Incidental Teaching in ABA Therapy
Incidental teaching is an important and effective part of the multi-faceted ABA therapy we offer at InBloom Autism Services. You can think of incidental teaching as using teachable moments in natural activities to help your child learn and practice new skills.
What Is Incidental Teaching?
To better understand incidental teaching, it may be helpful to discuss the principles that define it.
Natural Environment
The natural environment is an important focus in incidental teaching. This simply means that your child’s therapy takes place in a natural setting and involves real-life situations.
Teaching can happen while your kiddo is playing on our indoor playground with peers, working on a coloring page, or waiting in line for their turn on the slide. Grounding incidental teaching in natural environments helps ensure your child’s new skills carry over into many real-life settings.
Child-Led Interactions
In incidental teaching, your child’s therapist lets your child’s preferences and interests unlock a teaching opportunity. When their interest is sparked, children get excited and are motivated to learn. For example, a child might be playing with toy cars and notices a blue car, their favorite. Their therapist can use this opportunity to work on skills, including asking to play with the car or interacting effectively with other children.
Prompting and Reinforcement
Reinforcement simply refers to ways a child’s therapist can encourage them to repeat a positive skill. This can include verbal praise after they attempt a new skill or the opportunity to play with a toy they’ve asked for.
Prompts are instructions or cues that help a child initiate a skill or behavior. Prompting can include visual cues, verbal prompts, gestures, or modeling.
Reinforcement and prompting both help your child learn and build essential skills.
Key Components of Incidental Teaching
Self-Initiation
Self-initiation simply refers to your child initiating a social interaction. This may be as simple as greeting a friend or asking a peer to play with them. Striking up a conversation, sharing their interests with a peer, or asking questions are essential to social growth and learning, and all require self-initiation. As part of incidental teaching, your child’s therapist can help increase your child’s comfort level with self-initiating.
Free Play
Free play is what it sounds like—unstructured time for your child to take the lead in play. Free play does several important things. It allows your child’s therapist to understand their interests, creates opportunities for teachable moments, and makes learning skills natural and enjoyable.
Child Requests
When your kiddo asks for a toy or expresses interest in playing a game, this opens up a great opportunity for incidental teaching. Your kiddo is excited and motivated to learn because they’re doing something that interests them.
Benefits of Incidental Teaching for Autistic Children
Incidental teaching is an established method within ABA therapy that can benefit your child in many ways.
Learning Naturally
When learning unfolds in a natural setting, your child benefits. Learning is more enjoyable and the skills they learn are more likely to carry over into real-world situations. By working on skills in a natural way, your child can more easily make connections between those skills and real-life situations. Incidental teaching in ABA therapy emphasizes using natural scenarios and environments, helping to ensure this generalization of skills.
Everyday Life Skills
Incidental teaching can help your child to learn and master essential life skills, from brushing their teeth to communicating with others. The naturalistic approach central to incidental teaching equips your child to apply these life skills to many different settings while growing in independence.
Social Skills Development
Through incidental teaching, kiddos can learn and build essential socialization skills. InBloom learning centers feature in-center ABA therapy. In-center therapy gives your child the opportunity to engage with peers in their age group on a regular basis. From playtime to group activities, your child’s therapist will guide them in naturally learning social skills they can carry throughout their life.
Comparison with Other ABA Methods
Discrete Trial Training
Discrete Trial Training (DTT) focuses on teaching specific skills in a structured way, often with a child working 1-on-1 with the therapist. For example, your child and their therapist may sit at a table and work on learning how to raise their hand to ask a question.
While both DTT and incidental teaching are important parts of ABA therapy, incidental teaching is less structured, is often child-initiated, and can be more spontaneous.
Structured vs. Unstructured Learning
Some teaching methods within ABA therapy are structured, and some are more unstructured. Incidental teaching is less structured and more informal. Though the therapist is still actively working toward the goals in your child’s therapy plan, they are doing so more spontaneously. By finding teaching moments during activities, like playtime or a game, your child’s therapist helps make learning enjoyable and natural.
Incidental Teaching Examples
Incidental teaching can take many forms, limited only by your kiddo’s imagination and their therapist’s creativity. Your child may work on tying their shoes while getting ready for playground time. During a group game, they may have the opportunity to practice effective communication skills with other children. They might work on important spatial skills while playing with their favorite blocks.
Incidental teaching fosters success and helps make learning fun for kiddos!
Take the Next Step in Your Autism Therapy Journey
If you are ready to begin your child’s adventure of learning and discovery, join us at InBloom Autism Services. Our exceptional, caring staff is ready to answer your questions and help you navigate starting ABA therapy. Contact us today or call us at 888-754-0398.
