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Applicableprinciple

Social Skills Training for Young People
Fuminori Sato, Lecturer, Faculty of Nursing, Iwate Prefectural University / Student Group HOSSTYPrinciple 9: A commitment to promoting sustainability through education

1. Activity Overview
The Faculty of Nursing of Iwate Prefectural University
continuously provides Social Skills Training (hereinafter,"SST") program at Iwate Prefectural high schools in orderto improve interpersonal skills of high school students. SST
is also held once a month for elementary, junior high, andhigh school students at the Aiina Campus of our university.
The program is specifically targeting elementary, junior high,and high school students with developmental disorders,
contributing to the improvement of interpersonal skills of suchstudents.
SST is one of the cognitive behavioral therapies developed
to improve interpersonal skills for people with chronic
schizophrenia, and currently, SST for children is held in
various places such as hospitals, schools, and after-school
day-care centers.

Members of the circle HOSSTY that assists the operation

2. SST at a Prefectural High School
In 2021, the faculty provided SST three times in total for 40first-year high school students from a prefectural high school.
The contents of each session are as follows.

April:

Making friends, Understanding your feelings and thoughts

May:

Skills to keep conversations going and execute plans

The flow of program was, teaching according to the theme,
presenting communication scenes (modeling by teachers),role-playing among students, and communicating good points(positive feedback).
The high school students who participated in the SST gave
comments such as, “I have been at a loss about my own
feelings, this has made it easier”, and “I want to make time toreflect on myself from now on".
Also, one high school teacher commented, “In the past, there
were students who were absent from school in April and May,but not this year”.

3. SST for Elementary, Junior High,and High School Students
Our faculty members and the student group HOSSTY offer
the following SST program with the aim of improving theinterpersonal skills of elementary, junior high, and high school
students when interacting with friends and family. Separate
60-minute classes are held for elementary, junior high, andhigh school students.
The class for elementary school students has a theme ofchanging behavior such as listening to others and tellingstories, as well as “greetings”, “doing self-introductions”,
and “communicating feelings". The class for junior highschool students has a theme of changing cognition such as
controlling emotions. For example, “Thinking about one's ownthoughts”, “Accepting new thoughts”, and “Coping with angerand depression”. The class for high school students has freethemes, for example, how to get along well with friends andhow to deal with depressed feelings, as well as themes such as“Communication using social network services” and “How toget along with a member of the opposite sex”.
Comments we heard from the participants were, “I want to say
thank you properly to communicate my feelings", "I learned
how to use thank you and I am sorry”, “I was able to say
words properly so that the other person can hear me, and I
was able to face the other person when I talked, so it was agood experience”.

January: 	Anger management, assertion (self-expression thatrespects both oneself and others or self-assertion)

SST classes for elementary, junior high, and high school students
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