Skill-Streaming the Adolescent: A Structured Learning Approach to Teaching Prosocial Skills

I am a School Psychologist and I use this program with Middle School students. The lessons are age-appropriate and easy to implement. The teacher checklist in the back is also very helpful in planning which lessons to use. I also use, and love, the early childhood and elementary skillstreaming programs.

This book is primarily directed at teachers and professionals trying to manage and socially 'skill' aggressive and delinquent adolescents. The book consists of short exercises sandwiched between buffers of explanatory material. The exercises are fairly much standard prosocial activities involving discussions and role-plays. As an overview, or outline, of what to do, these are good. However, the instructional sequences are short, and occassionally vague. My overall reaction to the book is that it needs a companion manual to realise its usefulness. There is also a deal of repetition of points that may or may not be useful depending on the audience. The amount of explanatory text is high for a book that is not theoretically laden down, and this weakened its appeal to me. In my own opinion, it is hard to beat (pardon the pun) for detail Teaching Social Skills from the Boystown Press for this youth segment.

I was introduced to this book by the co-ordinator of out patient services as a book that she thought highly of in working with adolescents. A chronically mentally ill client from my program was seeing her outpatient for counseling and she thought the book may work well in assisting the client with social skills. On an individual basis it worked very well with the client. We decided to start a group within our program to see how it would work with other chronically mentally ill clients and it has worked extremely well.

A super book for working with socially challenged youth. High risk kids often get into trouble because they don't possess appropriate social skills, and they are not motivated to practice positive skills. They simply don't see the value. All to often their innappropriate skills have been rewarded in life. This book prepares teachers and adolescent group leaders to develop missing social skills in a step by step well thought out and research proven manner. The book also prepares the leader with great stratagies for recognizing and dealing with trainee/client resistance. Of course in your group you will not experience this. If you really want results and not just feel good discussions with kids this material is state of the art. Highly recommended!

I came across this book while working with a group of middle school students who were lacking social skills. This book provides step by step social skills information directed at the specific deficiencies. I am looking forward to continuing to work with the information I have gathered from reading this book.