BLOG POST
The Impact of Incidental Teaching
Published on 17th November 2023 by ABA Simplified
Today I want to talk about a topic that I absolutely LOVE and have used in almost every single session of mine. Although it took some time for it to come more naturally to me, when it did, you bet I used it every chance I got! I’m talking about Incidental Teaching AKA Naturalistic Environment Teaching! Among the many effective strategies used in ABA, incidental teaching stands out as a powerful and naturalistic approach to skill acquisition. In this blog post, we are going to look at the concept of incidental teaching, exploring its principles, applications, how we can implement incidental teaching, and the impact it can have on our learners’ programs.
Principles of Incidental Teaching
- Natural Environment: Incidental teaching occurs in the learner’s natural environment, whether it’s at home, school, or in the community. This provides a contextually relevant setting for skill development.
- Child-Led Interactions: The child takes the lead in initiating interactions or activities. The ABA professional or caregiver capitalizes on these moments to embed teaching opportunities into the ongoing interaction.
- Prompting and Reinforcement: Prompting is often used to guide the learner, and naturally occurring reinforcement is embedded into the activity. If you need to use contrived reinforcement, do that, but if you can embed naturally occurring reinforcers, try to make that your first choice.
Applications of Incidental Teaching
- Language Development: Incidental teaching is particularly effective in fostering language skills. By following the child’s lead, several opportunities arise to expand vocabulary, sentence structure, mean length of utterance, and social communication.
- Social Skills: Incidental Teaching also allows for more naturalistic social interactions which allow us to teach appropriate social behaviors, such as turn-taking, sharing, and asking questions, and responding to others.
- Play Skills: Incidental teaching can be also employed to enhance play skills by introducing new activities, expanding on existing play repertoires, and encouraging cooperative play with peers.
- Academic Skills: Basic academic skills can be addressed incidentally, such as counting objects during play, identifying colors in the environment, or practicing letter recognition in context.
Implementing Incidental Teaching
As I mentioned earlier, when I was new to incidental teaching, it felt so difficult to think of targets on the spot. But I promise, as with any new skill, it is bound to feel difficult at first but keep at it! Things will get so much easier as time goes on. Here are the steps I typically follow:
- Know Your Learner: When starting out with a new client, I asked caregivers, teachers and the child (if possible) what their general interests are. Do they love Paw Patrol? Peppa Pig? Trains? Dinosaurs? This information is not only valuable for planning reinforcement but also creating learning activities that your clients will love.
- Observe Your Learner: This one is SO important! Preferences change. We don’t want to do the same things every day. Our learners (most of them) don’t want to do the same exact activities every day either. Taking time to observe your learners special interests on that day will help you know what activities you’ll be doing that day. Of course you can make plans to do specific activities but if your learner doesn’t want to do them, it’s absolutely fine! It’s important to stay flexible.
- Follow Your Learners’ Lead: Pay close attention to your learners. Is your learner enjoying the activity? While observing them, also think about their current targets. Almost all my learners have had a manding goal. Unless expanding on the duration of play is a specific goal, if your learner wants to move on to something else, it is totally fine to do so! We prompt a mand for ending the activity e.g. “all done” or the next activity’s name e.g. “bubbles” and move on.
- Use Prompting: Make sure to use those prompt hierarchies as you usually would! I prefer most-to-least unless my learner (or the specific program) does better with least-to-most.
- Reinforce Desired Behaviors: Try to build in lots of natural reinforcers as best as possible! It will help you cut back on an additional step of having to fade reinforcers and help maintain the behaviors after intervention has ended. Let’s take an example of a child who is thirsty in session. The child mands for water. Instead of simply handing the child some water, we can use this opportunity to teach pouring as well. Don’t be afraid to use escape as a reinforcer too! Let’s take an example where you and your learner are at the supermarket. Your learner wants to leave, but we can’t leave without cashing out. We can work on receptive identification of the self-checkout area or finding the cashier, cashing out and leaving!
- Collect Data: As with everything in ABA, don’t forget to take data! This will help us know if our teaching approach is working for our learners.
- Collaborate with Caregivers: This was my absolute favorite part (especially during the pandemic)! I always encourage parents and caregivers to participate and come up with their own unique activities. It always amazed me to see the creativity of some of the families I worked with, and I definitely saw the changes in my learners!
Case Example 1
Several years ago, I worked with a child whose parents owned a mini grocery store. My client often spent his evenings in the grocery store and so with consent from his parents, we decided to switch things up and moved therapy to the shop once a week where we targeted non-identical matching skills (putting canned goods together), receptive identification (identification of grocery items, money etc), social skills (greeting customers) and so much more.
Case Example 2
Back in pandemic days, when we switched to telehealth service delivery, I worked with a client and his mom. This client’s mom was a complete natural when it came to incidental teaching! We’d do an activity in session and mom would be able to embed targets into play or daily routines throughout the day! Anyway, we were specifically targeting community helpers and instead of doing this with flashcards at a table, we targeted it via pretend play and a much simpler version of the game Guess Who in sessions. When the family was out and about in the community, mom would point to specific community helpers and ask, “Who is that?” or “What is that person’s job?”.
Benefits of Incidental Teaching
Looking at the examples above, I’m sure you have an idea of the benefits of incidental teaching but let’s summarize some of them below.
- Individualized Learning: Incidental teaching allows us to tailor our learners’ targets to the specific interests of our learners as well as to a variety of contexts.
- Increased Generalization: We don’t need to target generalization separately since it was built into our programs since the beginning!
- Improved Engagement: Leveraging our learner’s interests and motivations increases engagement and their motivation for learning.
- Increased Learning Opportunities: Parents, grandparents, caregivers, siblings etc can participate and learn how to implement targets. This means that our learners will have increased opportunities to learn not just at home, in the clinic or at school but also anywhere else the family goes! Also, having multiple adults and peers interact with the child can also help with generalizing skills faster.
- It Works: Incidental Teaching/Naturalistic Environment Teaching is an evidence-based practice which means that there is data to show that it is an effective strategy.
All in all, incidental teaching is an amazing tool to have in our toolbox. It can be tailored to the needs of your individual learners and families can be more involved in the therapeutic process. Using this method, our clients can learn new skills while participating in activities that they enjoy. Of course, as with any other ABA strategy, it might work wonders for some of your learners, while other learners may need a more structured approach.
