive in tone and used appropriate language for the target audience. The goal was clear because the language used was unambiguous and clearly defined.
Follows Sentence Criteria 3 points	Not submitted or link not accessible	Does not adequately follow the Social Story criteria with regard to asking questions or using descriptive and coaching sentences.	Attempts to follow Social Story criteria and asks some questions (who, what, when, where, why, how), as well as uses descriptive and coaching sentences, but may have too many or not enough according to the criteria.	Follow Social Story criteria and asks questions (who, what, when, where, why, how), as well as uses descriptive and coaching sentences at a ratio of 3 to 1 or higher (i.e., no more than 1 or two directive sentences).

 

Resources

There are a number of things that you can do to enhance your story and get the most from this assignment. Of course, at all times, remember to have fun and be creative! This is an exploratory assignment that lets you be as creative as you want in investigating a tool of interest while you implement a useful learning model.

To find images to include in your site, each tool contains some search capabilities, and you can also go to http://search.creativecommons.org to find royalty-free artwork.

Trouble with coming up with a story idea or making it work? Again, Carol Gray's website may have ideas, and you might also check out some of the following places for inspiration:

• Understanding and writing good objectives
• 21 Things Kids Need - a series of tech integration strategies that help kids grow academically and creatively
• CAST UDL FAQ Page
• TarHeel Reader help
• All about Social Stories from Carol Gray
• Summary of the value of Social Stories for people with Autism