social emotional learning for
peer connection and belonging
A Social Emotional Neuroaffirming Curriculum for classrooms and clinics
What is social stencil?
Social Stencil is an Australian neuroaffirming social-emotional curriculum that helps students understand their own and others’ social, emotional, learning, and communication styles. By recognising individual differences, it fosters inclusive classrooms where acceptance, positive peer relationships, and belonging contribute to supportive and effective learning environments.
Social Stencil wasn’t always neuroaffirming.
Social Stencil was first developed in 2008, called The Friendship Saver Program, a traditional Social Emotional Learning Program. Traditional means it was designed to teach everyone the same set of social skills and social norms. For example, some autistic people better process information when they look away rather than provide direct eye contact. Some ADHD learners listen best when they are moving rather than sitting still. Traditional social-emotional curriculums ignored natural variations in our cognitive, sensory, and social processing and expected that everyone could converge to the middle and be the same. This created a heavy toll on our neurodivergent learners. Schools need to be places where children feel safe, seen, and accepted for who they are and what they can bring.
Neuroaffirming curriculum helps us get on with the business of teaching and learning by creating a shared language and understanding that makes space for all learners.
Here are a few sample posters
Social stencil is evidence-based
Social Stencil has been internally and independently evaluated since its inception in 2008. This year (2025) Social Stencil is undergoing further formal evaluation as part of a dedicated research project with the University of Melbourne. These results will help explore how this neuroaffirming social emotional program supports peer relationships, social development, inclusion and belonging.
Stay tuned for results to be published at the end of this year.
What we teach is important. how we teach is powerful
What we teach is important…
The Social Stencil program is intentionally sequenced to map to the social cognitive processes identified by the Social Information Processing Model (SIP model, Crick and Dodge, 1994) in collaboration with a neuroaffirming perspective.
The SIP model is an evidence-based theory for understanding social cognitive processing steps that support social interactions and we acknowledge that neurodivergent individuals might not naturally engage with the same six social cognitive processing steps, and so, their social style and preferences might differ. Let’s learn about all of the variations that make up our beautiful world, understand one another, explore social strategies together, and build a collaborative, supportive classroom, school community and community at large.
How we teach is powerful…
The pedagogy underpinning the Social Stencil program is student centre - teacher guided, and influenced by arts education.
Each session is characterised by a facilitator initiated question, whole class discussion whereby the facilitator can model acceptance of ideas, and respectful communication, followed by a whole group game or small group activities to unpack the themes discussed.
This program structure provides consistent opportunities for peer to peer learning, sharing of insights between peers, opportunities to immediately apply and experience the social skills and strategies learnt, and a positive, safe, creative space to build skills together.
During Social Stencil, all students of all ability levels feel curious to learn, successful, heard and safe to try new things.
Online lesson plans and e-resource Portal
Educators and Clinicians are supported to run the program via a self-paced portal with lesson plans, video models and downloadable material for the classroom.
The online training provides 11 hours of professional development, with a certificate of certification at completion. Jump straight in!