Verbal Behavior Approach: How to Teach Children with Autism and       Related Disorders [Mary Lynch Barbera]

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Teaching Children with Autism to Greet Others

A few months ago, I evaluated a 4-year-old boy named Bobby. When I said “Hi Bobby,” he replied “Hi Bobby.” My son Lucas (who is now 13) had similar issues when he was younger so I learned strategies to help him overcome this problem well before I became a Behavior Analyst. As a BCBA, I now run into greeting problems fairly frequently so I thought I’d write about some strategies I often use to address this issue.

1) Until you can build the component skills required for greetings, encourage parents, staff and other students to eliminate the child’s name when saying “hi” and “bye.” This way you will prevent the error and the child will be more successful. If someone interacts with the child and does not know this strategy or if they forget and say “Hi Bobby” and get an echo, just have them drop back to “hi” and get a correct echo of “hi.”

2) Next take pictures of all important people in the child’s life who he sees often (i.e. mom, dad, sister, grandma, cousin, friend) and make two sets of these pictures. You will need two copies of each picture since you will want to start with matching picture to picture. Instead of saying “match” or “put with same,” just say “mom” or “mommy” as you hand the picture to the child and point to the identical picture of “mom” while you have him match. If the child is echoic, he might say “mom.” If he does say “mom” you might want to ask “who’s that?” and have him say “mom” as a tact.

3) Once the child can easily tact all the people he sees regularly without any prompts (both in pictures and when the real person is around) and he can also say “hi” and “bye” without prompts, you can try to put greetings together. If the child cannot fluently tact pictures of people who he sees often and/or if you don’t have good echoic control (Child echoes “hi” when someone says “hi” or the child says “ball” when a therapist says “ball”), I think it is probably too early to put greetings together. In this case, just have all people say “hi” and “bye” without the child’s name until the pre-requisites are met.

4) To work on putting the greeting with the name, you’ll need two people. One is the person walking in or out and greeting the child and the other person is used to prompt the child from the side or behind. For example I’m with Bobby so when mom says “Hi Bobby,” I immediately prompt “Hi Mommy.” You will most likely need several prompted trials before systematically fading your prompts.

5) If the child is still having difficulty, you might also consider making a video of people ringing the doorbell and someone opening the door and having each person who comes to the door say “Hi Bobbie.” When viewing the video, an adult should sit and watch the video with the child and prompt the child for each clip as each new person rings the doorbell and the door is opened. This was a key strategy for Lucas and after viewing the video only a few times with prompting, Lucas mastered this skill. The video showed the doorbell ringing, me opening the door then therapist # 1 (Nina) would say “Hi Lucas.” I would prompt “Hi Nina.” On the video, she would ring the bell again, door would open, Nina would again say “Hi Lucas.” This time, Lucas would say “Hi Nina” with a reduced prompt or without a prompt from me. Therapist # 2 (Eric) would then ring the bell for the same type of practice.

6) The two main things to remember when considering teaching greetings are: 1) Make sure the child has the pre-requisite skills for greetings (tacting of people’s names and good echoic control of 2-3 word utterances) and to teach greethings errorlessly as many times as needed using two adults and/or a video.

For more information about teaching greetings, see page 99 of my book, The Verbal Behavior Approach (http://www.verbalbehaviorapproach.com/).

19 comments:

  1. Excellent Blog! I see this issue in many in home programs and especially at school as this seems to be a highly popular IEP goal. Thank you for the information :)

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  2. Mary, Thank you so much for this blog that I want to share with my education students at Trinity Christian College. This is Professor Pete Post and I realized I have an autographed copy of your book that I have referred to several times. Currently I have 16 students taking a class in low incidence disabilities with me at Elim Christian School, a facility dedicated to children with special needs. For the last 20 minutes of each class each of my Trinity College students tutors an Elim student. What a joy to watch the Elim kids come into the cafeteria seeking our their new college buddy and mentor. I want to share this article with them this week and ask them to also reply to your blog. Thanks again.

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  3. Thanks Megan and Professor Post for your comments. You are both doing great work spreading ABA/VB to help children with autism and other disabilities. I'm glad this blog was helpful!

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  4. Hello, my name is Jenna (I'm one of Professor Post's students) I found your blog to be very helpful! I do see this problem a lot. People tend to verbally try to explain the correct way to respond and this approach doesn't seem to work as well. I would love to try your 6 step process out and see how it works. It sounds genius.

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  5. My name is Lauren and I am also one of Prof. Post's students. I definitely agree that teaching children with autism how to greet someone is important and I think you gave great ideas on how to do that. I also like how you talked about how if the child continues to have problems what to work with the child on, so as not to get discouraged.

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  6. Hi Mary! My name is Kathy Hossink and I am also one of Professor Post's students. Your blog caught my attention because I've encountered situations like this when working with individuals with Autism. With one individual that I work with I've noticed that the echoing tends to happen when I ask a question and he doesn't seem to know the answer. I don't know if you have any insights on that. Thank you so much for sharing your strategies with me, I'm excited to try them out!

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  7. This is very helpful!! My name is Rachel and I am also one of Prof. Post's students. I loved what you had to say! I work with a child with Autism over the summer and this will be very helpful when teaching him how to greet people. You seem very well educated and full of wonderful ideas! I look forward to more of your insights:) Thanks!

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  8. Hello! I am Laura, one of Prof. Post's students. As I was reading this article, several instances came to my mind as to when I would do exactly what you say to avoid. Just by eliminating the name when we are saying hello, is a great modeling technique for our students. I also would like to add that in our morning routine it is very important to switch up the activities we allow our students to work on, so that they do not become in a rut. Thank you for your blog, there are a lot of things that can be learned from this!

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  9. Hello :) My name is Melissa and like the above posts I am also one of Professor Post's students. Last semester I had the opportunity to work with students with autism. As I was reading the article I realized that I made some of the very mistakes that you talked about. I am excited to utilize some of these new ideas of yours as I continue to work with these students. Thanks for sharing these ideas. I enjoyed reading them because it was beneficial!!

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  10. Hello, my name is Mike and I am a student in Professor Post's class. I thought that this article really gives an educator, or anyone working with an Autistic child, a pretty comprehensive tool in how to work with a child who has this problem. I would make sure to have my student practice his greetings in as many real life situations as possible instead of just in class simulations, and I think following these 6 steps would really help us get positive results! Thanks for sharing your tips.

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  11. I was in an autistic classroom for a semester and I noticed this sort of echo communication a lot. I often wondered why students were praised for simply copying what was said by someone else. The trial transfer procedures that you mentioned in your book would have been exactly what I needed when working with these students! I hope to work with autistic students again sometime in the future, so thanks for this insight!

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  12. Hello, my name is Margaret and I am also one of Professor Post's students. I was in an autistic classroom last semester and there were a few students that came to mind when I was reading your blog. I think that the six steps you listed above would work great with autistic children. It would be really great to see the results at the end of the six steps. Thanks for sharing your blog it was really interesting!

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  13. I am also a student of Professor Post.You have some great tips for working with students with autism! Although I haven't yet worked with a student that is autistic, these tips will be great to keep in mind if I ever do have an opportunity to work with a student that is autistic. I probably would have made the common mistakes that you mention if I hadn't read this article. Thanks!

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  14. My name is Christine, and Post's student.
    I really like that different steps are given. It is helpful for people to know exactly what are some ways to be effective when communicating with a person with autism. I know it is nice to have at least a general idea of what to do when in a siutation that I might not be familiar with. Thanks!

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  15. Hi Mary, Thanks for the insight. Last semester I was able to be part of an autistic classroom as well! While I read this article, one student particular came to mind from my class last semester. He would repeat whatever i said -- it was the funniest thing, but at the same time it was hard to figure out to get him out of this habit. I am very excited about your article, because I am actually planning on going back to this classroom for the second half of this semester, and I think the teacher would be interested to know about what we can do to help him! Thank you so much for sharing!

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  16. Hi Mary, Very useful and helpful. Thanks.

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  17. Mary -
    Suggestion number 5 is genius. It would have saved us a ton of time to have used video modelling in this manner. Thank you.

    Q: Do you ever find that your students ever get "stuck" on needing to say someone's name with the greeting, depending on how it's taught, or do they already have that down and it's the name/ID discrimination that they need to add? Just wondered because in polite society, we sometimes need a plain vanilla "hi", whether as initiator or responder without a clue as to the friendly checker in the supermarket is.

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  18. Hi Mary,
    My name is Kathy and I'm a student a Trinity Christian College. I had the opportunity to work with a couple students who are on the spectrum last semester and I find your strategies really helpful especially since I've had instances where the students repeated what I said. After reading your article, I can see the mistakes I made last semester. I think this is a great article and will be sharing it with a few parents/teachers who work with Autistic children. Thank you.

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  19. I know I am late to the party on posting a reply but maybe this will help someone. I had the hardest time teaching my son to say hi and bye to people (and good morning, etc.) What ended up working was I video taped people he knew saying 3 different phrases at first: "Hi Zach" "Bye Zach" and "Good morning Zach" since those seemed to be the most common. Then I would play the video for Zach and do an immediate prompt of "Hi ...(whoever the person was)" After years of him just repeating "Hi Zach" he finally got it and now greets people properly. Video modeling is such a wonderful tool and very easy to make your own little videos :)

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email: mary@verbalbehaviorapproach.com