Text Transcript: Stephanie M. Peterson, PH.D.

Welcome everyone.

It's my pleasure to introduce Dr. Stephanie Peterson this afternoon for our second session Dr. Peterson is Professor of psychology and Associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University previously serving as the chair of the Department of psychology for eight years.

She earned her doctorate in special education at the University of Iowa and previously taught at Gonzaga University Utah State University the Ohio State University and Idaho State University.

Her work focuses on Choice making in the treatment of behavior challenges functional communication training and reinforcement based interventions for children with behavior challenges.

So we're really looking forward to listening to speak this afternoon, Stephanie.

And Stephanie's session is title conceptualizing self-determination from a behavior analytic perspective.

Thank you and welcome.

computer so Well, thank you so much.

And and thank you for the invitation to be here.

It's really an honor to be invited to talk to all of you today.

And as I was saying in our sort of pre-conference session here getting ready.

It's a little intimidating and it's It's special intimidating like when you can't see your audience at all.

And so there's not a lot of nonverbal feedback from people.

So I really invite your comments questions today as we talk also three hours is like a really long time to be engaged with a computer screen.

And so I you know, I just really encourage you to ask questions make comments.

I welcome those and hope that some of this can be a little bit of a conversation instead of Me talking to a screen and you listening to a screen?

So I'm going to attempt to share my slides now.

I'll get started.

And share sound.

Okay one sec.

Navigating multiple screens.

Okay.

You can see my slides.

Yes.

The only person I can see is The Interpreter.

So yes we can okay.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

So again, thank you for inviting me to speak here today.

And I I'm aware that some people in the audience are Behavior analysts and some are not so some of the things I have in here are sort of geared toward those of you who are Behavior analysts in terms of how you might think about some of these things from as a behavior analyst and and I hope there's something in here for everybody else as well in terms of how we all work together to Help children that we work with who have autism and other developmental disabilities to really become as self-fulfilled as possible and engaged in their communities and family life as possible.

So just a little bit more about me.

Thank you for the kind introduction, but I thought it might be helpful for me to just give a little bit more detail on my background.

I started my career as a special education teacher after my undergraduate training and and in Iowa when I was trained as a teacher.

Um, they were very categorical as a state meaning when you got certified to teach in special education.

You got certified to teach very specific distinct groups of individuals.

So my undergraduate training was really in how to teach children who have mild to moderate mental disabilities.

Oh and just let me add when I did the share screen.

I can no longer see the chat.

So I'll rely on Shelley to let me know if there's something that I should know or question.

That's come up.

Okay Shelley.

okay, so when I did my undergraduate training my certification was In my my teaching was to work with children who had mild to moderate mental disabilities and I began my teaching career.

Working in a classroom with children who had mild to moderate learning disabilities, but also had I had some children who had learning disabilities and some who had at that time.

We called it behavior disorders.

And so that Type of classroom required me to go back for graduate degree and get a second area of certification and I ended up getting my master's degree in working with children who had emotional and behavior disorders.

Shortly after that I started working in an outpatient clinic setting with the person who taught my last behavioral assessment class, which was Dr. David wacker.

And Dave had appointments in the department of pediatrics at the University as well as in school psychology and special education.

So I started working in one of his outpatient clinics, which was aimed at helping families who had young children who really had Oppositional Defiant Disorder types of issues.

And then from there I started working in another one of his outpatient clinics, which was aimed at individuals who had more severe disabilities and more importantly had very severe and chronic problem Behavior.

So I studied with him and worked in that clinic.

So my doctoral work really focused on Behavior Analysis behavioral pediatrics.

And very severe behavior problems.

From there as mentioned.

I've taught at a few different universities and taught for most of my career actually taught courses and special education.

So I was teaching undergraduate and graduate courses to people who wanted to become special education teachers.

And in part of as part of that one of the courses I taught in Idaho was a secondary education course that focused on transition services for young adults.

And so we talked a lot about things like self-determination and you know, because at least in the United States when people turn 16 you have to have a transition plan as part of the IEP and part of that transition plan consisted of asking individuals.

What do you want to do with your life?

Do you want to go to work after you graduate from high school?

Do you want to go to college?

Do you want to live at home?

Do you want to get your own apartment?

And so the focus of that course was really about Thinking about that transition process as an interesting aside a lot of my students in that class really wanted to be Elementary education teachers.

And so they were a little miffed.

They had to take this class.

But in Idaho people were certified K through 12, so they had to be prepared to teach secondary even if that's not what they were planning to do and I told them it was really important for them to think about.

Even if they're thinking about working with children who are younger, it's really important for them to think about these secondary transition age students because ultimately the kids they're teaching that's where they're heading and it was important for them to think at these early ages about the skills that they needed to be teaching.

So that when children reach that transition age, they've got the skills necessary to engage in self-determination and and transition responses.

So and I got a lot of feedback from students that that was not something they had thought much about So people who were thinking about being like a kindergarten teacher weren't thinking about what the skills were a person needed to have as a young adult.

And so in this presentation today, you're going to see me talk about or hear me talk about Really the the lifespan of individuals from adulthood, you know down to very young children and I'm doing that purposefully because I think it's really important at all of those levels that we're thinking about self-determination.

We're not we shouldn't be waiting until children are 16 17 18 years old and beginning to transition into adulthood to start thinking about it.

These are things we really have to think about Very early on with children if they're going to be well prepared.

later to make those transitions so I hope you'll tolerate sort of that bouncing around to the different age levels that we're going to talk about.

So why should we even be talking about self-determination?

well for those of you who are not Behavior analysts one of the things in my field that is sort of a very Central thing that we discuss all the time are the seven dimensions of Applied Behavior Analysis, or you know that constitute what applied behavior analysis is And one of those seven dimensions is the applied Dimension meaning as a behavior analyst our work is applied.

Well, what does the word applied mean?

The word applied to us means that?

It's important that when we select behaviors.

to work on with an individual we are selecting behaviors that are socially significant.

And by socially significant, we mean that these are behaviors that are going to produce the most significant change.

For the individual with whom we're working.

And that that change is going to maintain over time.

Equally important the behaviors that we're targeting for change.

Should be important to the individual with whom we're working.

So I don't select these behaviors because they're important to me as the interventionist.

But I select them because they're important to the child.

With whom I'm working or the If the child is not old enough yet to really maybe Express that clearly it's something that's important to the family so that they can function as a family better.

They can go out in the community more easily.

They can do the things they want to do as a family more easily.

And so the idea here is that we're targeting.

A behaviors that are going to allow that individual to function in their environment more effectively and that's not always for me to say what those behaviors are.

So there must be some pretty good communication going on between myself and that child and that child's family.

And this is significant because these days as as many of you may be well aware.

There are a lot of concerns being expressed about applied Behavior analysts and an applied Behavior Analysis as a field and how we interact with our constituency.

So this has always been a central theme in our field.

but I think Now more than ever.

This is an important thing for us to really be thinking about and looking inward about.

whether we're giving this dimension of Applied Behavior Analysis enough thought and I think when we start thinking about self-determination, That ties directly to this applied dimension of behavior analysis.

Asking the individuals were working with what's important to you.

What are the things you want to work on?

In what context do you want to work on those behaviors?

Really?

helps Center us and ensure that we are engaging in our practice appropriately and not engaging in the inappropriate practices that some people are expressing concerns about So I think like as a field and as we think about our own practice as professionals, it's important for us to be thinking about self-determination.

And you know as if thinking about it because of the individual individuals we work with should be important enough just in and of itself but so there are multiple reasons why we should be thinking about this issue.

So the workshop we're going to do today really focuses centers around.

This paper that I co-authored with several of my now former students.

and we started having a conversation about Self-determination and what that looks like?

from a behavioral perspective and we stipulate that.

self-determination really centers around some common themes themes of choice making themes of self-control and themes of self-management so we wrote about that in this paper and I just want to provide this paper reference to you in case you're interested in in going to read that by itself.

We're going to talk about most of the concepts.

That we presented in this paper today.

And I'm what I'm hoping to do in the latter parts of this talk is to just walk you through some of the research that's been done in the areas of choice self-control and self-management to illustrate ways.

This has been implemented.

In hopes that maybe it gives you a couple of ideas for ways you might implement this in your own practice in the schools.

Trying to keep an eye on my time and I'll let you know.

I'm going to try to take a couple of breaks here at the top of each hour.

So that people can do the Necessities that they may need to do.

So.

All right.

So before we begin to my daughter this this is my daughter.

She is now 17 or 18 years old.

She probably killed me if she saw this picture.

This picture was more like when she was in about 5th grade and we were taking a trip.

To Florida probably because that's where my parents live and we would drive down there frequently.

So we have these long car trips and she'd bring books that she would like to read and I don't know if you all are familiar with Scholastic book orders, but here in the US that's a common thing where in school they get these book order forms and kids could order books and get them delivered to the classroom.

And so she ordered this book and brought it on the trip with us and and this book is called would you rather?

um And it's over 300 quite crazy questions that are wonderfully weird.

And on this road trip.

My daughter was going through this book and it had a whole bunch of questions that were Silly and would you rather but I thought they'd be kind of a fun way for us to start thinking about Choice as we enter this conversation today.

So I wish I could see the chat so I could see your answers to this.

But here's one.

Would you rather a hermit crab make its home in your ear or in your mouth?

I don't know about you, but I would be like neither.

So that's one of those choices were between two evils.

Maybe choose neither.

But how about this one, would you rather?

Naturally give off a strong Wi-Fi signal or be able to make sounds of a drum set by smacking different parts of your body.

I answered this one.

I'd rather give off a strong Wi-Fi signal because then I'd have Wi-Fi wherever I was.

regardless of my self-service How about this one?

Would you rather Burt ping pong balls or hiccup jelly beans?

Would you rather sneeze fireflies or yawn hummingbirds?

Okay.

These are all just kind of fun and silly.

Pretty impossible really?

So in that essence, none of these that I just presented you are really choices that that you have but they're kind of fun to think about So now I'd like you to just think for a moment.

About all of the choices that you made in the last 24 hours.

so last night you might have decided what you were going to drink with your dinner.

You might have considered what time you had to get up this morning and whether you were going to have a glass of wine with dinner or not.

You may have decided what time you would get up this morning.

Whether you would exercise before breakfast or before coming to this webinar.

You might have decided whether or not you would shower what to wear.

You probably made a decision about whether or not to eat breakfast and if you did choose to eat breakfast you decided what to eat.

You might have decided.

I'm not sure if you had choice of what sessions to attend for today's webinar, but certainly had probably had the choice whether to attend or not or go do something else.

And by the way, I'm honored that you chose to come and sit through this webinar today.

So my point here is that already today.

You've made many many choices.

And your ability to make those choices and execute those choices?

Makes you a pretty functional adult.

Most of the time anyway, so we might consider you as an adult who is independent.

free I'll put that word in quotes because that means a lot of different things to a lot of people.

And a relatively productive member of society.

So now I'd like you to think about how your morning might be different if you were an individual who has severe and possible multiple disabilities For example, let's assume that maybe you use a wheelchair for Mobility.

And let's say you have spastic cerebral palsy.

And maybe you have an intellectual disability.

Let's say for example, you don't have a lot of.

vocal verbal skills in your repertoire Maybe due to your cerebral palsy.

Maybe the last couple of days would have looked a lot different for you in terms of the number of choices you had so for example You might if you were an adult.

You might live in a group home with other individuals and staff and I'm just imagining some of the clients I work with here.

in my community in Kalamazoo your day might have looked a lot different because you may not have had a choice about what time you got up this morning because the staff may have woken you up when they needed you to get up and get moving because Things were happening in the group home that you needed to be there for you may not have had.

A lot of choices about what you're going to have for breakfast today or what you were going to wear or whether you're going to shower or not because it may have depended on what staff were available to help you with some of those things.

because of your Mobility you may not be able to go out in the community when you want to because you have to wait for when staff can take you or when Transportation is available.

So I'm trying to illustrate here an extreme.

Situation that I know is not all situations, but I'm just trying to contrast.

The Continuum that we might think about when we're thinking about an individual's Independence and how that might impact their autonomy and self-determination.

So in our article that we wrote We challenged people to really think about what is the purpose of Education?

in a Democratic Society and if you go to the literature to try to identify the purpose of Education, you're going to find a lot of different opinions on this topic.

and in fact if you ever listen to Ted Talks, there's a there's a TED Talk where they talk about this and and the presenter.

said that he put out a call on the internet and said tell me what you think the purpose of Education is in a Democratic Society and I think there were something like 350 responses very quickly and no two of those responses were the same you got 350 different opinions.

So it's really difficult to sort of come to.

a standardized purpose statement of education, but for today's talk I'm going to use a conceptualization by John Dewey who is one of the most well-known educational philosophers.

Who?

Said that really the the purpose of education is to prepare individuals to participate in a Democratic Society.

And what does that mean?

Well, that means that the purpose of our education system is maybe to help individuals.

Exercise their rights and responsibilities that are afforded by a democracy and to protect the rights of others and responsibilities of others afforded by democracy.

And so You could drill that down maybe a little further to say that the purpose of Education.

In a Democratic Society is for people to be able to exercise the freedoms and choices that are afforded to them by that type of society and I would argue what that means.

If you wanted to Define exercising freedoms and choices.

I think that means living a self-determined life.

And so arguably if all of us in this room are educators.

I guess I would argue that that our purpose in educating all the children we work with is to help them learn to live a self-determined life.

So I thought this quote from John Dewey was really very interesting.

He's you may have gathered.

He's one of my most favorite educational philosophers, and I've read a lot of his work.

this quote says only as the coming generation learns in the schools to understand the social forces that are at work.

The directions and cross directions in which they are moving.

the consequences that they are producing the consequences that they might produce if they were understood and managed with intelligence.

Only as the schools provide this understanding have we any assurance that they are meeting the challenge which is put to them by democracy.

So in this quote do we seems to be suggesting that one of the primary aims of Education?

Is to understand the consequences of our actions.

and to manage our actions and even to manage the consequences of my actions in a way that furthers a democratic and and I would argue that means a self-determined society.

So so we get to this concept now of self-determination and In if you are in education and you work with young adults, you have undoubtedly heard this word a lot in your training and hopefully in your conversations with other.

teachers and practitioners and so I'm going to ask you to just think about what that word means to you for a minute waymire.

Is one of the leading people who talks about self-determine the most in the literature and he defines self-determination.

As acting as the primary causal agent in one's life.

and making decisions free from external influences So that is self-determination is a set of actions that allows one to act as one's own agent.

To maintain or improve the quality of your life.

So this is a pretty abstract term.

It's used frequently in the disabilities literature to refer to the ability of an individual.

To determine for him or herself.

outcomes that he or she desires so I would venture to guess that all of you in this room are fairly self-determined individuals in the sense that you make your own choices.

about what to eat and when where to live and with whom to live what to wear each day what how to earn your money what to do with the money you earn If you choose to go to school to further your education or not.

in short self-determined people determine a get to cause things to happen in their life rather than having things happen to them.

Often this concept of self-determination is associated with quality of life.

So the more self-determined you are the higher the quality of life you experience that's kind of the big idea behind self-determination.

So perhaps one could argue that the ultimate goal of education is to produce self-determined adults.

But I think given the abstract nature of the term self-determination.

It can be difficult to really think about what skills need to be taught.

In order to have it in order to be self-determined.

And for those of you who are in the room who are Behavior analysts.

I think that as Behavior analysts sometimes when we encounter.

Terms like this that are hard to Define hard to measure.

There can be a tendency for us to sort of.

Push that aside and say I don't know how to think about that in a behavior analytic perspective.

So I'm just going to keep doing what I do.

And hope I'm doing okay over there and I'm suggesting that.

We can Define this in a in an operational way that allows us to figure out what skills we want to teach or we need to teach and how we approach this so.

My goal for you today is to like to really think about those things and to think about what skills we can teach in order to make sure people come out as self-determined individuals as much as possible as they leave the education system.

So let's move into what some of those ideas might be.

as I just said This is a concept that's associated with quality of life.

And Very much.

So it's it's all about the act of making choices in my estimation.

It's one I want to talk a little bit more about that.

So the questions that I hope we can get to today are questions about what skills are involved.

When it comes to self-determination and how we might approach teaching those skills.

There might be other questions.

I don't think we'll answer this one today, but maybe you can think about this one a little bit after our discussion is how do we know when self-determination has been achieved?

It's a really difficult thing to measure.

Maybe you never achieve it fully.

Maybe it's a journey and we're always working to improve it.

I do want to note that some of the research.

I'm going to talk about with you today.

You're going to look at the dates on the studies and think gee like that study was done quite some time ago.

How come she's not presenting more current research to us on this and I just want to mention that my some other students of mine and I recently did a literature review and found that.

There's only 15 papers.

In the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis since 1990 that even mentioned self-determination.

So there aren't a ton of papers.

That even talk about this so I'm just going to offer my apology that some of the research I'm going to presenting to you isn't.

Like 2020 ish, but I still think it has important meaning for us today and also tells us we've known how to do these things for quite some time.

And that maybe we need to be doing a little more work in this area presently.

So waymire in shorts and Lohman identified the following component skills as being important with respect to self-determination and they listed Choice making decision making goal setting problem solving self-regulation self-monitoring and self-evaluation So we're going to talk about some of these today and I want to begin just thinking about Choice making for a minute.

I have a colleague.

Happens to be married to me and live in my house.

So the personal communication on this happens all the time in my house, but he's got a saying that really resonates with me.

And that's saying is choice is only choice.

When you know what your choices are.

And you have the ability to act upon them.

So this is a construct.

We really have to think about with self-determination.

If we're going to argue that choice making is a major component of self-determination.

So let's just think about that again choices only choice.

When you know what your choices are and you have the ability to act upon them.

So I want to pick this apart just a little bit.

All right, let's start with examining this part of the phrase when you know what your choices are.

So as I said, we make choices all the time and on some level.

All Behavior can be conceptualized as choice.

Which behavior you decide to display at any given point in time is actually a choice whether you're cognizant of what that you're making it or not.

So for example, all of you are making choices right now.

You are making a choice to look at the screens and attend to my verbal Behavior as opposed to pulling up Facebook and scrolling through that while you're listening versus answering a text that just came through on your phone and trust me.

I do all those things too.

So I know you're doing it probably at some level today.

And we're going to come back to this notion in a minute, but we call those pre-operant choices.

Meaning nobody is standing in front of you right now and saying do you want to look at Facebook or do you want to look at these slides?

It's just be they're just choices that are available to you and you are acting on those choices.

All of these kinds of things are our choices, we make repeatedly throughout every day.

However, there's also times when we do face what I'm going to refer to as discrete choices.

For example, if you went out for breakfast and you were asked would you like wheat toast or white toast with your eggs?

You're being asked to make a discrete choice at that moment.

And so in all of these instances we need to discriminate that a choice is available to me at this moment.

and quite often as we make those choices, we're thinking about the ramifications of those choices right like When I'm asked do I want whole wheat or white toast?

If I'm trying to lose weight, I might say well I I think maybe I should choose the wheat toast because maybe it doesn't turn to sugar quite as fast and maybe I won't gain as much weight if I eat that or a whole grain and so I'm weighing out the ramifications of my choice before I make the decision.

And many of you probably did that throughout the day as you make choices you you may think about things and like what I want to wear today and what the ramifications of those choices are given the activities that you have planned for the day.

Um, you may do those really fast and you may not even realize you're doing it sometimes because you're so fluent at it.

but I would venture to guess many times you are actually weighing some of those options.

So these are those are skills that you have acquired.

Over your lifetime and you've done them so many times.

That you've practiced them a lot.

You've become very quick at those behaviors and they're probably occurring.

Very subtly and almost unconsciously for you at this point.

But I don't think that means we should ignore that.

It's happening.

Okay.

Now let's consider another part of that statement.

And you have the ability to act upon them.

So a choice I would argue that a choice is not really a choice if you don't have the ability to engage in that behavior.

For example, if you're going to if you say I need to wake up.

At 6 o'clock tomorrow morning in order to shower eat breakfast and get out the door to get to my first appointment on time.

There's a whole bunch of skills that you have to engage in in order to help you do that.

For example, I have to be able to Think backwards like if I need to be at this appointment at 8 o'clock I have and it takes me 20 minutes to get there and I want to get there 10 minutes early.

So I have time to set up my computer.

Okay, and then I have to go and it generally takes me this long to shower and eat breakfast and get out the door.

So I've got to get up at 6:00.

So I've got to be able to sort of like count backwards and make sure I'm gonna have enough time.

I have to know how to let's say I use my alarm on my phone.

So I've got to be able to set an alarm on my phone.

um In order to get out the door on time.

I need to know how to put on my clothes I need to.

Know what clothes I'm going to choose to wear have them clean right?

There's a whole bunch of skills involved in getting up on time and getting out the door.

If I don't have those skills in my repertoire.

Then me making a choice to get up and do those things isn't really an option for me because I I can't do the behaviors.

So here what we see in my opinion is that education is very directly linked.

To a person's ability to make choices as Educators.

Our job is to teach kids a lot of skills.

And of course their parents also teach them a lot of skills, but we have our role in teaching those skills.

And so for example, I'm just going to say if if I don't have the ability to read then my choices for employment are significantly limited so I can say I want to be And editor for magazine, but if I can't read that's not really a choice that is available to me.

So the better job we do in educating children in basic skills, like Reading Writing and arithmetic and other functional daily living skills the more choices.

the kids we work with have and if you're in doubt just consider that any high school graduate.

And his or her potential for options for college and their earning power after that.

Is very significantly impacted.

So I'm just going to skip this I'm going to skip ahead of slide.

Sorry.

These are data from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics that show the median weekly earnings for individuals with less than a high school diploma on the left side of the screen.

Versus the median weekly earnings for individuals with a high school diploma.

But no College.

on the right So if you look that in 2004.

You can see the annual difference if you add up their weekly earnings and you see a hundred hundred dollar difference there 173 dollar difference.

As an difference of annual sorry weekly earnings for people.

So that's a pretty big impact just for whether you have a high school diploma or not.

Imagine what it the differences if you have a college diploma, so there's important things to consider their people who are well educated have more choices.

They can earn more income.

They have more job choices.

They can go to college or not.

So there's a lot of different options there.

So on this slide what I'm suggesting here.

is sorry my notes.

I gotta go back on here.

What we suggested in our article then is that the purpose of Education?

If we're going to think about it.

Being leading to self-determination.

In our estimation there were three big groups of skills that we need to work on.

In an education system to lead to that and the first one are the skills.

We just talked about basic academic social vocational and activities of daily living.

So as teachers of children, this is a huge.

Responsibility to for us to make sure we're targeting those kinds of skills.

now, I think that's what most of us think of Education as pretty consistently so I'm not going to spend a lot of time today talking about those.

I'm going to assume that you've spent a lot of your training thinking about those and learning how to teach those things.

But the fact that I'm not talking about them today doesn't mean I don't think they're critically important indeed.

I think they are very important because that having the ability to act on the choices.

This is crucial to that part of that phrase.

But another very important area.

For us to think about is self-control.

So we're going to spend some time today talking about self-control.

what that means how we teach it and why it fits into this Paradigm of self-determination, and then we're also going to talk about self-management as another important area So what I'm thinking is it's 12:51 according to my clock right now.

This seems like a good time.

It's a good break in the slides.

And so what I'd like to do is take like a 10 minute break.

Could we meet back here at okay now my clock says 12:52, so we'll meet here at 102 and we'll regroup.

And at that time I'll ask Shelly if she can share any questions that you have and then we'll start talking about self-control and what that is.

So just as folks are coming back as Shelly here.

I'm going to put the first bacb continuing education code.

In the chat and it's three one five eight zero.

Five typed it correctly.

It should be going into the chat as we speak.

So there was just one question.

And and one of the participants was wondering would it be fair to say that every individual's definition or skill set of what makes up self-determination would be at least to some extent based on that individual's.

I guess they're on them as an individual and on their context as well.

Absolutely.

I think it's highly individualized across people depending on what their preferences are.

For just about everything you could imagine, right?

For just to give an example of that in in my community.

There's a group of individuals who?

Have a farm and it's a working farm.

And they've made it available for people who have disabilities who would like to do farm work to come and work on that farm.

And it's very interesting in this state.

The the state will not allow any funding to go to that farm.

to help support the employment of those individuals because there's history in the state a long long time ago.

There were some Farms that had individuals with disabilities working on them, but they like took advantage right and didn't pay them what the fair wage and all of that and so now if if you're running like a farm and you want to hire people disabilities, you can't get any funding to have support people to support that individual and I think that's really sad because we have people who want to work on farms, right?

Like that's part of Their self-determination that's where I want to work.

But there seems to be a judgment that farm work is not appropriate for people with disabilities.

And so for me that goes to the heart of this matter of self-determination.

It's is it up to the state to say farm work is not something that we're going to support.

though I appreciate you know, the fact that they don't condone what happened before because that's important, but But everybody's gonna have their own definition right of what they want to do with their life.

And so what that's going to look like for any individuals going to be very different.

Thank you so much.

And that was the only question so I'll just mention again that the bacb continuing education code is in the chat for anyone who's looking for the first one and we are interested in self-control and self-man, right?

All right.

I'll share screen again.

see Okay, here we go.

All right, so in our paper, as I said, we talked about a party goer as an example just to sort of get the ball rolling of thinking about self-control and self-management and So I want you to imagine that you've been invited to a party with friends.

And you know that maybe this is like this.

This all resonates with me.

So sorry if it doesn't resonate with you doing the best I can but so let's say I'm invited to a party to go out and do something with friends one night, but I know I have to get up and give a workshop tomorrow three hour Workshop to a group of people and furthermore.

You know, I'm working really hard on trying not to gain weight.

So there's a lot to think about when I think about going to this party, right?

Like how am I gonna exercise the self-control I need at this party, so let's say Let's see if I can advance my slide.

There we go.

The friends are like, hey, come join us.

Come have a drink and I know that if I consume that glass of wine, I might be likely to have another glass of wine and then I might not do so.

Well in my presentation tomorrow and I might not do so.

Well on my weight loss goals.

So I've got a lot of things to That are going to go through my head at that moment.

First of all, I have to discriminate that a choice is available to me.

Do I want to have a drink or not?

I have to know what my choices are.

What are all the options I have?

What are the ramifications of my choices?

So thinking about that do equal understanding the consequences of my actions.

What are the contingencies of punishment like gaining weight not being ready for my presentation the next day might be punishing consequences to me though having that drink right now might taste pretty good and my Be the thing.

I need to relax at the end of a tough day.

So I got away those out and I've got to make a selection and then engage in the selection.

So so there's a lot that has to go on there.

And so, you know, like these are things that might be thinking about I have to get up early tomorrow if I want to meet my weight loss goal.

I better not have a drink.

So I have to discriminate all these different choices make a choice and execute it.

so I'm going to go back to this idea that almost all operant behavior can be considered choice and what I mean by operant behavior is most of our Behavior behaviors that we would consider voluntary behaviors not reflexive behaviors, but voluntary behaviors, and we talked earlier about What I would call free operant Choice, which is just you know, you sitting there listening and and then switching over to Facebook.

That's a free operant Choice.

Nobody asked you do you want to do Facebook right now versus a force choice where somebody says do you want this or that When you need one thing that's important to understand that the choices we make under either of these contexts are very much affected by various aspects of reinforcement.

So for example one aspect of reinforcement that's going to impact.

My any choice I make is going to be the rate of reinforcement for each of the two choices.

Um, that is a behavior that gets more reinforcement is going to happen more often than a behavior or is going to be selected more often than a behavior that gets less reinforcement.

Example in a classroom if a child.

Is wanting some teacher attention.

They might.

Be able to raise their hand and get teacher attention, but that might not always work.

As opposed to if I get out of my seat and run across the room and hit appear.

I'm almost undoubtedly going to get the teachers attention.

So the behavior that child chooses might be very much impacted by their history.

Of hand raising not working every time but it works sometimes whereas the other Behavior.

Pretty much works every time in terms of getting teacher attention.

Quality of reinforcement is going to impact your choices.

So behaviors that produce very high quality reinforcement are going to be more likely to occur or be selected then behaviors that produce low quality reinforcement.

So I'll go back to that example.

I just used of the child racing their hand or going to hit up here.

You could imagine a situation that when a child raises his hand for attention the teacher might say yes, do you need help versus If the child gets up and runs across the room and hits a peer it might result in a commotion lots of pure attention a teacher being having very excited attention.

And so the quality of that attention might be higher for hitting the peer than raising the hand and in that moment, then the behavior that's more likely to be selected is going to be hitting the pier.

immediacy of reinforcement is important to think about as well if one behavior in my repertoire gets Reinforcement almost immediately.

It's going to be more likely to be selected than a behavior that is going to produce a more delayed reinforcer.

So if I raise my hand the teacher might not come right away, but if I run across the room and hit appear, it's probably going to result in very immediate attention.

And then there's response effort.

Responses that are easier for us to engage in are more likely to be selected than behaviors that are more difficult for us to do so find faced with a choice.

I can do X or Y and X is a lot easier for me to do than why I'm probably going to select X so you can see like in the example I gave you about the child raising their hand or running across the room and hitting the pier.

if the rate of reinforcement quality of reinforcement and immediacy of reinforcement is all in favor of hitting the pier.

versus raising hand the odds are pretty well stacked in favor of that child making a choice to hit the pier as opposed to raise the hand.

So let me show you a diagram that sort of illustrates this and then shortly here.

We'll talk about how that affects self-control.

all right, so Palmer in 2009 used this metaphor of our bodies as sort of being like a flask and if you look in this picture, you see at the bottom of the flask.

There's a whole bunch of little circles.

Each of those circles really really.

Sorry.

I can't speak.

Represents, that's the word I was looking for represents.

A behavior that's in the child's repertoire.

so those are all what we call like the dormant behaviors that are in the repertoire and depending on the context of the situation any one of those behaviors may become relevant.

And as behaviors become relevant, they sort of float up higher in the flask.

So you see on the left side of this flask.

It says response probability low to high.

As the context demands certain behaviors or certain behaviors are relevant.

Some of those behaviors are going to become more probable because the context fits right?

But at the top of the flask there's a bottleneck.

So a couple two or three responses may have sort of risen to the top.

And are now competing to say which which one of these is the child going to display at any given point in time.

And then one of those behaviors will sort of Escape out of the top of the flask and the question is which ones going to be the one that escapes who's gonna which one's gonna win that response competition and In the research literature we talk about something called the generalized matching law, which basically says the response that's going to come out of the top of that flask is going to be the one that gets the most reinforcement.

So there's a little formula over there on the right that has Behavior one.

Divided by Behavior two so looking at that proportion.

How often is behavior one going to occur relative to behavior two?

Is pretty much equal to the reinforcement either rate immediacy?

Quality and and the response effort that we talked about in the last slide.

You know Behavior one the rate of reinforcement that's associated with it compared to the rate of reinforcement Associated to behavior, too.

Is going to determine which one wins and which one wins is going to be in direct proportion to the rate of reinforcement.

So if Behavior one is twice as likely to get reinforced as opposed to behavior, too.

Then you're gonna see Behavior one twice as many times as you see Behavior too occur.

okay, so that's it's important to understand this concept as we get into talking about self-control because if the rates of those rates of reinforcement are occurring and causing an individual to select one response or the other and the other response is the one that's really more habilitative for that child.

We got to think about how we're going to deal with that response competition.

So this is just a little.

I just had a little animation to say we've got these two responses and let's say in the example of our partygoer.

Am I going to choose to have a beer or a glass of water?

Well, you know choosing that glass of water is what we would refer to as the self-controlled response.

Why do we refer to it as the self-controlled response?

because I'm going to get a better reinforcer, which is not gaining weight maybe doing well in my presentation tomorrow.

So we might think that's a larger reinforcer, but it's later right?

That's I'm not going to see that result on the scale or the impact on my talk until sometime tomorrow.

So we call that a larger later reinforcer.

And when you make a choice that you choose to engage in the behavior that's going to get you the larger later reinforce or we call that a self-controlled response.

You might think about this as like saving for retirement is another example of a self-controlled response.

I can either spend my money now, or I can put it in the bank and and have it multiply so I get a larger reinforcer but quite a bit later.

So that would be the self-controlled response if I chose it.

On the other hand, I might have lesser reinforcement sooner or we call this a smaller sooner reinforcer so I could choose to have that glass of wine now.

It's immediate.

And it helps me like it's what I want to drink right now.

It sounds really good.

It's gonna taste really good.

And we might call that the impulsive response that means so I'm going to accept the smaller sooner reinforcedure and then pay the price tomorrow at the scale and maybe and my presentation and our job is to think about how do we help?

children and other individuals we work with develop these self-controlled responses quite often people think about self-control as this sort of inborn innate.

thing that you have or you don't and what I'd like to suggest is this is not a personality trait that you either have or you don't these are skills that you learn over time, but they have to be taught so we can talk about how to teach those.

Okay, that's just my example.

So I want to illustrate.

in this concept in something called the marshmallow test.

I'm not sure how many of you have heard of this but this is like a famous experiment you can find lots of videos of this on YouTube and we'll just watch this for a minute to really understand the concept and then we'll start talking about how we teach self control.

So I'm going to click on this and see if I can.

Make the video Work Shelly if it's not working and you can't hear it.

Please let me know.

Okay, make it big.

Okay, isn't that sure?

All right.

Here's the deal marshmallow for you.

You can either wait and I'll give you another one if you wait, or you can eat it now.

When I come back, I'll give you another one.

So then you'll have to but stay in here and stay in the chair till I come back.

Okay?

All right.

I'm gonna go do something and then I'll come back.

here All right, so it's up to you can have it now or you can wait.

Okay.

I'll be back stay in the chair.

Okay?

Okay.

you All right, so I'm gonna leave and then I'll come back.

Okay?

You can either eat it right now or you can wait either way, okay.

Okay.

How'd you do?

Did you do good you did you wanted to eat it?

Didn't you?

Yeah, so tell you to give you another one.

Okay, now you can have both.

You need them.

Okay, so that was a great example of what we're talking about with self-control.

When you do that test with young children most children will eat that marshmallow.

They take the smaller sooner.

reinforcer rather than getting the larger later reinforcer because many children haven't developed those skills of self-control.

So what what is how do we teach this skill if we want to teach children self-controlled responses?

So if you think about self-control this is this right here is what I have Illustrated is basically the marshmallow test, right?

So the kids are given a choice.

You can either have the marshmallow now, which is the smaller sooner or the SS response here.

Or you can wait and have the larger later response and if you're working with children who are displaying this the choice of smaller sooner and you want to help them develop some of these waiting skills, then usually what we do is use something called a progressive delay teaching procedure.

So what does that look like?

Well one way to do this is to present the children with the choice and basically equate the two time periods.

So you can either have the smaller reinforcer now or you can have the larger reinforcer.

Now the idea here get the children choosing this to start with even though these times are equivalent and then over time you slowly start stretching out.

The requirement for the larger later, so I might start with you know, smaller sooner being you can have it immediately versus larger later.

If you wait one second, you can have the two marshmallows and once you start experiencing success with that, maybe two seconds.

I you can form some kind of rule about how you're going to multiply the time period until ultimately you've got the larger later stretched out now to the same original.

Context but now the child is choosing the larger later reinforcer.

There are several studies in the literature that support this kind of teaching procedure and show that you can establish self-controlled responses in individuals using such a procedure and I'll just walk you through an example here in a minute and Neef and colleagues in 2001 also showed that if I train that Self-control response in one context I can even get it to transfer to other dimensions of reinforcement for that same situation.

So let me show you one study that was published by passage and colleagues in 2012.

And the participant I'm going to show you the data on is Stevie.

He's a 16 year old.

Boy with mild mental retardation.

Yes, spastic cerebral palsy and is cortically blind.

He had difficulty engaging in tasks for extended periods of time the task that he was working on was a match to sample workbook page where he had to like draw lines from matched items on a workbook page and then they had another task for him that they considered a generalization task.

And in this case, it was sorting markers.

So they conducted a natural Baseline first and they placed the task in front of Stevie showed him how to do it and then gave an instruction for him to do the task and then just left him alone to work on the task.

And so these are the results of his natural Baseline.

They took data on how long he would work on that task before stopping and going to do something else.

And so in this case he had an average of 42 seconds that he would work on that task before doing.

You know stopping that task and doing something else.

So next they did what they called a choice Baseline and this Baseline was identical to the original Baseline, except they held up two picture cards associated with Different stimuli one of which was more preferred and one of which was less preferred and they identified these as more or less preferred based on what we refer to as a multiple stimulus without replacement preference assessment and all that means is they would have put something like eight or ten items on a table kind of in a semicircle around Stevie and said which one do you want to do?

And he would select one and engage in it for short period of time after which they would say, okay my turn and they would remove that stimulus or that item and then but the rest of the array is still in front of Stevie and say what do you want to do next and he would pick the next item and so on until all eight items had been selected and that would give them sort of a rank order of his preference for those stimuli.

So once they had identified those they said to Stevie if you would like to receive this less preferred reinforcer for doing nothing.

Point to that card if you would like to do the task until I tell you to stop.

And get the more preferred reinforcer point to that one.

So now he's got a choice.

I can either completely opt out of the task and Immediately get this less preferred reward or I can work on my task for a period of time and get this more preferred work.

And in this case, they made the target duration of time for selecting.

I'll do the task until you tell me to stop they were asking him to do that for 168 seconds.

So what that's like a little less than three minutes.

I think that their hypothesis was he would never select working on the task because that was four times the amount of time.

He was working on it in the Baseline and surprisingly he chose as you can see here by the the triangles indicate choosing the more preferred delayed reinforcer and you can see that he actually chose that very frequently.

So Next they increased the amount of time that he had to work on that task if he chose the more preferred reward and when they did that at first he selected it three times and actually did the work but subsequent to that.

He stopped selecting it and chose the more immediate less preferred.

And so he just opted out of the task so clearly when they jumped the time period up to 420 seconds.

It was just too long for him.

And so now they did self-control training.

So in this one, they backed off the requirement for the more preferred reinforced more preferred reinforcer to make it equivalent to the Natural Baseline.

So now he's got a choice you can either completely opt out.

And get the less preferred reinforcer or you can work on a task for 42 seconds and get the more preferred reinforcer and they chose that because it during that Baseline he clearly showed he was already working for at least 42 seconds.

So there was a high degree of probability that he would be successful and earn both select and earn that preferred reinforce, sir.

So they did this and if he chose earning the more preferred reinforcer.

Frequently and he reached the Criterion.

They would repeat this and slowly increase the time until he reached 10 times the Baseline which was 422 seconds.

Which I did that math the other day.

I think that's what Close to five minutes, I think.

Can't do public math when I'm in a presentation.

Sorry, so here are the data for their self-control training session and you can see that.

These black triangles indicate that he's choosing the more preferred and delayed reinforcer.

These open triangles show the set the times when he selected the more immediate less preferred so you can see it's not a hundred percent that he's always choosing the more preferred reinforcer that's delayed but more frequently than not that's what he's choosing.

And this is what we would expect right?

We wouldn't expect him to never choose this because it does receive some reinforcement right?

I get out of my work and I get A less preferred reinforcer so sometimes he's going to select that.

But ultimately he was pretty frequently choosing to complete the work and for extended periods of time.

furthermore they did a quick reversal back to Baseline where they removed those choices and just said here do your work to see if maybe he just like doing his work better now but in but things sort of fell apart and he stopped doing his work when they did that so they came back to Um this task and this setup and he again started choosing to complete his work for that more delayed reinforcer this data point here shows when they switch to the marker task and showed that it wasn't even specific to that match to sample tests that they could even change the task and he would he would behave in a similar fashion.

So this Study is one example of how you might use this strategy now in some of my work.

We've used this strategy quite a bit for children who have significant problem Behavior.

And I'm just going to jump ahead to a slide and show you.

What we've done with this.

So very frequently.

I work with children who have significant problem Behavior.

In the context of teachers asking them to complete a task and let's let's just assume that the task the child is being asked to complete is one that the family has identified as an important task that.

The child needs to learn that the teaching strategies are very appropriate and yet the child displays a lot of problem Behavior.

We will usually start with a functional analysis that demonstrates that antically the problem behavior is motivated by escaping the tasks.

So the child does not want to engage in the task and in some cases not only do they want to escape the task.

They'd rather be doing something else like playing with one of their toys.

so Our first step is usually to teach the child a more appropriate way to request a break again.

When we think about self-determination.

It's okay for kids to want task breaks.

We all take test breaks.

We all get frustrated and need to walk away from something especially if it's difficult.

So it's okay that kids want to take breaks from their task.

What's not okay is for you to be hitting yourself or hitting other people in order to get that break.

So a very common intervention that we will use is we teach the child a more appropriate way to request the break.

We may teach the style child an ASL sign for break.

We may teach the child to touch a break card as is shown in this picture here where we've we've got a little break card.

And so what we do in that situation is we will teach the child if you here's the work that I'm asking you to do.

If you hand me the Break card, you can take a break from that task for some period of time that we identify typically for us.

It's it's about 30 seconds or so.

And maybe initially what we do is we even let the child engage in playing with the toy when they ask for a break some of the kids I work with when they engage in the problem Behavior.

It's self-injury or aggression and ideally we might say We're not going to provide breaks for that behavior anymore.

That's a term.

We call that Extinction in Behavior Analysis that that the reinforcer will not be provided for that problem Behavior anymore.

however In a lot of context we don't like to use extinction extinction can cause the behavior to get worse before it gets better.

Teachers really don't like doing it.

sometimes if if the task I'm asking the child to do is one that they would normally sit at a table to do it might mean I have to sit behind them and not let them get up from the table, which is just like We don't want to be manually forcing children to stay at a table.

So.

We have tried really hard to not use Extinction in those contexts.

And so when problem Behavior occurs, and by the way, we don't present a card that looks like this to the child.

This is just for illustration purposes here in this talk, but if the child engages in problem Behavior, we still provide a break but we keep it very short 10 seconds and we don't provide toys contingent on it.

So instead it might look like me just removing the work and allowing the child to sit quietly for 10 seconds.

In this context as you can see think about that flask that we talked about in a minute ago in this context both behaviors problem Behavior or touching the break card are producing a break.

right one is a smaller sooner one.

So for problem Behavior, you're going to get a smaller.

shorter break and for the break card, it's slightly delayed because you have to hand me the bright cards.

So that introduces a delay and a little bit of effort on your part.

But you're going to get a longer break and I'm going to let you play with toys on that break.

So, can you see there how we've set up a context where the child has a choice of how to respond both are going to produce reinforcement.

One of them is going to be a bigger better reinforcer.

And what will typically happen under that context as we'll see the child.

Very quickly learn to hand us a break card and we will see rapid deceleration of the problem Behavior, even if we're providing that reinforcer for it.

because we've sort of set up the context to bias responding in favor of that break card Now that's great because it decreases the problem behavior and it gets the kid using the break card, but then teachers will often tell me all right.

That's great.

that we got the problem Behavior to go away, but I've got IEP goals to meet I've got Things I need to teach this child and I can't teach anything if they won't engage in the task and if they're constantly requesting breaks, which is pretty much what the kids will do.

So then we change the scenario and we set up like a three Choice context where now we say.

All right, if the child engages in problem Behavior, they're going to get that 10 second break with no toys.

If they touch the brake card, they're still going to get that 30 second break, but now we're going to provide maybe a less preferred toy.

something kind of neutral if they choose to engage in some of the work.

They're going to get a longer break yet a 60 second break and we will provide preferred toys during that break and what we tend to do.

Like let's pretend the work task.

Is this worksheet here?

I might make it very easy for the child.

If they choose this work task.

For example, Trace one letter a and that's all you have to do and you get the one minute break with toys and I'm going to play with you.

I'm just gonna really load it up and make sure it's really reinforcing to choose what I would call the self-controlled response here.

Invariably we will get the child to choose to do work.

We're not forcing break or work we're saying hey, it's up to you.

You can engage in any one of these responses, but we're trying to arrange consequences.

That are going to produce a habilitative response and one that is what we would consider a self-controlled response.

Once we routinely get the child choosing this work task.

We might start increasing the task requirements.

So maybe instead of just tracing one a now you have to trace two and then you can have your break and so on and we'll do that until we reach the terminal task requirement which might be here complete the entire worksheet and then we'll take a break play with toys and I'll play with you.

Um, so this is a self-control Paradigm that we've and we've used a lot in my work very successfully with with children.

from with a variety of different skill levels And with a variety of different contexts and problem behaviors, we've done it at home with parents.

We've done it in classrooms with with teachers.

to a great degree of success Let me just stop there for a minute.

To see Shelley.

Are there any questions about any of that?

Hi, it's Shelly speaking.

The first one question about the reinforcers and we're wondering how do you select the reinforcers to use when you're teaching these self-control behaviors?

Right, so that's a great question typically.

Let me stop share for a minute so we can just see each other a little typically we are doing some sort of preference assessment with the children and we use the variety of different preference assessment techniques.

Sometimes they're very formal in the sense.

Like if we're doing a research project.

It's very formal where we might ask the the parents or the teacher.

What are some things that you think this child might like to play with?

Or might things that might function as reinforcers and we try to get about eight of them and we might do what we call a force choice preference assessment where I say to the child, which would you write which one do you want?

You know and you know, here's the two stimuli and the child can reach for the one they want and when they select it I give that give it to them they can play with it for a little bit and then I say my turn and I take the stimulus back and then I pair two different stimuli you guys are gonna get to see all the things that are on my desk these two stimuli and I say which one do you want and I let the child choose and engage and I do that for all eight stimuli where I and I pair each one with each other one.

Does that make sense?

So stimulus number one versus two?

One versus three one versus four and so forth for all of them in a randomized order and then I get a rank order of which one is most to least preferred by counting how many times the child selected?

That stimulus that's one way.

Another way we do it is much like I described in that passage study where we do the multiple stimulus without replacement.

I just put an array.

Of stimuli in front of the child and I say which one do you want?

Let them pick one play with it for a while remove it.

Okay, which one do you want next and I can get a rank order that way.

sometimes we just watch what things the kid likes to play with in their free time and we use some of those so those are There's lots of different ways that you can do that.

So I see yeah, I see that Julie says she's had a success and observing their play over the course of a few days, right?

That's that's like if you want to give that a name I call that a free operant preference assessment where you're just watching.

What do they choose to play with when no one's You know restricting their access to play, what would they choose?

Let's see my students spend most of the day in the classroom, but are willing to take their breaks in another area of the building.

They enjoy the breakspace, but I'm wondering if taking them to another space will have a negative impact on this kind of structure.

That's a great question.

I think it depends on some things.

In my situation if I'm working with a child who's displaying problem Behavior?

That's motivated by getting out of the task.

I don't think adding a short walk.

Is going to be problematic in fact.

It might help because it taking that walk is getting me out of the task for you know, so there's some reinforcement in doing the walk.

I think if the child is very motivated by.

Toys or other items that are in that other room.

And taking the time to walk there if you see problem behavior on the way there.

That's probably too much of a delay for them.

And you may need to have those toys right in the room with you.

I will say adding that walk time in there.

Decreases the efficiency of the teaching procedure right?

Because you've got time spent walking back and forth and so you can get fewer opportunities to practice.

Due to that lost time.

but I think I think your name might be Nadine given how you're listed there Nadine.

I think it's kind of an empirical question.

And if it's working okay for you.

It doesn't it's not a problem.

If you start seeing problem Behavior or The interventions not working.

Well, I might eliminate that to see if that helps.

Shelley is it okay if I just take some of the questions that are popular absolutely go for it.

Let's see do the length of the brakes extend for older students.

Kerry I think that depends on a lot of things my husband and I have a joke.

We say the answer to most questions the right answer is it depends?

There are some older children that can tolerate.

working for longer periods of time and in those cases longer breaks might make sense, right?

I've had people ask me like when I'm working with younger kids and you know, I just showed you that slide that had the one minute breaks.

As we shape up the work time.

We've we've had kids go from starting at like 10 or 15 seconds of work and the teachers goal is I want them to work on this for 15 minutes.

So we start stretching out that required work time from like 10 or 15 seconds to 15 minutes.

And we have never increased that 60 second break time.

Which is always surprised me because I've always thought wow, once they start working for 15 minutes shouldn't they have a longer break, but it's been very interesting to me that that break has maintained its reinforcing value enough to make it still work.

At the same time I would say if the goal is to work for 15 minutes and then naturally you would go to recess or something.

That's a longer break.

That'd be great.

Once you get into sort of the natural reinforcement flow so that you don't have to structure.

That situation anymore.

So Carrie, I think.

If you're working with older students and as you start increasing the task requirements.

If they're like vocal verbal and they say to you it's not fair.

I'm still I'm only working for a one minute break and I'm working for 10 minutes.

I would certainly say well we can increase that.

You know, I think that's something you can totally do.

Melissa, I see your comment that 10 and 30 seconds seem like a really short time.

I agree.

That's purposeful.

First of all, I they are arbitrary so you could change that if for your context it makes sense.

When we are teaching these skills, we are trying to give children multiple opportunities to practice.

in a specific time period so for example, when the intervention I was describing when I had the slide up with the cards, we're typically running that for about 15 minutes at a time.

And so the children are getting anywhere from you know 10 to 20 opportunities to make this Choice during that 15 minute time period I think that.

Kids need those multiple opportunities and they they need them to occur within a relatively short period of time.

I find one issue that occurs in classrooms is that teachers might set up a choice like what I described.

The child gets one opportunity to choose they do it.

and then we're done for a while and we don't come back to that maybe until later in the day and I think that allowing kids to have multiple opportunities to choose in sort of in succession Is important for the learning to take place?

But these are arbitrary amounts of time that we've used in our work.

You could certainly try different.

Durations of time and see how they work in your context and if they're working well in your context great if they're not I would try to adjust those and until you see some success.

so I see Leslie saying her kids wouldn't be okay with those short times.

So yeah, try to make some adjustments and see.

Just be careful that like if you start giving problem Behavior a one-minute break.

your other two breaks are going to have to be quite a bit longer to be different enough that the child recognizes them as better right sounds like Julie's had some success with a similar strategy.

Wondering how this might work if breaks her longer now would reverting to Shorter breaks be counterproductive.

Or just change.

Start small and build still mmm.

Leslie I think it might depend on how what kind of receptive language skills your student has I find with some students.

If they have good receptive and expressive language skills, sometimes sitting down and having a conversation about that and saying I'm going to propose we try something different.

What do you think about this?

And sometimes you can get the kids to do that with you.

If they're not vocal verbal.

And don't have good receptive language skills like that.

You could do a little probe and just try it and see what happens.

And and I always say those are very empirical questions.

You can give it a try and and see what the result is and go from there.

Trying to see if I hit most of the questions.

Hey Shelly, I don't think there were any others in there that I picked up on either.

Okay?

Time is it?

Okay.

I'm gonna try to finish up the self control piece and then we'll take another break.

Okay, perfect.

So given the time I'm going to skip the second video.

I'll show you this slide in case you want to go look for it on your own and see if I can share my screen.

Okay.

There's a real cute video if you want to look for this one.

Online about self-control for Monsters and what I liked about it was that it shows Cookie Monster talking about self-control in somewhat of a similar context and Cookie Monster is asked to there's a plate of cookies in front of him and one of the humans that he interacts with says, oh look at this plate of cookies, but we got to wait for their friend to come because they don't want to eat them all before she gets there.

And so the two of them are trying to wait and it's really hard like cooking monsters having a pretty hard time.

Waiting and so the the male friend starts to suggest some strategies that he might use like deep breathing strategies and so forth to help them wait and they even go get some milk and have a drink of milk while they're waiting and then the friend comes and they get to share the cookies.

It's real cute video.

And the reason I had included it is that It shows some strategies that have been shown in the literature that can help improve tolerance for delays to reinforcement.

And so I just wanted to introduce a few of those to you in some cases.

It can help to provide a delay cue that is so for example, if you're doing one of these self-control interventions and the child is chose to wait for the reinforce or giving them a cue of like, okay, just wait.

So that it's clear to them.

The reinforcers coming just not right now that can sometimes help a little bit.

Not a lot.

The literature isn't entirely clear on how well that works.

But what the literature is more clear on that helps is if you can teach the individual to engage in a competing activity during the delay.

And I gave you some references there of people who've done that but you know restaurants are really good at this right restaurants.

There are restaurants that sometimes bring around things like crayons and placemats that kids can do dot to dot pictures play Tic-Tac-Toe or sometimes they have paper on the tablecloths so that you can draw on the tablecloth.

So that's a really great example of providing an activity that helps mediate the wait time.

Sometimes providing other things like listening to music or playing on an iPad while waiting for Attention our good strategies, although iPad can be tricky because getting taking the iPad away can be problematic in my experience, but So in the example, I just gave you momentarily a moment ago about the child working.

The work itself can be that competing activity during the delay, but in some cases the context isn't about doing work, right it's you know the child saying I want to play with that toy that my my friend has and it's not their turn right now and they have to wait for it.

So what do we do to help them make it to through that weight period and sometimes finding a competing activity can help with that.

I think I already talked about that one.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think I'm going to stop right there for a minute because it is two o'clock and I want to give you guys another break.

So let's come back at about 208 and at that time we'll transition to talking a little bit about self-management.

Perfect.

Sounds good.

We'll see you in a few minutes.

Okay, good.

I wanted to make sure interpreters were ready.

You didn't want to start without you.

Yeah.

I see a couple of questions in the chat that I did not address before because they came in right as we were leaving.

One of them was would this be the my way Hanley procedure?

I think it if by this you're referring to teaching the child to request a break.

From a work task.

I think that might be close to the Hanley my way procedure from what I understand.

I don't I don't know what your experience with that procedure is but as I stated previously one problem we have with teaching things like break man's break requests or attention requests is that children will use them frequently and request a lot of breaks and a lot of attention.

And like I said before, that's okay.

I mean it's okay for kids to want breaks and attention.

The problem is they also have to engage in Some other tasks.

I mean, I don't know about you guys, but if I could engage in my break activities all day long, that'd be pretty awesome.

That's just not how my life works and I think it's okay for kids to understand that.

There are things you got to do during the day.

It's how life works for all of us and So eventually I feel like allowing the child to have my way all day long isn't really productive in terms of them becoming a self-determined adult Because they won't have the skills.

They need to participate in society.

So assuming that the family and the individual want to learn to do other things so they can participate in society together.

I think it's okay to start teaching the child.

You can't always have my way.

So let's start teaching you some strategies.

For waiting for those periods of my way.

I hope that addresses your question Corey.

And oh, sorry, go ahead.

I see Sharon has a question too.

When you're done responding to the next one.

I'll enable Sharon's microphones so she can pop in.

Oh super.

Okay.

Thanks for letting me know.

I was just gonna address Julie's question about what about for more severe children who won't understand what is coming after the delay?

So many of the kids that I've used that scenario that I described to you with have had Fairly severe disabilities.

And so there's two ways that children can understand what's coming after the delay.

One way we refer to as rule governed behavior.

That is I can explain to them.

Hey after you do the work.

You're going to get this break with these toys.

if children do not have rule governed behavior in their repertoire Or they don't have the receptive language skills to understand that then typically I rely on what we call contingency shaped Behavior.

contingency shape Behavior just means that you learn what's coming by experiencing the consequences?

And so in the cases of children with more severe disabilities were typically relying on contingency shape to behavior because they don't have the repertoires for me to explain it and have them understand it.

So in those cases the trick is to make that the third choice for the work requirement.

to be pretty small and a lot of times I'll prompt that selection.

So for example, I might say do you want to take a break or do you want to do the work and assuming they don't engage in problem Behavior right away.

I might guide their hand to touch the work card.

Do a very small amount of work.

and then Experience the reward of the bigger better reinforcer and I found with a little prompting.

The child will select that after they experience the consequences a few times.

They'll select it on their own because they if you will understand what's coming because they've experienced it.

Now I'll tell you one of the kids that I worked with using this procedure who was most challenging.

Wasn't that severely intellectually impaired but had really?

Troubling problem behavior, and he did not want to leave the computer.

At this school, they had him basically sitting at a desk to the side of the room with access to a computer all day long because if they tried to remove him from that computer, his aggression was so severe that nobody wanted to try to get him away from the computer.

So in his case, we started so small that we simply put like a piece of foam core between him and the screen so the computer still on and he just couldn't see the screen and we had a work task right next to him and all he had to do was touch the pencil.

And then we would remove the barrier to the screen and let him have access to the computer.

After practicing that several times we moved the pencil to a different table that he could still reach from his chair.

He could like spin his chair and touch the pencil and come back to the computer and then we just started sliding the table a little further away to where he had actually moved to get to the table.

We did that until we could start requiring him to stand up and walk to the table.

And touch the pencil and once we got him doing that we covered the entire table with paper so that all he not only had to touch the pencil.

He just had to pick it up and touch the touch the tip of the pencil somewhere on the table.

We got him doing that routinely and then We Shrunk the size of the paper that was on the table down to like a notebook style piece of paper and then he had to touch it and then he had to Make a letter and so forth.

Like it was a huge shaping process because his behavior was so intense.

We just had to go with a little baby steps so that he could understand what was that he was going to get that bigger better reinforcer if he made the choice.

So I hope that helps Julie.

All right, Shelly, and I'm hoping that Sharon's microphone is working.

Sharon are you there?

Hmm not hearing anything.

Maybe she gave up.

Well Sharon.

If you come back and and want to interrupt at some point, just let me know.

Yes, or to go ahead and type your question in the chat.

Whatever works sounds good and I see Jillian's comment.

Could you compare this to a first then chart with steadily increasing the length of the first activity while keeping the preferred length the same I think that could be great and I love the idea of using something like a first then chart.

We're going to start talking about self-management now and I think Antecedent cues like that.

Or something we're eventually going to talk about and those can be great.

And I love that you're thinking about incorporating it into strategies that maybe you're already using with children and blending them in with those.

I think that's terrific.

Oh Sharon says her microphones not working.

Plus Leslie I'm gonna go ahead and go on and maybe I'll let you work with Sharon to figure out how we get her question addressed.

We will figure it out.

Thank you.

Okay.

Yeah.

All right.

Let me share my screen again.

Really?

Didn't slideshow again.

There we go.

um Okay, so we talked a little bit about self-control and choosing larger delayed reinforcers.

So just to sort of wrap that up and move to the next thing.

I would like to encourage you all to think about ways that you could Build in some of those self-control opportunities for practice during the day with your kids, I think.

A lot of times in classrooms.

There's a tendency to say, you know you we're going to do this now because that's how I have my classroom structured and kids have a little less choice about when they do things or how they do things.

So if you can think about ways to offer children opportunities to make choices, like would you guys rather do this now?

And then we can just be done with it and go do go to recess or something else or would you like to you know do something else first and then we can get to that so there's ways I think you can incorporate that into a lot of classroom activities and for kids who have Severe problem Behavior, there's lots of opportunities to set up those kinds of practice opportunities.

So another strategy I want to talk about that.

I think is related to self-determination is self-management and by teaching self-management.

We can help students learn to arrange the environment in such a way that it helps them display self-control.

So once they learn some self-controlled responses, the next step is really going how do I arrange my own environment to make sure I can engage in these self-control responses.

Um, so let's talk about some of those right now.

I want to talk about some responses that we might use.

I think I skipped a slide here somewhere in this slide.

Okay.

Well, what I wanted to say is when we engage in self-management.

One of the things that we do is engage in what we call controlling responses to try to control our own behavior and a lot of us engage in controlling responses routinely, so I want you to think about things you do.

to self-managed because that will help you start thinking about things that we need to teach the kids we work with so You know, like how many of you write things on your calendar like due dates?

So that you can complete a task on time.

For example, I think I've got two or three letters of recommendation that are due tomorrow.

And when I look at my calendar for tomorrow, I see that I've got that task written there so that I make sure I get it done in time for those individuals.

I'm sure many of you make lists of things to do or when you need to go to the grocery store.

You bring a list with you to control to make sure you remember to get the things you wanted to get and maybe some of you do that to avoid bringing home things that you didn't intend to buy which I can do sometimes often people will put reminders in their phones to help you certain behaviors.

I routinely will set items by my garage door so that I remember to take them with me in the morning when I go to school or I have a place in my house.

That's like my spot where when I go to work in the morning I look there and I pick up everything on that spot and take it with me.

Those are examples of controlling responses.

That I engage in to help control my own behavior.

So that I engage in the behaviors.

I want to engage in the morning.

So I'm managing my own behavior again these learning these controlling responses are skills that can be taught and add to the number of Bubbles at the bottom of that flask that we looked at earlier.

So then kids have more choices of behaviors to engage in because you've taught them.

So when we think about self-management skills, you can kind of group those into some general categories and one of those is self-monitoring.

One is self-evaluation.

one is goal setting self-administration of consequences and even self-instruction I doubt we're going to get to all of these today, but I'll try to touch on at least a few of them here.

I chose this one to show you.

This is an article that was published in the Journal of emotional and behavior disorders.

And this was by Phil strain and colleagues.

And they taught preschoolers with autism to self-monitor their social interactions in both home and school settings.

And so I thought this was really interesting because I think that people might say very young children can't self Monitor and can you really teach children with autism to self-monitors?

So in this study they had three boys with autism participated participating along with their non-disabled Pearson siblings.

They conducted the research in an integrated preschool and in the children's home.

During Baseline the children participated in some play activities.

While the adults simply observes so that the adults simply instructed the children to go play and the adults observed and then they conducted some social skills training where they taught the children some skills like to be a play organizer.

So what that meant was the children could go to appear and say hey, do you want to play do you want to play with this?

Do you want to play trucks?

So play organizer?

Share offers like would you like some?

And also requests to share from you know, so asking a child.

Can I have some?

And then assistance offers and requests asking if you could help with something or requesting help.

so they took data on the percentage of intervals in which the children engaged in some of these different behaviors and Interestingly they during Baseline they found that the children engaged in very few of any of those behaviors that I just described and so any of those social interactions, they kind of lumped all of those behaviors that I just described into a category called social interactions.

And so this these are Aubrey's data and this top panel shows their Aubrey's total social interactions as measured in a percentage of intervals and during Baseline.

You just see that there's very few.

And then this ST means they did the social skills training and then in addition the teachers put up a poster in the room that gave some reminders and cues about engaging in those social behaviors and you can see here that that didn't really produce very much.

More social interactions.

So then they went to a self-monitoring phase and in this self-monitoring phase the children were given 10 little phone discs, and then they gave them a little cylinder and they told the children that after you engaged in one of those.

Social interactions to go put the little foam disk in the cylinder and after they had put a designated number of discs in the cylinder the child and their peer or sibling got to have a small amount of an edible treat.

And early they early on in here they began with every foam disk that they put in the cylinder resulted in a little treat and then out here.

You can see at this point.

They started to require two foam disks in the cylinder before the little treat was delivered.

and in addition to that the teachers did do some prompting so they prompted the children to engage in some of these skills and you can see in Baseline and in the poster there was no prompting but once they taught the children the self monitoring they also did a little prompting to get them to use those strategies and what they found was that this entire package of prompting self-management and a little bit of reward for engaging in those behaviors really produced a lot more of the social interactions with the children.

So I thought this study was interesting because it showed that you could teach children to engage in this new social behavior and ask them to monitor it themselves.

So that they would start engaging in it more and I think this is important in context like play where maybe you don't want the teacher having to jump in and pray certain behaviors and sort of interrupt the ongoing social interaction.

So this is a really good example of where self-monitoring might be helpful for the children.

Interestingly they also measured Aubrey social interactions in the home and found similar effects.

So during Baseline, there were very few social interactions.

And in this case, the parent was actually doing quite a bit of prompting of social interactions during Baseline, but you just weren't seeing those social interactions occurring And when the parent then implemented the same self-monitoring strategy with a sibling you saw quite a quite a substantial increase in the social interactions and the and the prompting was fairly.

Similar.

So in this case We can't even really say the prompting was responsible for the change in Behavior.

It was probably the self-monitoring and accessed edible reinforcement.

You can also see at home.

They increase the requirements from up to three discs being put in the cylinder and then five discs being put in the cylinder and the behavior is still maintaining over time.

so a really cool way for kids to monitor how they're doing and sort of bridge the gap between engaging in the behavior and getting the reinforcement by using that self-monitoring strategy.

So this is another one that was conducted by Diane sonato and colleagues were they had six typical children and six children with autism enrolled in an integrated preschool and and like the other one.

This study was conducted during a free play period In this case the researchers wanted to teach the peers.

Some facilitation strategies so that the peers could help.

prompt and organized play so that the kids with autism would be able to socially interact a little bit more.

So in this case, they taught the peer Confederates how to get the attention of the children with autism how to sort of be play organizers like approach a child with autism and say hey do you want to play?

To do some sharing and also how to respond to some peer interactions from the children with autism.

And in this case instead of self-monitoring.

They actually taught the peer Confederates to self-evaluate whether they use the strategy successfully.

So in this graph what you see is the three peer Confederates.

And their strategy usage during free play and you can see in Baseline.

They were already using some of these strategies.

And then they did a formal training with the children to teach them to make sure they knew all the strategies and you can see that they're training didn't really have much effect.

So just teaching the children to engage in these behaviors didn't really seem to get them using those strategies with their peers.

So when they implemented self-evaluation which consisted of giving the Confederate peers these little booklets that had four small pictures in them that represented the strategies that they wanted them to use with their peers and they were supposed to Mark yes or no.

Sorry for the typo there on the pictures to say did I use that strategy or not with one of the children in the classroom and they were taught to do that at certain intervals of time and then their responses were compared to the teacher responses to see if they were even matching and appropriately evaluating their own behavior.

And in this case, you can see that the children really were matching.

The teacher evaluations at a pretty high level and at the same time they were also really increasing their use of those peer facilitation strategies.

So this is a really nice example of how even young children can be taught to evaluate whether or not they're engaging in the behaviors.

You just taught them.

I think you could generalize this to a lot of different strategies.

I've worked with lots of children where we've taught them.

To self-monitor and self-evaluate their on-task behavior during activities.

So for example, if you're giving them a worksheet to complete and they're supposed to be over there independently working on it.

I've had a sticker that's up on the corner of the child's desk and maybe sometimes we've had things like a tone that goes off at certain intervals and at that interval they're supposed to self evaluate was I doing my work and they put in a happy face in the box if they were doing their work and at the end of the session they can earn something.

Some kind of reward for completing their work and being on task.

so teaching children to understand their own behavior and evaluate their behavior to see if it's in line with the expectations is a good self-management strategy or a component of a self-management skill.

So this is another example from Diane Sonata.

Yeah.

Yeah, if I wanted to make sure that was different study.

Okay, this is another one from Diane sonato and her colleagues where they looked at self evaluation of independent work.

Like I was just describing for preschool children with disabilities.

So in this case, they had six children with disabilities and six non-disabled children who attended and integrated preschool.

They used a six second partial interval recording procedure.

So all that means sorry 10 seconds.

So all that means is the people who were observing the children every 10 seconds would code if they were on task or not, and they had to with a partial interval if if they were on task at any time during that interval they get a plus and the Baseline during Base Line the teacher distributed the materials gave the children instructions to finish their worksheets was present in the classroom.

Would prompt children repeatedly to do their work and answered any questions that the children had about their work and the Baseline too was the same but had no more it only had two teacher prompts allowed.

And so in this one what I want to point out is that on the y axis here you see the percentage of intervals for the appropriate behavior for these children during Baseline.

And you know, some of them were doing okay like this one was doing okay, although that didn't maintain over time during the two baselines, especially in the second Baseline where the teacher stopped doing all the prompting.

You know the children's.

Appropriate behavior was decreasing so they did a self-assessment with the children.

And here's what it consisted of the children had on their desk a little photo.

of themselves working quietly and it was in a little binder that they could flip through that had multiple pages and on each page, they would have to mark yes or no underneath the picture if they were working quietly or not at the designated times and at the end of the time they would Assess whether how they did during that session.

They again compared the ratings to teacher ratings during a meeting with the teacher and all of the accurate ratings.

Received praise from the teacher and then the children received a small prize if their self-assessment matched the teacher on seven out of nine tries.

So the little prize was not contingent on appropriate behavior.

It was only contingent.

On their ratings matching the teacher so they were only giving the prize for accurately assessing their own behavior.

And what we see here is then in the during the treatment we get really nice increases in appropriate behavior.

And then later they even started whittling away that treatment to involve fewer components so that like they got rid of the reinforcement strategy during this phase.

They were only doing self-assessment and match with teacher and then here they're just doing self-assessment and that's enough to maintain the behavior over time.

So another example of where self-evaluation.

Can be in a very effective strategy for improving.

A habilitative behavior, but not only that teaching a really great self-management skill that the child can now use to manage their own behavior.

Now this study by Sheng Zhu and colleagues.

I wanted to include this one for a number of reasons not the least of which is this is a study that was conducted in China rather all the other studies.

I've shown you so far we're conducted in the US and I like to be able to show data from other countries.

So as not to be us-centric, but this one involved a nine year old boy with autism.

He attended a first grade classroom and attended general education most of the day, but went to an Autism Center for an hour in the afternoon and this study took place both at the Autism Center and in his public school and the entire study was conducted in Mandarin.

So the class period they chose to conduct the study was in a language arts class and they had Baseline data on academic engagement and there was no other.

And no other intervention in place during the Baseline.

And what they they taught the child who they call Sean in this paper to use a self-monitoring form using roleplay and feedback.

And so you see in this self-monitoring form.

He was asked to put a plus if he did everything on the target list and a minus if he did not do everything on the target list and then they had a goal for how many things he had to have a plus for in order to earn some sort of reward.

And so they listed his Target behaviors.

They trained him on what those were.

At one minute intervals.

He was asked to Mark how he was doing on these did he do all of them?

If so, he got A plus if not, he put down a minus.

And then, you know if he met the goal.

That he worked on with his teacher then he would get.

His reward, so I want to show you his data.

So during Baseline when they just gave him his work and asked him to complete it.

He the percentage of one minute intervals in which he was engaged in.

His work was very low.

The teacher said that the final goal.

I'll just go back one one page here in working with Sean.

They decided a reasonable final goal was that he would be engaged 80% of the time during this.

work period and obviously going from 10% to 80% would be too big of a jump all at once and so Sean worked with this teacher to set his own goal and determined that his first goal would be I want to get up to 20% And so they made that goal line.

And as long as he achieved that then he earned his reward then Sean set his own next goal, which was 40% and again, you see the data where his He improved his engagement commensurate with his goal when that was met.

He said a new goal and again, and again until he had basically reached the targeted goal that the teacher was hoping he would obtain.

And so whenever he reached his goal, he was praised.

He looked at his graph they set a new goal together and he got a small reward for maintaining that and then during maintenance.

There was no goal setting no keeping track, you know self-monitoring and he again maintained his behavior so we've talked about some different strategies and I think you can see that a lot of them get packaged together when you teach self-management and that's pretty consistent and I chose this one to show you because this one Really puts everything together in a nice package in a self-management package for children.

So this one was by stammer and shreibman.

And they worked with three children with autism two boys one girl.

All of them displayed very little independent play unless they were directly supervised.

And again, this is some language that we don't really use anymore today rightfully so but I didn't feel it appropriate for me to change what these authors wrote but they referred to it as self-stimulatory Behavior.

I would refer to that as maybe stereotypic Behavior today, but examples like hand flapping and spinning.

That were interfering with their ability to play with other children.

So, you know in our field now we talk about whether these behaviors should be targeted for reduction and certainly hand flapping and spinning are okay behaviors.

But if you're being asked if if it's time to play with other children and the family thinks that's the goal that might be important again.

This is a paper that's a little older and and this may not be how we would do it today, but I still think there's value in looking at the strategies they used.

So they measured the occurrence of those hand flapping and spinning behaviors as well as appropriate play inappropriate behavior.

And then they had other behaviors.

This one was conducted in a clinic setting for the boys, but for the little girl it was conducted in the home.

And this one I thought was interesting because they used watches that had.

Alarms and then the papers papers that the children could use to self monitor their behavior.

So This graph has a lot going on, but I'll just walk you through it here.

So this has percentage of Engagement in the play activity per session.

and let's just look at the Baseline first the the researchers here observe the children through a one may one way mirror and the child was alone in the room with a bunch of toys that they reportedly like to play with and and you can and so what they measured was the appropriate play which is shown by the black triangles and the Open Circles are the self-stimulation behaviors.

I'm not really focused on those.

What I'm really focused on is the appropriate play and so in the next phase they taught the child to appropriately play with the toys and they gave the child the watch and every time the watch.

Signaled the children would Mark the interval with whether or not they were engaged in toy play when the when the timer went off.

And at first it was 30 seconds for the boys and a minute for the girl and they earned some reinforcement for Engaging in with the toys at the end of that interval if they marked it.

And over time they increased those intervals from 30 seconds to two minutes successfully and so you can see sorry.

I'm trying to get my cursor.

Here we go.

Let's look at this one.

You can see that over time the engagement improved when they faded the intervals to be longer the engagement maintained and very interestingly later in the session.

They actually put the reinforcers the Edibles and the stickers in the room and taught the child to go deliver their own reinforcer if they marked their paper that they were engaged appropriately.

So what I liked about this study is it just showed Not Only Could you teach the children to Monitor their own behavior and evaluate their own behavior.

They could also self-deliver their own reinforcers for those behaviors and these children were relatively low functioning children and yet they were able to learn these appropriate strategies.

So I thought that was a pretty neat example in that study.

So just what I've shown you here are multiple examples of some of the component skills that you might see in a self-management.

Paradigm and there are lots of great things that you could start including in some of the interventions you're doing with children and the national Autism Center does consider self-management as an established intervention with multiple studies supporting its Effectiveness, so if you aren't thinking about ways to include self-management strategies in your instruction already, I would just highly encourage you to to think about ways to embed that.

With the goal of helping children become more self-determined.

In addition as I said earlier some of my former students and I did work on a literature review paper on self-management and we found that not only were the studies that have been conducted on self-management strategies effective.

We looked at where were they conducted were they conducted in like highly clinical settings or where they conducted in naturalistic settings and we found that the majority were done in natural settings, like classrooms and homes, which I think adds even more sort of social validity to the fact that these can be effective in the settings you guys are working and I'm going to skip over this for now because we're running low on time.

That's Okay, I'm just skipping over these things because we're running out of time here.

One thing I wanted to just point out though is I look at the the self management strategies.

We've talked about so far like self-monitoring.

Self-evaluation self delivery of reinforcement.

These are controlling responses that help help children engage in whatever the target behaviors are that that we're all hoping they do.

But very few Studies have really demonstrated how to teach individuals.

To come up with those controlling responses and use them on their own every study.

I showed you so far.

the teachers designed the self-management procedure the teachers taught the children how to do it the teachers monitored whether the children were doing it, which is all great.

I'm interested now in how do we get kids to take the next step like When you have to remember to do something tomorrow, you don't have a teacher standing over you saying you better write that in your calendar.

You say to yourself.

I better write that in my calendar you've learned.

To initiate those controlling responses yourself.

So we don't have a good research base to tell us how to do that.

And I think that's a challenge to the researchers out there to do that.

But so I can't really tell you how to do that.

But in my view that's that's really the ultimate.

in self-determination right is when you can say to yourself.

You know, I need to work on x.

I better put in a strategy to help me engage in that behavior to either go.

Learn it.

If it's a skill deficit or to be motivated to do it so that I can get it done.

Those are important skills to teach and I don't think we're there yet in terms of how we teach the kids we work with to do those.

Now the final thing I want to say and then I'll want to leave some time for questions at the end.

Is that some things we didn't talk about yet are some antecedent strategies that could be used and when I'm thinking of Anniston's strategies, like somebody mentioned earlier a first then chart that's a great example of an antecedent strategy.

I'm sure some of you use things like picture schedules with children to help them predict and understand what things are coming up today.

Those are wonderful antecedent strategies that could also be used as part of a self-management routine.

For example, could you envision children coming in in the morning and setting up their picture schedule almost like how you look at your calendar each day and organize how you're going to go about your day.

That's a wonderful self-management strategy that you could be using with children.

And this study is not out yet.

but I happen to be interacting with a colleague the other day who was sharing an abstract for a paper that they're about to present.

And that abstract was for a study where they interviewed individuals with autism and ask them some of their preferences about the kinds of strategies that are used.

in teaching them and one of the things I noted in that abstract is that the individuals they interviewed.

Said that strategies using antecedents were highly preferred at least by the people they interviewed.

the consequence strategies and especially Extinction extinction was notably one that they said I really don't like it when you use Extinction with me.

So I think that these antecedent strategies are really important for us to think about and I want to encourage you if you're using picture schedules already or maybe you're using video models as a way to teach children how to engage in specific behaviors.

These are really great strategies that could be incorporated into self-management routines, and I would highly encourage you to consider those So in summary just to pull it all back together early in this talk.

We we looked at this quote that says choices only choice when you know what your choices are and you have the ability to act on them.

And further we looked at some a Dewey's.

Quotes and here's a couple more from him that education is a process or Preparation or getting ready and we are preparing individuals for the responsibilities and privileges of adult life.

I hope that some of the strategies we talked about today in terms of.

teaching for self-determination makes sense and that you I guess I'm sort of hoping that you're convinced.

That sort of bringing together these three sets of skill areas that you do instruction on.

Are really what create self-determined individuals and that are responsibility in these areas is huge and one of those areas is really doing effective job teaching those academics social vocational and activities of daily living.

So that our the students we work with have a flask that has a ton of little circles and Bubbles at the bottom so that they have as many choices as possible and they know what those choices are.

They have the ability to execute them and that they have learned.

to delay access to reinforcers so that they can access larger better reinforcers rather than engaging in impulsive behaviors and that they've learned some self-management strategies that will help them organize their environment once they understand Consequences of the behavior like larger delayed reinforcers are better for me.

I need to arrange environments to help me access those.

I can use self-management strategies like self-monitoring and goal setting and self delivery of reinforcers to make sure that I'm accessing those.

larger later reinforcers Then we can say, you know, we're really truly teaching self-determination and my view.

So this is my email address in case you want it.

I saw somebody ask a question in the chat about having access to the slides.

I'm more than happy to provide access to these and I'll correct the two typos.

I saw and send them to Shelly so that she can.

Get those posted for you.

And with that I'm going to stop sharing and see if there's any further discussion.

All right, if anyone has a question, feel free to type it in the chat or the Q&A.

Not sure that activating microphones is working as well as we were hoping so my apologies for that.

I will go ahead just as we're waiting to see if there are any more questions and I will give the final ceu code for those of you who need it.

So it's try to type it in the chat at the same time four zero nine four three.

Coming your way forward, but you can say that and type it at the same time.

It's the end of the day.

I'm usually not that coordinated at all.

Well, I just want to take a minute Stephanie and say thank you so much for your presentation and for sharing your research and your expertise with us.

I was thinking about your the quote about choice and also the point about some of these skills particularly, you know, they the tiny little skills that are involved with self-management and self-control are really challenging to teach and I think sometimes as Educators we tend to To naturally go to the skills that are a little easier to teach or a little more in our wheelhouse.

And so bringing this, you know kind of back to the Forefront has been really helpful.

So I appreciate that very much.

And as I I've seen the marshmallow test video a couple of times, but every time I watch it about two minutes in I start to get a little antsy and shaky on behalf of those little cutie patooties.

So it's always fun to watch I do see a just a couple of thank you as I guess in the chat and I really appreciate everyone hanging with us all day.

These three hours sessions are a long time especially for any of us as Educators to stay in one spot.

So appreciate everyone's patience and persistence and I'll just say as a wrap up, you know tomorrow morning.

We will start for those of you who are joining us.

We'll start again at nine o'clock Atlantic time 9:30 Newfoundland, and there are new links that you should have received for the presentations tomorrow morning.

We'll start off with just a little bit of Going to overview of our autism and education group and some of the professional learning opportunities that we have coming up for you over the course of this school year.

So we'll be happy to share those with you first thing tomorrow morning.

And then Dr. Linda LeBlanc will be joining us Shane Pelletier will be joining us and then Dr. Paul gavoni who many of you have met a few times.

We'll be joining us to wrap up the day tomorrow.

So thanks so much Stephanie.

It's been a thrill to have you with us and we look forward to probably working with you again in the future at some point.

Well, thank you again for the invitation.

And for those of you putting things in the chat, thank you for the kind words.

As I said, it's kind of hard to talk into a tin can and I'm glad I didn't know Linda was coming after me because Linda's amazing and that maybe yeah, like I'm I can't hold a candle to her.

I hope I've shared at least one thing.

I always sort of feel like if I walk away with one thing.

I'm good.

So I hope that there was at least one thing in here that you could take away and that is helpful to you.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much, and have a great evening everyone.

We'll see many of you tomorrow morning.

Same time.

Same place Take Care.

Thank you.