Using social stories as an intentional teaching strategy

Abstract

Social stories are a useful teaching strategy to support all children’s learning. Social stories support children to better understand specific concepts, skills, or situations and are intended to help children apply that knowledge in their everyday interactions. Most empirical research has focused on the use of social stories as an intervention for disabled or neurodiverse children with mixed results. When used well, social stories can support the learning of children with and without disabilities. Social stories do not appear to be widely used in Aotearoa New Zealand early learning services, particularly for children without disabilities. This article is designed to share the first author’s personal journey with social stories and provide early learning kaiako¹ with more information to use social stories as a teaching strategy to promote learning.