B (7:16)
And teachers time and again will say, and parents, I think, might say this as well. I haven't seen as many surveys about that. That man, if my child could do that, we'll handle the rest. Do you know how many teachers I've had tell me just flat out, if they could just sit still and, like, listen a little bit, follow some basic instructions and then just be nice, I'll teach them everything else they need to know. But if they come and they're like, I don't want to sit. Give me what I want now, I won't wait, or I'm just going to grab and take what I want from other people. They're like, I can't teach those kids. Those are. Those are the kids that I think we have a lot of challenge with. I think post pandemic as well, kids were not around other kids. They were not necessarily in educational environments. And I think we lost a lot of that with our kids. Just the ability to ask, politely, wait for, you know, 30 seconds to a minute and share. That was a skill that got lost for, I don't want to say a generation, but like four to five years of kids, and you could tell. And those kids are probably going to be struggling for a long period of their educational careers because they spent so much time relearning some of these basic skills. So in any case, what it comes down to is if you had a way to just consistently ensure that all children learned these skills, wouldn't our schools be a better place, not just for appliance reasons, not just to get kids to do what you want, but just in kids being able to access what they need more quickly. We see this back in Walden, too. So I love preschool life skills as just a kind of a nice, equitable way to ensure that everyone learns that. Like, rather than just let's assume kids know that and then be mad when they don't, and then eventually come up with some sort of elaborate individualized behavior plan where we do, you know, basic functional communication and delay and denial training. What if we just made sure everyone has that skill from as early an age as possible? In this case, it's mostly kids three to five. That's why it's preschool life skills. And I love that idea. I think we all are huge fans of what if we just did this and everyone could do it. And then we could move on from there. You know, getting fluency with these basic skills, more repetition. So that's where the preschool life skills came from. There's sort of four general areas which again, if you have any practice in functional communication or delay and denial training, you're going to say, I get this, this doesn't sound that complicated because it's not. But it's basically ideas around instruction following functional communication, tolerance to. Tolerance to any sort of denial and friendship skills. Friendship skills being specifically, you know, greeting people and sharing, you know, offering to share things. When people come into a play space where you have materials saying thank you or be kind of the main skills, the instruction following is like one, two step instructions. It's responding. Yes. And looking at someone. When they say your name, we don't mean eye contact, looking, just stopping what you're doing, and generally looking in the direction of where the instruction is coming from. All of these things. You can read lots of research articles about how important it is for things like, hey, asking for help, asking for attention. Right. Waiting up to 30 seconds for someone to give you attention. Waiting up to 30 seconds for someone to give you an item. These are all things like, I do that all the time. Where do you do that? Probably in your tier 3 intensive behavior plans with young children. So what if we just assume we're going to have to write those behavior plans anyway and let's just jump ahead of it and kind of make that a general guideline. So the original studies were with children in Head Start programs. So typically developing children, and then a lot of extensions, specifically the Fallagant and Pence we're going to talk about now, looked at what is the response to intervention model? So if you've never worked in a public school or you've never worked in an educational setting where they use a response to intervention model, basically it just says, what if we set up a system in which everybody received some type of intervention? That's the tier one. So the least restrictive intervention. This is a concept that comes up a lot in at least American public schools. Least restrictive setting. Least restrictive, restrictive procedure. You know, it's in ethical codes too. We don't want to start with the hardest thing ever. If we don't have to, then from there you can move on to your tier two and tier three, which is sort of just increasing the dosage, the intensity of the programming. It could be that we teach the skill with more reinforcement, kind of external reinforcement, or we teach it in a smaller group, or we teach it with More repetition, or we have multiple exemplars, right? Or we write an individualized behavior plan that ties into the teaching of these skills, again with more reinforcement, probably with more exemplars, probably more in a one to one setting. And again, those are the tiers from tier one to tier three. And the real extension here is the idea of it's not great if we only teach typically developing kids these skills, because we know that many of the children that we support as behavior analysts have disabilities that make learning some of these skills a little bit harder for a variety of reasons. So we need to ensure that this is a technology that can be replicated and generalized for as many children as possible. Because there has to be a cost effective savings for a program like this to be of use in classrooms. If it's something that only works for the kids that, like some of them, probably will just develop these skills naturally on their own, a few might not. It's not going to be seen as a good use of instructional time because as much as teachers will tell you, my number one goal is for children to be able to wait a little bit, follow simple instructions. The states in most of our, in most, at least United States will tell you they need to be able to be writing these essays and doing all these passages and doing all this busy work. And if they can't do it, we really don't care how much they followed instructions, because that's how education works. A lot of time we want a product and we will assume all these other things are in place. And if they're not, we don't care. We still need this product. So make it happen. Which is stressful for teachers, that's a different episode. So in Fallagon and Pence, what we have here, I'm not going to go through their introduction because I kind of did already with sort of a big review of many of the other articles that we discussed. But basically here, this was sort of a look at that more elaborate use of preschool life skills, like how do we teach across the tiers? So tier one preschool life skills is basically going to look like teaching the individual skills. Like, you know, say yes and stop what you're doing and look at the person giving an instruction. When you hear your name, follow a one step instruction, follow a two step instruction. And basically tier one just means it's happening for a whole class. So you take your whole group of learners and you do a little mini lesson. And I've written like so many of these mini lessons in the past. I have one. I'VE been trying to use Canva because everyone seems to love Canva. It's so pretty. So this year I redid all my old lessons and I did them in Canva with little like pictures of kids and stuff. Social validity off the charts. The classroom I have run this. I'm just going to brag, you know, it's my birthday. They I have been told by the teacher, the kids keep asking, when are you going to come in and do another lesson? They really think of you as a teacher in the classroom, which I don't get all the time. As someone who mostly comes in to be like, here's the individualized behavior plan or I'm just consulting to the teacher and I'm just trying to be nice to the kids, but I don't work with them directly. So it's been a real, it's always a real treat to do preschool life skills because the kids tend to like you a lot when you do them. They think it's very funny when you run this program because at least the first levels are super easy and you know, you do a little mini lesson and you sort of demonstrate what it looks like. Some folks have added like this is what it should look like. And you know, again, depending on your class, some kids think that's hilarious. Sometimes it can be confusing to teach non examples. So that varies. That's not in a lot of the research.
