CREATING A WILLING LEARNER 

This two-day workshop is designed to help prepare participants to establish instructional control and teach functional communication skills to students with autism and other developmental disabilities using the principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA) with an emphasis on B.F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior.

• List three methods that can be used to assess a student’s positive reinforcers.
• Describe how unconditioned reinforcers and existing conditioned reinforcers can be used to pair teaching staff, peers, teaching materials and teaching environments with positive reinforcement.
• Define verbal behavior and explain its importance in teaching language skills to students with autism.
• Discuss the need for capturing and contriving motivation when teaching students with autism to request (mand).
• Discuss the importance of a generalized imitative repertoire as it relates to request training (mand training).
• Implement the steps necessary for teaching vocal students to request (mand).
• Decide when an alternative communication response form is necessary.
• Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various augmentative communication systems.
• Identify important variables that should be considered when selecting initial sign targets when teaching non-vocal students to request (mand).
• Demonstrate the steps necessary for teaching non-vocal students to request (mand).
• Employ an efficient and effective data collection system for vocal and non-vocal requesting (manding).
• Describe stimulus-stimulus pairing and its potential benefit in facilitating vocalizations for non-vocal students.