When developing a social skills learning plan, it is always a good idea to begin with the end in mind. Skills to be developed should be chosen considering both the immediate and long-term goals for the student. How will this skill help the student to achieve his or her goals? How will it increase functionality and independence in vocational, educational, and personal contexts? By assessing not just the student’s challenges, but also his or her choices and interests, it is possible to craft a plan of instruction that will be increase his or her capacity for self-determination. As you select target skills, the one guiding question should be: How will this skill serve as a building block to this student’s future quality of life?
Using strategies that integrate Pivotal Response Treatments (PRT) can help guide you as you choose target skills.
Pivotal Response Treatments (PRT): PRT is an intervention method based on the work of Robert and Lynn Koegel that uses a developmental approach and applied behavior analysis procedures. The targeted or pivotal areas in this approach are motivation, responsivity to multiple cues, self-initiations, choice, and a balance of maintenance and acquisition tasks in instruction.
- Sustain a student’s engagement and motivation by assuring a high frequency of success.
- When possible, focus on natural, activity-based reinforcement. When the reinforcement for a particular behavior relate naturally to the targeted skill, it is more likely that they will carry over from the classroom to real-life situations.
- Select targets for which a student can initiate a response independently. If you must say or do things in a certain way for a student to offer the targeted response, then it is the instructor, and not the student, who is initiating the behavior. For example, if you are targeting the skill of asking for help at work or in school, and the student will only demonstrate this skill when you are nearby and looking at him expectantly, then he is not really initiating the skill. Your prompts (looking at him and your physical proximity) are initiating the response.
- During instruction, work on only one new acquisition skill for every four maintenance activities. An acquisition task is something that is entirely new for the student, while a maintenance task is an activity in which the student already exhibits an 80% success rate. Interspersing these maintenance tasks in with new skills will ensure that the student maintains a high rate of success, ensuring continued motivation and engagement in the activity.
Examples of acquisition and maintenance task selection and interspersal procedures:
Let’s say you are learning a new language. Rather than attempting to memorize 10 new words, you start by targeting one or two. Then, once those are “solid,” you add one or two more to your memorization and learning routine. Then, you add one more, while intermittently checking for retention of the previously memorized four. In this way, you are selecting one acquisition task while working to maintain / retain the other items. Each day at several points across the day, you again return to those “maintenance” words in an effort to retain them in the long run.
Now let’s consider a different example: You are working with your student to help him understand and recognize different literary devices. He can consistently identify and produce examples of similes and metaphors. You next target the concept of analogies. First, you prime by introducing the concept of analogy, providing illustrations. You provide other examples or exercises. As the student displays initial success in identifying examples of analogies, you intersperse examples of similes and metaphors into these practice opportunities. You are working to maintain his understanding of similes and metaphors (and maintaining an atmosphere of success), while targeting the concept of analogies (the “acquisition” target).
Attending to these concepts helps to assure that intervention targets are within the student’s range of ability, neither too easy nor too hard.
Once you have determined that a particular skill is relevant and necessary for the student to learn, how do you first approach the teaching of this skill? Task analysis is the process of breaking down a task or skill into teachable units. In many cases, it is not appropriate to attempt to teach the entire skill all at once. Such an attempt is not likely to produce successful and ultimately independent performance of the skill. Rather, you must first task analyze the skill to identify the critical features and sub-skills that actually comprise that skill. This will help the student more concretely understand what is expected while ensuring consistent student success in performance.
Task analysis involves assessment of:
- The student’s current performance of the skill in various environments
- The student’s learning needs, which determine to what degree a skill might need to be segmented into smaller units
- The skill itself, which determines how it might be reasonably segmented into teachable units
- The environments, the conditions now and in the future, under which that skill needs to be displayed
In order to task analyze a skill, it is often helpful to actually perform the skill yourself and write down every step in that process. This task analytic process will reveal:
- Skill sub-components (prerequisite skills) that you might otherwise take for granted or overlook
- The entry point for instruction, which will be different for each student
- The targets for shaping, the behaviors that will be “molded” via reinforcement (shaped) over time into the desired response or skill
In some cases, the process of task analysis will reveal to you that many or all of the sub-components of the skill are currently out of range for that student. In that case, you must reevaluate the skill you have selected to target for intervention. You might instead shift your focus to target one critical sub-skill across multiple conditions and environments.
Need an example?
Let’s say you identify introductions as an appropriate target for intervention. You task analyze the skill as follows:
- Walk towards the person
- Stop within one large step of the person
- Look towards the person and smile
- Extend your hand
- Say, “Hello, I’m Kevin, it’s nice to meet you.”
- At the same time, shake hands for three seconds (or three subtle up and down shakes of the hand) using a moderate grip
- Release hand
- Put hand at side
Yet upon analysis of the student’s current skill level, you determine that this student does not verbally reciprocate within an introduction (e.g. “It’s nice to meet you too” or “Hi, my name is Kevin” in response to someone else introducing himself). In other words, if someone else initiates the introduction, Kevin will extend his hand in response but says nothing and does not consistently look toward the person. Kevin touches the hand of the greeter but his handshake is weak and he pulls back quickly.
Therefore, you determine that it is first important to target this verbal response to a greeting/introduction across multiple conditions, before attempting to chain together the complex social communication responses of approaching someone, eye contact approximations, smiling, initiating introductions, and initiating handshakes. Simply, when approached, initially you target Kevin looking toward the person.
Then you add the next step of grasping the person’s hand with a moderate grip and holding for 3 seconds. Then you add the step of shaking the hand gently 3 times. Then you target the verbal response of “Hi, I’m Kevin. It’s nice to meet you too.”
Any skill that can be broken down into teachable units can be task analyzed. Even skills that might seem quite simple to you (e.g. hammering a nail, making a sandwich, drawing a circle, saying “hello”) can be broken down into multiple steps. For some students, such a task should be explicitly broken down into teachable steps.
What types of skills can be task analyzed?
Vocational skills (e.g. making a salad, hammering a nail, creating a spreadsheet, taking out trash)
Job-seeking skills (e.g. creating a resume, asking someone to serve as a reference, completing a job application)
Organizational, self-direction skills (e.g. accessing and following a schedule, accessing and following a to-do list, setting an alarm clock)
Social communication skills (e.g. greeting a co-worker, joining peers or colleagues for group work, shaking hands)
Self-regulation skills (e.g. requesting a break, muscle tension and release exercises, walking away from face to face bullying)
Safety skills (e.g. crossing streets, responding to a fire alarm at school or work)
Personal care skills (e.g. washing hands, brushing teeth, shaving legs)
Community access and leisure skills (e.g. walking from home to work, checking out a book from the library)
Independent living skills (e.g. making a sandwich, cleaning a bathroom, making the bed)
There are some skills that cannot be task analyzed because there are too many dimensions, features, and levels of the skill. For example, you cannot effectively task analyze larger domain areas like “self-advocacy,” “coping,” or “money-management.” In such cases, you must identify the much more specific skills that fall underneath those domains, then determine through careful assessment which skill might be targeted for intervention and thus broken down into teachable units.
Here is an example that illustrates why task analysis is important:
Upon further examination, it is clear that the task itself is not so simple:
- The student must go into the store,
- locate the area where he might find applications,
- locate a store employee or manager,
- walk towards that person,
- assess whether that person is busy with another customer or employee, and if they are busy, then the student must wait patiently (stand still, look down, remain quiet) until the person is finished before speaking,
- look toward that person, smile,
- introduce himself, and use an upbeat tone of voice,
- politely request an application (“Can I please get an application?”)
- take the application,
- smile, look toward the person again, and
- say “thank you” before leaving.
By breaking down this skill (requesting an application in person) into teachable units, you have identified a number of critical sub-skills that must be individually targeted and systematically chained together over time as the student displays increasing independence with each step in the task analyzed sequence.
Chained together… You target each sub-skill by modeling each step, providing multiple opportunities for the student to practice each step, you shape or “mold” each step into the targeted response via well-timed and differential reinforcement across multiple opportunities, and you systematically fade out your prompts. In many cases, it would be appropriate to provide a visual representation of that sequence through visual scripts and sequences (in written and/or picture form), video models, and other visual supports.
You might determine that it is appropriate to initially target a set of sub-skills across multiple sessions and multiple contexts, before moving on to the next set of sub-skills.
Thus, you may start by only targeting these responses:
- The student must go into the store,
- locate the area where he might find applications,
- locate a store employee or manager
Once these sub-skills are consistently displayed with increasing variation in context (different locations, employees wearing different uniforms, name tags, etc.), then you move on to the next set of responses that comprise this larger skill:
- walk towards that person,
- assess whether that person is busy with another customer or employee, and if they are busy, then the student must wait patiently (stand still, look down, remain quiet) until the person is finished before speaking.
Once these sub-skills are consistently displayed with increasing variation in context (different locations, “employees” played by actors in simulated situations if needed, different wait times), then you move on to the next set of responses that comprise this larger skill:
- look toward that person, smile,
- introduce himself, and use an upbeat tone of voice,
- politely request an application (“Can I please get an application?”)
- take the application,
- smile, look toward the person again, and
- say “thank you” before leaving.
As you are targeting each set of sub-skills, you are systematically chaining more sets of sub-skills together, until ultimately, you have engaged the student in multiple opportunities to practice the entire skill.