Article
CVI and the ECC: Focus on Social Interaction Skills
Learn about Social Interaction Skills in the ECC, how CVI impacts the development of social skills, and ideas for supporting students with CVI learn social skills
The Expanded Core Curriculum (ECC) is a nine-area curriculum to help bridge the gap between a standard school curriculum and what a student who is blind or visually impaired would miss with reduced access to incidental learning—the skills sighted peers learn from observing the world around them. The ECC levels the playing field for blind and visually impaired students. Each of the ECC’s nine areas must be individualized to the unique needs of the child with CVI. One of these areas is Social Interaction Skills.
In this article, we will dive into:
- What are social interaction skills in the ECC?
- What is the impact of CVI on social interaction skills?
- How are social interaction skills included in the IEP?
- What is the role of the TVI and the school team?
- What are some ideas to support students with CVI learn age-appropriate social skills?
- How do social interaction skills overlap with other areas of the ECC?
What are Social Interaction Skills in the ECC?
Social Interaction Skills centers on learning how to read and respond to social situations without the benefit of visual cues. All children with a visual impairment need individualized instruction in developing social skills based on whole-child assessments. When it comes to CVI, a whole-child approach that understands the student’s communication, motor, cognitive, and behavioral skills and how they use compensatory strategies for access is essential for building an individualized approach.
As children with visual impairments grow and develop, their initiation of social interactions is less than their sighted peers.
Kim Zebehazy and Thomas Smith
As parents, educators, and trusted friends of people with CVI, it is our role to provide accessible social situations while developing life-long skills.
Social interaction skills of the ECC include (skills and needs are prioritized and individualized based on a comprehensive assessment):
- Non-Verbal Social Cues: face and/or eye contact, body posture, personal space, gestures, facial expressions, avoiding socially inappropriate behaviors/mannerisms
- Communication: initiating positive interactions, conversation skills, social reciprocity, responding to positive and negative feedback, using cues to interact, compliments and sarcasm
- Cooperation: respects group leader/speaker, orients towards and attends to the leader/speaker, sustains group involvement, takes turns when playing with others, shares toys with others, works/plays cooperatively, participates in group activities, leads group activities
- Interactions: demonstrates positive social interactions with peers and adults, shows a willingness to compromise, develops relationships, makes introductions, displays personal networking skills
- Identity: emotional awareness, human sexuality, social media presence
What is the impact of CVI on social interaction skills?
There is no simple, clear-cut guide to how CVI impacts an individual, and no two individuals are affected in the same way. CVI can impact all aspects of the visual processing system, including detecting a face, recognizing that face orientation to movement, and connecting movement patterns to a specific individual. Visual processing challenges could impact the auditory, tactile, or language skills connected to associated social skills. For example, a person with CVI may rely on auditory input to gain emotional cues from a conversation partner; however, in a complex environment, those auditory cues are less accessible, impacting the person’s processing speed and ability to interpret tone and emotion accurately.
Social interaction skills for people with CVI may be challenging for many reasons. Some include:
Difficulty with facial recognition
- Recognition of a face and its parts
- Pairing a face with a name
- Recognition when a face changes (i.e. glasses / no glasses)
- Changes in a communication partner’s voice: loud, soft, strained
Difficulty with perceiving and processing emotions
- Perception of facial expressions and the emotions they signal
- Understanding of emotions of others
- Understanding one’s own emotions
- Ability to connect voice tone with emotions
Reliance on changing factors for identification
- What a friend/teacher usually wears
- Where people are typically located
- Costumes or festive outfits
Difficulty with distance vision, crowding, and clutter
- Awareness of who is speaking and where to look
- Struggle with locating a person in a crowd or small group
- Difficulty finding and joining a group already engaged in a play schema
Difficulty processing motion (speed, direction, distance) of
- people coming toward them
- group games; playground activities
- interactive gestures such as high fives or a wave
Visual recognition and form accessibility
- Limited access to animated/cartoon/ or 2D social situations and stories
- Difficulty connecting 2D social situations to 3D/ real life
Visual guidance of upper and lower limbs
- Difficulty with visual motor tasks that involve eye/hand use and foot-eye coordination
- Navigation challenges; tripping and frequent falls; overstepping or under stepping when approaching changes in depth
- Recognition of the space between others and themself
Visual-spatial perception: can include difficulty seeing spatial relationships between things,
organizing visual space, and creating a visual mental map of 3D space.
Visual field loss, not being able to see people on the right or left side as they approach
These difficulties are exaggerated when situations are: visually cluttered and busy; have multiple sensory inputs; are too far away; and unfamiliar, without the supports of context clues or verbal descriptions.
Children with CVI need direct and explicit instruction to support the development of social skills. Hands-on activities, real-life experiences, and learning social rules and expectations strengthen these learning experiences. Individualized assessment of functional vision, learning media, CVI evaluation, and ECC screening tools are vital to developing appropriate social skill instructional strategies (along with speech, OT, and PT assessments).
How are social interaction skills included in the IEP?
The short answer, they should be included in all areas. For sighted peers, social interactions happen throughout the day. Social interaction skills include our understanding of ourselves even when we are not interacting with others. The accommodations and social methods of access for an individual with CVI will vary between time of day, place, and familiarity. This is why individualized evaluations to determine the levels of support needed are essential to aid students’ consistent access.
Don’t forget—an ECC checklist should be completed to help guide the IEP development and what areas of the ECC and social interaction skills to include. This checklist will guide:
- What are the student’s social interaction skills, strengths, and weaknesses?
- What social skills are appropriate for the individual’s current level?
- What skills should be targeted through consultation, and which need direct instruction?
The essential parts to include in all IEPS:
- Statement of how CVI impacts the student’s access to social skills.
- Acknowledging the individual’s method of social interaction (strengths and areas of challenge) and includes strategies the student uses to support social skills along with methods for the IEP to facilitate interactions with adults and peers.
- Accommodations and modifications that match the individual’s evaluation results while helping to facilitate effective methods of interactions.
What is the role of the TVI and school team?
All team members should own social interaction skills and incorporate them throughout the student’s day. When a teacher or specialist greets the individual, that is a natural opportunity to practice social interaction skills. Class peers and school staff must know how to have productive and positive interactions with their fellow students with CVI, which also creates a sense of community, understanding, and safety. When others understand that their classmate or student with CVI cannot recognize them up close, in a group, or from 5 feet away, they know why a simple wave is not enough. Instead, saying, “Hi, Emily, it’s Susan,” is accessibility in action. Small changes in the school community can significantly affect the accessibility of the environment for an individual with CVI.
One of the jobs of the TVI is to ensure that areas of the ECC are being addressed for the student with CVI in a way that uniquely matches the student’s needs—this includes a holistic understanding of how CVI affects the student. We know that each student with a visual impairment is different from the next, but it is important for the TVI to understand specifically how the student is affected by CVI in particular, and how to best approach the ECC.
The TVI needs to be able to consult with other school staff, including but not limited to the Speech Therapist, Occupational Therapist, Physical Therapist, general/special education teacher(s), Orientation and Mobility Specialist, and the school counselor. The TVI working with the student should be able to explain how their diagnosis of CVI affects the student’s ability to learn social skills relevant to their school day so that these skills can be worked on across settings with different staff.
What are some ideas to support students with CVI learn age-appropriate social skills?
As parents, we are our children’s biggest advocates. Discussing social skills development with IEP team members is essential, as social skills overlap in multiple areas of the ECC, instruction, and learning. Social skill development is also important when considering transition and post-secondary goals and priorities.
As always, there is no one specific focus or goal that is perfect for all children with CVI to help develop social interaction skills—all strategies should come from individual assessment results. Here are some ideas for promising practices that are meant to inspire inquiry (all supports and accommodations must be based on a student’s assessment results).
- Establish a routine—use visual/tactile/auditory reminders of expectations.
- Start with one constant method of greeting (hello/bye) and build off of the skills for that one greeting.
- Develop tactile and/or visual indicators for staff, classmates, and family to use to help the student (i.e red ball on the PT’s lanyard).
- Ensure adults know how to initiate and engage with the student. If you use one greeting method, ensure all adults use that.
- Greet the individual with your name and a few characteristics about yourself or outfit. For example, “Hi Sam, it’s Miss. Emily, I have brown hair and I’m wearing a black t-shirt.”
- Let the individual know who is around them during group activities. This extends to letting them know if new people arrive or leave the group.
- Be aware of visual field deficits or neglects and avoid approaching from that field.
- The individual should not be expected to look at you when you are talking. It can be extremely difficult to look and listen simultaneously.
- Cue students to give personal space and orient themselves toward the person they are speaking with.
- Foster and encourage friendships between peers. This can be done through structured activities, including sharing, turn-taking, and teamwork.
- Foster agency. Encourage students to advocate for their needs. Allow them to use their vision or not use their vision. It’s their choice. Always provide opportunities to explore and develop compensatory skills.
- Promote age-appropriate independence in self-care routines.
- Model language to help make connections about emotions (e.g. “She is laughing, I can tell she is happy,” “Did you hear him slam that book down? He seems like he’s mad,” etc.). Due to difficulties with facial recognition, it can be hard for people with CVI to determine someone else’s emotion by their face. Therefore, helping them learn other cues of different emotions is an important skill.
- Occupational therapy can include social skills such as: self-advocacy, asking appropriate questions when completing a task, and interactions during community outings such as ordering at a restaurant or asking a store clerk where they can find a particular item
- Speech therapy can include social skills lessons tailored to the student with CVI by: teaching self-advocacy, encouraging the student to join group activities and giving them the language to do so, and help give the student the confidence and language to deal with confrontation.
How do social interaction skills overlap with other areas of the ECC?
Areas of the ECC often overlap. For individuals with CVI, social interaction can affect self-determination skills, recreation and leisure, independent living skills, and career education. For example, CVI can affect a child’s development of play skills, including imaginary play, group play, or organized gameplay, as these are all skills that sighted children learn through observation and imitation.
- Recreationally, older kids may have to try many things to discover their interests. How do you know if you’d like to play baseball if you’ve never seen or experienced it?
- Social skills that may fall under the heading of self-determination include: gaining attention, asking for help, negotiating, expressing emotions, and dealing with teasing or bullying. These are important skills used in school on the playground, in class, in therapies, and at home when interacting with family.
- Career education also requires a particular set of social skills; people with CVI may need to know how to address superiors versus co-workers, ask for help when needed, and take constructive criticism.
- Independent living skills and social skills go hand-in-hand. When living independently, an individual needs to understand social norms of personal hygiene and dressing because this is how we present ourselves to others. Individuals also need to be able to communicate (in their preferred communication approach) with healthcare professionals about their health needs and communicate with people who work at restaurants or retail.
Social interaction skills are essential for all children to begin learning early and continue developing these skills into adulthood. These skills require extensive teaching to those with visual impairments (which includes the diverse manifestations of CVI) who do not experience incidental social learning. The CVI visual behaviors impact how a person with CVI experiences social interactions differently, which can include difficulties with facial recognition, smooth and easy eye movements, visual attention, visual recognition, motion processing, clutter, and sensory integration.
A team effort must be made from a very young age to target social interaction skills across multiple settings, including the home, school, and community. As a team, determine the student’s strengths and areas of need and think of what skills would be functional and appropriate for the upcoming IEP year. And most importantly, value and prioritize the student with CVI and their family’s input and goals for social skill development.
Keep the learning going!
- CVI and the Expanded Core Curriculum
- Understanding the CVI Visual Behaviors
- How to rethink four social and environmental norms to fully include individuals with CVI
- 5 essential steps to finding the best AAC system for a learner with CVI
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