Moving from Natural Environment to Intensive Teaching

Module 3

Moving from Natural Environment to Intensive Teaching

Once the child is engaging in multiple activities with the instructor, begin intensive teaching sessions. Natural environment teaching always has an element of “requesting” involved if the child enjoys the activity. Intensive teaching sessions begin to remove that element of “request” insuring that the child will respond in a more structured teaching environment and not only when he is playing with the specific toy. It allows the responses to become fluent (fast and accurate) and allows practice even when the child is not interested in playing with the toy. It also helps insure generalization of the responses because the child is responding to multiple pictured items rather than the specific toy or objects.

Choose different targets that have already been taught within the activities with no more than three targets for each skill type. Try to choose targets that are very different from each other (i.e. different categories) so the child is less likely to have discrimination difficulties. Get pictures of each of the targets.

Gradually “morph” into intensive teaching sessions at the table by requiring just a couple of “easy” responses in between reinforcers. These short “spurts” of intensive teaching can occur when it is the instructors turn to choose an activity. Use videos, favorite foods or “stimmy toys” with no themes as reinforcers at the table. Always provide full prompts and fade your prompts quickly. Mix and vary across the verbal operants.

Initially keep a ratio of at least 80% “easy” (mastered) responses to 20% “hard” (current) responses. As for the schedule of reinforcement, you may use a fixed ratio (set number of responses) while pairing at the table or whenever introducing a new target, but want to gradually shift to a variable ratio (VR) when you require a variable number of responses set around an average. A variable ratio is preferred because it produces a steady rate of responding and unlike fixed ratios do not produce non-responsiveness post reinforcement because the moment of reinforcement cannot be predicted. Begin with a VR of reinforcement of no more than 3 responses with reinforcement occurring after just one response at least once during the “sitting”. Gradually increase the VR as the child is successful. Also, gradually increase the length of the intensive teaching sessions as the child tolerates and begins to enjoy the intensive teaching sessions.

Your current targets should be written on an Intensive Teaching Program Board under the appropriate skill area. All current objectives should be written on this board with the current targets written underneath.All current targets should be probed daily, unless otherwise specified, with the data transferred to the notebook under the appropriate target area. Remember, just the first response of the day is used to collect data. Use the probe data to tell you which targets need additional teaching in the natural environment as you play with the toys.

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Tracy Vail,MS,CCC/SLP and Gabrielle Trapenberg, MA, BCBA Let’s Talk Speech & Language Services, Inc.