A Deep Dive into Verbal and Non-Verbal Life Skills is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of adult services and community participation. In A Deep Dive into Verbal and Non-Verbal, for this course, the practical stakes show up in service continuity, accurate reporting, and defensible clinical decisions, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via The Verbal Behavior Conference
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Join Free →A casual look at checklists of verbal and non-verbal functional, life skills, like the Assessment of Functional Living Skills (Partington and Mueller, 2012) often results in skills that appear to be quite functional. Some of these skills, however, especially when they are taught with children and adults with moderate-to-severe disabilities, 'turn out not to be' what is required in everyday living. Sometimes these skills are simply the wrong skills, sometimes the context in which they are taught does not resemble the context in which they are expected to occur, sometimes the skills appear to require prerequisite or concurrent skills that turn out 'to be distracting or unnecessary', and sometimes the skills do not result in a critical outcome that is typically expected in everyday living (White, 2014). In each of these situations, what results are skills that are not useful and do not occur as part of activities of everyday living. To resolve this issue, we strongly suggest what we call a 'deep dive' into life skills (McGreevy and Fry, 2012), which includes a thoughtful look at the verbal or non-verbal movements expected from the the learner (White and Haring, 1980), the context in which the skill is taught, whether other verbal or non-verbal movements often taught at the same time are distracting and unnecessary, and if the skill results in an outcome which is critical in everyday living (White, 2014). McGreevy, P., and Fry, T. (2012) Essential for Living. Orlando, FL: Essential for Living, P.A. [essentialforliving.com] Partington, J. W., and Mueller, M. M. (2012). The Assessment of Functional Living Skills [currently unavailable] White, O. R., and Haring, N. G. (1980). Exceptional teaching. Charles E. Merrill Publishing Company [out of print] White. O.R. (2014). Personal communication.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
| COA | 1 | — |
Dr. Patrick McGreevy received B.S. and M.A. degrees in Psychology and Special Education, respectively, from the University of Iowa. He was a special education teacher for eight years, working with children and young adults with moderate-to-severe developmental disabilities. He received the Ph.D. degree in Education from Kansas University under the guidance of Ogden R. Lind sley. He has served on the faculties of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Louisiana State University, the University of Central Florida, and the Florida Institute of Technology. He is the author of Teaching and Learning in Plain English, an introduction to Precision Teaching, and the founder and first editor of the Journal of Precision Teaching and Standard Celeration Charting. He is the author of ten journal articles and a book chapter on teaching verbal behavior. He is the first author of Essential for Living, a functional skills curriculum, assessment, and professional practitioner’s handbook based on B. F. Skinner’s analysis of verbal behavior for children and adults with moderate-to-severe disabilities. For the past 30 years, he has provided consultations for children and adults with developmental disabilities in school districts, residential programs, and hospitals, specializing in the simultaneous management of aggressive and self-injurious behavior and the teaching of communication and language skills to individuals with limited repertoires. He is board certified behavior analyst, has given hundreds of presentations and workshops around the world, and is the recipient of the Ogden R. Lindsley Lifetime Achievement Award of the Standard Celeration Society. He is the President and Director of Consultation and Training Services for Patrick McGreevy, Ph.D., P.A. and Associates.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.