Michelle Garcia Winner, Social Thinking

Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC, is a speech language pathologist who specializes in the treatment of students with social cognitive challenges. She has a private practice in San Jose, California, where she works with clients and consults with families and schools.

Michelle is the founder of Social Thinking® and the related treatment strategies. Michelle’s goal is to help administrators, educators, and parents appreciate how social thinking and social skills are an integral part of students’ academic experiences and are critical for success in adulthood.

A treatment framework and curriculum developed by Michelle Garcia Winner targets improving individual social thinking abilities, regardless of diagnostic label. Professionals and parents alike are using these methods to build social thinking and related skills in students and adults. Social Thinking books, workshops and trainings, created by Winner or based on Winner's work, now offer a range of strategies that address individual strengths and weaknesses in processing social information.

The heart of Michelle’s work is illuminating the often elusive and intangible world of Social Thinking, and developing practical strategies that can be easily used by parents, educators, and service providers across different environments. Teaching "social skills" is not enough - individuals with social-cognitive challenges must learn the why and the how of their own and others' abilities to process social information - a capacity that for most of us is intuitive, but needs to be explicitly taught to individuals who enter this world with a brain that does not process social information in the same way.

Alongside building her clinic, Michelle also began a company now called Social Thinking Publishing, Inc. to handle the growing public speaking demands from national and international sources, as well as to publish her own books and an increasing number of books by innovative professionals using the Social Thinking framework. To date Michelle has written or co-authored more than 20 books on Social Thinking. Her work is being applied not only to persons with higher-functioning autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, ADD/ADHD, and related disabilities, but also more broadly to students in mainstream classrooms and to adults in vocational and professional settings in the U.S. and abroad. She was honored with a “Congressional Special Recognition Award” in 2008.