Social Skills - Choosing Conversation Topics

See the audio transcription below:

Welcome to my Choosing Conversation Topics activity. Check out this excerpt from the training video I did for the New York City Department of Education. The next activity is Choosing Conversation Topics. When I speak to my students about what skills they'd like to work on or what they feel they're struggling with, very commonly I'll get the answer that they have a hard time choosing conversational topics. They don't know what topics are good topics. So, what makes a topic good? I came up with three attributes of a good topic. One is that it's interesting to all the people in the conversation, that it's common, meaning all the people in the conversation know about it and would have something to say about it and hopefully can participate, and three, that it's appropriate, which basically, boils down to don't talk sex, drugs or politics. So, what happens is we look at a number of common topics: movies, television, school, work, weather, sports, and for each one we have our own checklist. We each have our own checklist and we check off, we go through the topics, one at a time and we all check off if we find it interesting, if we know something about it, and if we think it's appropriate. And when we finish, what we have left over to look at is which topics remain that got checks across the board on everyone's checklist. Thanks for viewing my description of this activity. If you like what you've seen here, please click and subscribe to my channel. I'm not exactly sure what that means, but my web guy told me it's a thing!

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