Practitioner’s Corner: Navigating the Social World

By James Dillon Principal, September/October 2012 The difficulty and complexity of navigating the social world often exceeds any academic challenge a student faces. In most cases, once an academic skill or concept is learned, it remains stable in the student’s knowledge and repertoire of responses (2+2=4 doesn’t ever change). In contrast, how does a student respond to a positive and smiling face from a peer one day and a putdown from the same person the next day, without any apparent reason for the change?