Crank it Up, Turn it Down: Balancing Volume in Regard to the Skills You Teach
As behavior analysts and teachers, our primary mission is to enrich the lives of children by equipping them with an ever-expanding repertoire of skills. One of our guiding principles is pretty straightforward: the greater the range of skills, the higher the potential for an enhanced quality of life. We usually focus on fundamental, go-to behaviors like: tying shoes, recognizing and labeling common items, mastering toileting routines, and social gestures like waving to peers. However, it's crucial to recognize that not all behaviors hold equal significance. I've previously discussed how certain behaviors carry more weight due to their immediate or long-term impact on a learner’s life. Skills such as street safety and toileting, for instance, profoundly influence the learner's daily well-being and independence. Moreover, behaviors differ not just in their importance but also in their 'volume' or the space they occupy in our learners' lives. Understanding this nuanced perspective is key to prioritizing and shaping our interventions for maximum impact.
Let me expand a little more on that—because it’s important.
What I mean by 'volume' in a particular behavior has to do with response effort and inherent difficulty in whatever behavior we’re trying to teach. The more steps it takes to complete the skill we’re trying to teach, the higher the volume (like packing for a trip, for example). Or the longer it takes in duration to complete, the higher the volume (waiting at a bus stop for example).
It's a simple but often overlooked concept: some skills are inherently larger and more challenging than others.
See the video above as I expand further on what I mean!
For example, a one-step imitation task, due to its straightforward nature, is less demanding and occupies a smaller 'volume' in our teaching space compared to a multi-step imitation task. Similarly, mastering a comprehensive task analysis for handwashing, with its multiple steps and nuances, is substantially more voluminous in terms of response effort compared to executing a basic two-step gross motor behavior. Recognizing and adjusting for these variations in 'behavioral volume' is super important in crafting effective and efficient learning experiences for our learners.
My point here? Some behaviors are super simple, consisting of just one or two component skills (low in volume). Others are more complex, with multiple steps and multiple and time consuming component skills (high in volume).
We shouldn’t simply aim to teach new behaviors. We should also teach in a way that allows our learners to engage in more voluminous and complex behaviors.
Think about behaviors like toileting, handwashing, or picking up toys. These aren’t simply important skills—they’re important multi-step, high volume skills. Our ability to teach these voluminous behaviors—behaviors that take more time, steps, and effort to complete—may pave the way for our learners to learn more intricate and substantial multi-step tasks in the future. Think about the skills involved in paying a bill, navigating with a map app when lost, or independently following through with a doctor’s appointment. These aren’t one and two-step behaviors. These are substantial life skills that require a learning history of managing other complex and lengthy, multi-step behaviors. Therefore, as behavior analysts, our goal is to incrementally and thoughtfully expand our learners' capacity, enabling them to handle the extended steps and nuances that these larger life behaviors entail.
When it comes to those crucial, multi-step behaviors we're teaching, it's imperative to scale them down to a manageable size for our learners.
The key is to start where they are, not where we want them to be.
For instance, if we have a learner who performs only one behavior at a time in exchange for a highly preferred reinforcer, it wouldn't be practical to introduce the entire sequence of handwashing, toileting, or circle time…and then prompt them through it…and call it programming. Instead, we'd focus on a small, manageable component of that larger behavior chain—like discarding a paper towel in the bin or flushing the toilet or engaging in the movements for Itsy Bitsy Spider. This is simply another way that we craft our teaching strategies to align with the learner's current capacity. For those learners not yet ready to tackle multiple or complex consecutive steps, breaking down our programs into digestible ones is imperative.
To belabor the point, let's take an example of teaching a learner to play a board game.
So often, BCBAs—with a zeal for teaching peer play—will throw the learner into an game of Candyland before the learner is ready (potentially making it an aversive and confusing experience). On the other hand, some BCBAs will avoid Candyland and any game like it due to those same complexities.
What if there was a happy medium?
A more tailored approach would be to identify a couple of universal board game behaviors and focus on these in isolation. Suppose our learner is pretty good at one and two-step LR tasks; in that case, we might practice just spinning a spinner and moving a game piece (a 2-step behavior). Alternatively, we could work on a simpler 1-step behavior, like sliding their Candyland game piece from start to finish without stopping, instead of playing the full game.
As our learner becomes more fluent in these isolated, component behaviors and their capacity to handle consecutive actions grows, these behaviors can gradually combine to form more complex, voluminous tasks. Once a learner can smoothly spin a spinner and move a game piece, the concept of actually learning, playing, and enjoying a board game becomes much more feasible.
Here's the final take-away for today: hone your skill in assessing the "volume" a learner can handle. Consider their current limitations—how many steps in a task can they follow without becoming overwhelmed? How many new tasks can they execute consecutively before needing significant prompting or showing signs of frustration? Work with them to increase that volume while tweaking complex programs to meet them where they’re at.
More on this next week!
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