Goal: To improve social-relationship skills
Objective(s): The student will demonstrate the necessary skills to end a conversation.
Process Steps:
1. Decide if you need to finish the conversation.
2. Decide the reason you need to end the conversation.
3. Decide what to say.
4. Wait until the other person stops talking.
5. Say it in a friendly way. (Goldstein, 1988 p. 166)
Discuss
Definition: Ending a conversion means to stop talking with a person or group and to move on to something else.
Rationale: Discuss the importance of why a conversation needs to be ended (so as not to leave the other person "hanging", to provide closure, complete a thought).
Where/When/Comments:
• Teacher explains how to end a conversation and discusses
situations when a conversation should stop.
• End a conversation when you have run out of time or
interest in the subject by putting an ending or closure to it.
• Situations: You might need to end a conversation because
it is time for dinner, you'd rather go play baseball.
• Describe specific, polite ways to end a conversation. Make
a list.
Set the Stage:
• Show a brief cut of a movie commercial cutting it off in
mid sentence. Discuss with students how they feel when something
just ends without completion.
Model/Role-play with Feedback
• Video tape role playing activities and evaluate
performance.
Role play situations:
• Your recess or free time in the classroom is over.
• You are talking to a friend, and your parents are waiting
for you.
• Your mother tells you to come inside or stop talking on
the telephone.
• You're at a party talking to someone and your best friend
walks in the door.
• You're at your locker talking to a friend and you have
less than a minute to get to class.
• Your aunt is talking with you at a picnic. You want to
play softball with everyone else.
Application with Feedback
• Practice getting off the phone with a friend.
• Try using some statements you and your classmates thought
of to end your conversations.
• Give the students a five minute break during class. Call
class to begin immediately. Discuss how students ended their
conversations.
• Independently, students make a list of things to say to
end a conversation.
• Make a list of the conditions when a conversation should
end. (Deckert and et al, 1989, p. 83)
Social Skills Curriculum Guide, 1992
Special School District of St. Louis County