Shocking ABA practice!

[StarlightMcEggsie]

OMG!

I just watched a video of myself delivering an ABA session to my ds 2 years ago, teaching him language order of a 3 word sentence and pronouns. I was literally shouting at myself at all the mistakes.

BUT - I could STILL see the learning happening right before my eyes. Just a couple of minutes slower than it could have been due to my silly mistakes.

Parents can do this stuff and make a difference. I was new to it all and the learning that occured in the 5 mins of video was more than he learned in 2 terms of SALT in school.

Can I ask, how did you get from the inexpert you 2 years ago to the point where you are now, able to critique yourself and see where you were going wrong?

We are working on a home programme with my DD, we see our consultant once per month and are then left to implement the programme in between. I just do what I think is right based on what I've been taught and observed from her. Other than that I can see my DD is learning new concepts that she wouldn't otherwise be learning if we weren't doing the programme (which is reward in itself), I have no idea whether I could improve my techniques and get more efficient so that the learning was accelerated.

Any top tips from the past 2 years you'd be willing to share? I strongly suspect I'm at the less effective end of this tutoring lark!

I think I just kept reading, watched others if I got the opportunity, attended the occasional workshop or training as well as watching YouTube (and critiquing practice) and videoed myself (although haven't watched for ages).

But my point really is that you don't have to be perfect. Arguably you should not train on your own child but seeing that video had be realising that my poor practice wasn't half as poor as much of the intervention DS received outside of ABA was interesting and has changed my mind.

Thanks. I think I will get my DH to video some of our sessions with DD and then we can critique each other! I'm attending Moondog's workshop so that will be another opportunity for me to pick up tips.

I think girdling really helps tbh. It's a faff but you can see more easily when you have lost attention and sometimes the child's errors can be explained easily by one of your behaviour that you just didn't notice.

I think it is fairly easy to critique yourself on video because the evidence is pretty obvious. You can see smooth performance and then what happens when you make a mistake or blip. The trick I guess is in fast self -correction but you have to know the issue first.

Girlding?

Videoing-obviously!

It's not just mistakes that flag up though.

One or two occasions my slip ups were due to my own frustrations and impatience. I think as a parent it can be hard to recognise those at the time.

Although please don't misunderstand, DS is happy and enjoying every minute of it on the video.

I thought at first girdling must be some super new technique I'd not heard of

Having been videod for work related training I think it will be a useful tool here because, as you say, you can pick things up that in the moment you're just not aware you're doing. I think it will also help me analyse when and why my DD loses attention and what the cues are to this happening.

Thanks for sewing this idea...

I agree absolutely that even poor inexpert aba practice can be more effective than other so called therapy. I was a pretty poor tutor for my dd and eventually gave up to make way for a much better and more enthusiastic, well qualified paid tutor. However, I did manage to teach her that objects had names through some very intensive work and this has made a massive difference to her life. I have also sat in on some very uninspiring and utterly ineffectual speech therapy sessions. I think conventional approaches have a lot to answer for.