Dressing Up the Basics: Tailoring the Art of Dressing Skills for Each Learner
You gotta start with the basics, right?
Dressing is a complex activity, often overwhelming for learners due to its time-consuming nature. (There are a lot of steps to putting on a shirt!) It’s not always about the inability to follow instructions; more so, it's the cumulative demand of these steps lined up in a sequence that poses the challenge. Recognizing the 'volume' of skills a learner can handle is critical—understanding both their skill limitations and the complexity of tasks they can manage.
This concept of 'volume' in skills varies from one learner to another. Your learner might excel in labeling a few items with reinforcement following immediately, indicating that they can handle skills low in volume and complexity. In contrast, some of your other learners may have fewer skills but can independently (thanks to practice and a preference for ritualized behaviors) perform more complex tasks like handwashing or teeth brushing, despite limited verbal abilities. Essentially, teaching dressing skills, much like other daily living skills such as toileting or handwashing, can be daunting due to their multi-step, voluminous nature.
The starting point in teaching dressing skills is to align with the learner’s current capacity, tolerance, patience (whatever you want to call it) in regard to the task at hand. And, if they can’t manage multi-step arrangements, then you have to start somewhere more elementary. Don’t simply decide that you’re going to teach dressing…or decide that you’re going to teach putting on a t-shirt…or decide that you’re going to teach putting on socks. Decide, instead to teach the most basic behaviors related to each of these items.
What does that mean?
This involves initiating with simple tasks like putting on a shirt, pants, or socks—the fundamental steps of each. These aren’t necessary the steps that come first in the dressing sequence. Rather, these are the steps that are easiest and most likely to get your kiddo a quick win. It’s less about the act of getting dressed and more about acquainting the learner with the basic elements of handling clothing items. By mastering these fundamental aspects, learners are more likely to transition smoothly into more complex dressing routines as their tolerance for multi-step tasks increases.
The image from BxMastery’s “Intro to Dressing” skill sequence (below) exemplifies this approach. Each program within the sequence is designed to be as basic as possible. The goal is to introduce basic dressing skills—but only those that will provide as little resistance to the learner as possible. Avoiding over-complication and allowing the learner to grasp the basic concepts without being overwhelmed by tedious, multi-step tasks that might exceed their current abilities. As each step in this sequence is mastered, the learner can then gradually progress to more advanced stages.
Each ‘toggle’ within the sequence reveals detailed instructions on how to run each program, ensuring that the learning experience is tailored to the learner's current capabilities. As learners proceed through these very basic skills, the clinician or teacher can make a decision on whether or not to dive deeper into teaching dressing. The subsequent 'composite skill' links (below) in BxMastery offer a similar 5-10 step skill sequence, guiding learners through each clothing item with increasing complexity. This structured approach ensures that learners build upon their skills methodically, advancing from the simplest tasks to more intricate dressing routines, thus enhancing their ability to handle voluminous, multi-step tasks more effectively over time.
The main takeaway is this: When it comes to teaching a complex self-skill like putting on pants with a learner that can only tolerate simple 1-2 step behaviors, it might be a better idea to take the most basic behavior(s) in that complex skill (pulling up pants) and teach that basic behavior in isolation. That way, as the learner increases their ability tolerate multi-step tasks, they already have a few of those basic behaviors down pat.
Let me know what you think!