ABA vs Flooritime - Why Discrete Trial Training is Important | www.agentsofspeech.com

Hey, guys. Welcome to our Monday Lives. Today's topic is about discrete trial training. This is an AVA term. I recently was reminded by this term because I was working with a therapist who is helping me to. To teach a child as an agent of therapy. Hence the name agents of speech actually comes from that. Because sometimes the principal me will need an agent to help perform the therapy because I'm not around or because it's a skill transfer. So that is the premise of agents of speech and also the premise of me teaching others what to do. Sometimes I am the agent and I learn from other therapists or, you know, other professionals as well. So, you know, this kind of thing, there's no hierarchy. It's just that whoever can teach someone something new or something, something more advanced or whatever, then you know, the floor is open, right? So therefore, let's talk about DTT discrete trial training. Okay? If you've heard about this, please let me know in the comments. And if you're joining us live, say hi, let me know where you're from, that kind of stuff. We'll get more people watching. So it's great if you guys can engage. It brings. It helps me out a lot. Okay, so anyways, discrete trial training. ABA term literally means how, like the. It's literally, literally the most watched YouTube video about ABA. Okay. There's like, I don't know, two mil video. Like, I'll just go ahead and find it since I don't think there's no. What's that called? There is any trial training. Aba. Okay. So like, if you watch it. I actually. I spelled wrong. Discrete. Sorry, my bad. I'll change it later. But anyways, if you watch this video, I'll watch it with like, together. Right? So if you watch this video, you will see that it's a discrete trial, is where you do something very robotically, as people would say. I remember my. Actually, what's that called? My. What's that called? My. Who's that called? The. The professor in speech therapy. He was like. He was showing this video to us. Like 1.5 million people watched it. Thomas turned off all for obvious reasons. Most probably it's going to be really like, like negative and say, hey, this is like unnatural. Whatever. And basically, if you watch it, which we will do right now. Sorry, I need to turn on my. My volume. Right.

Finally, once the child has responded, the child is given reinforcement, a reward for correct response or a correction or an incorrect response. Let's try it again.

Do this. So that is one trial, right? So let me just Go back to my screen. Stop sharing. And one trial is basically, oh, it's Rashona. Hey, how are you? Great to have you here. Anyways, so how it works is that one trial means that someone gives instruction, the kid does the behavior, and then someone gives the reward. And if you're like, new to this. No, I mean, if you've heard about ABA before, then you know, the ABCs of behavioral training, which we all use, by the way. It's not only just speech therapists, ABA therapist or OT or whatever, we all use this because when we're teaching kids, it's at the behavioral level. So I know this kind of topic isn't going to garner a lot of attention, but for those parents who are hardcore want to learn more, this is what they want to learn. Okay, why is DTT important? Why is it, although it's very robotic and repetitive, why is it good? So when you see in the video, right, what happened was that the therapist gives like instruction, for instance, like do this and then dance, right? So the kid tries. The therapist also prompts him to stand up and follow 100%. After that, gives a reward. Might be a toy, might be a. I don't know, might be a snack or whatever. And if you've gone through some of our material, our online courses for parents, we have that component inside. Why? Okay, here's the. Here's the big number one. Why? Because discrete trial training gives the structure that is clear for the kid and for you, okay? Especially for the trainer, which is you. Okay? If you are a parent who wants to train your child, that is right. Or if you're a therapist. So why is that this clarity and structure very, very important? Well, first of all, most of the time when the parents are teaching children, they don't know what they want to do. Okay. Most of the speech therapists who, who give advice, they would say, just play, play more with your child. Just, you know, teach them some words whilst you're playing. It's very vague, right? So why. I like to teach parents how to use like discrete trial training. Right? One chunk, one. One instruction, one response, one feedback and. And reward, Right? Why is that important? It's because parents need this kind of train, like this kind of structure so that they know what they're doing, what the things are that you want to achieve. And secondly, when you have that clarity, the child will be able to. Was much easier for a child to follow you. Okay? That's number one reason, is for you. Okay? It really is for you. Second reason is that whatever you're trying to teach it can be broken down into smaller, smaller steps. So I just got a DM from a parent. She's like, oh, I learned about like pre linguistic skills from one of our videos. Might be alive or whatever. Probably alive. Okay? So the pro linguistic skills, there are 11 of them or sometimes there's more. What you can do in a discrete trial training is that you can teach those things separately, okay? And a lot of parents, especially those in Asia, would say, hey man, I'm going to use this discrete trial to teach, what's that called? Eye contact, right when. And that's not really that great. You know, that's not the best thing to do as a, as a parent, as a trainer. We don't really do that. I cover that inside of one of our eye contact videos on YouTube or Facebook, if you're watching there. So I think that, you know, like discrete trial training can break down one of the hardest things that you want your child to do, which is to talk. Okay? Most of the time, the video that you're watching just now, they were teaching imitation. And imitation is like a huge component of starting any type of therapy. Because for instance, if you're learning how to play an instrument, the first thing you do is to imitate, right? You're learning a new skill, you're always following the instructor. Therefore, if you're learning how to talk, the first thing you need to do is to imitate how the instructor you is saying something. Okay? Those are some of the reasons why discrete trial training is important. All right? Is important. So now that you know, the next question would be, hey man, ABA or DTT or whatever you call it, right? It's so boring and monotonous and also so robotic, then why would you want to keep on doing it, right? Because that's so far fetched, so far away from actually having a conversation. Parents often say, I want like a two way conversation, right? So the thing about this is this. You cannot have, you cannot teach a child two way communication just by saying this because you want it, right? It's like, oh, I want you to sit down and talk to me. Hey man, we talked about this many times in other videos. Your wants are your wants. Your child's ability is another thing, right? And if your child's ability is like at this level right now, then and they don't know why they have to increase the ability in order to communicate with you even more, then you need to have a strong reason externally, which is rewards. And this is why where we use like discrete trial training or like we use ABA methods, we use this even in speech therapy, right? And it's kind of like a spectrum of how robotic or structured something is versus how natural it is. The matter of fact is that the natural side of, of, of training, of language training, behavioral training is very hard, especially for you if you're actually acting as an agent. If I tell you something, I teach you something and you try to do it, it's super, super difficult for you to pull off something super naturalistic because you already know how, need to know how to play a game, how to sell a toy to a child, how to engage them, how to, what kind of language goals are you, like creeping into the activity, like how to hold and maintain activity as long as possible. These are skills that, you know, that makes a therapist worth their money. You know, that's one of the skills that, that is very, very sought after nowadays, right? So that's something you have to build up. Okay? That's why we go to robotic structured tasks to teach you some easier ways to teach your child something like a quick win. Okay? Okay. So we always like, like my professor and masters would say, hey man, look at this video. It's so robotic. There's no, what we call like function of language. Right? But the problem is we don't stay there forever. Okay? So for instance, if you're learning how to play the piano, right, first of all you're going to copy your, your instructor like note by note, finger by finger. After that you try to read from a music sheet which is like not imitation but you know, just reading. Okay. And at like when do you start playing your own song or making your own song? Not until forever, right? So there is like for talking we might be innate. It's, it's innate skill, right? It should be in fact. But sometimes like children, if they're falling back behind in language skills and everyone is just composing their own language, how does it make the child feel? Very, very bad? Because if you go to a group learning session, everyone's like playing blue, like I don't know, Beethoven and whatnot or like their own song and then you're there trying to imitate stuff or you can't even play anything. That's very discouraging, right? So imagine that inside of a two or three year old person who doesn't know much about the world, don't want to give a damn, don't want to try, don't want to, whatever. And so if you say that imitation is super structured and unnatural to do, then if you do it all like, of course you can't do it for like 10 years, right? You can't do it for like a year even. You need to like this one has a. Has. Is a means to an end. You use this structured robotic way of teaching a child that is very clear to you and both, both to you and your kid. Very quickly you get all the prerequisite skills done and you move on. Okay? You move on. You don't need to stick to doing like doing tasks like I teach parents how to use like token economy, right? So I can talk about that in the live video. I'm not going to put on YouTube as a standalone video because as you can see, like if we talk about like technical terms like today, like discrete trial training. I didn't think I was. I'm experimenting with something, right? Usually I would write some catchy title and get someone's attention to keep on watching. This one is more like I even had a typo inside. I'm sorry. And like a lot less people are watching because the thing is, this stuff isn't something you want to care about and the same as your child. You know, if, if nothing is like fun and it sounds hard, they're not going to do it same as you, right? So if you're watching this right now, I'm very happy that you are. And DTT or ABA training, you need to do it in the beginning to cover the basics. Okay. And we talk about this a little bit before, like learning to learn skills. Are they able to sit down, listen to you, follow instructions and then after that some pre linguistic skills, like matching those we don't really do in speech therapy. To be honest, there isn't too much of a need, I believe secondly, like imitation of actions and, and, and sounds and whatnot, you know, joint attention is actually. You cannot just teach them in a task. I believe that's not how I do it. At least you teach it within teaching them the routine of a dtt, Right? So when you're using a discrete trial training, you're actually teaching them a routine like whenever I say something, you have to do something and I give you a reward. That is the routine. So once they understand that the joint attention comes very naturally and the eye contact comes very naturally because they're trying to guess or trying to know what you want so that they can get the reward faster. Right. So once you have that working relationship with your kid, then you can move on to something more naturalistic. So parents have been asking me about floor time, so maybe this title of the Video should be like, oh, how does like Floor time versus aba? That would be a better type title. Maybe I'll change it after I talk about it. But, um, but Floor Time is like the total opposite of a discrete trial training is that there isn't any trial per se, and it's very child led. Whereas, you know, ABA is more like clinical like clinician led or therapist therapist led or parent led, whatever. Whoever. The person who's doing therapy. Right. And why that is a huge difference is because if you have a child on the spectrum, what usually in the book say is that either you go super structured like the video we just saw, or we go very, very, very play based. So let me see if YouTube has like a floor time, like a floor time implementation or something. So it would look like something of what we call a sensory integration, that kind of setting. Let me just find one real quick. Because most of them are pretty. Just talking heads like myself, right. And it's very hard to get parental. What's that called? Parental agreement to showcase children on video. Which is why like information is traveling very slowly. You know what I'm saying? Like, and let me just see. I think it's around here. So something like this. Let me just share my screen right now. Share. Yep. I'll share my system audio as well. If you can see in front of me.

And one day he kind of allowed me to playfully take one of his toys from him. I kind of built up some anticipation, went and grabbed the toy.

And so it looks like this, right?

Frustrating them. But he had that beautiful look. He smiled at me. He had that playful look that he wanted to see.

So you're hearing the language that this guy is saying, like, oh, he's got this playful look. He allowed me to take a toy. It's very passive, right? I mean, no Asian parent would want to hear this. What do you mean by that? And you see like he in this, in here, he's trying to get his attention by playing and allowing him to reject and whatever. Okay. There's no rewards. He's not trying to get to him and make him sit down, whatnot. So this is like floor time. Maybe I'll do like a video full on about this. That would be a good video, right? If you want to know about it, comment below. Okay, so let me just close this. Go back here, right? So you know, like that's the problem. Like if you go from one extreme to another, usually speaking, I wouldn't say that both would be good together. Just choose one. I come from a background of teaching very structured things first and then move on to something naturalistic. I think that makes more sense, at least for the children that I've been seeing. And how do you move from a DTT from a discrete trial training into something else is to incorporate play. So what kind of play can you do? So I've been talking about. I've been teaching some parents over in our membership. So how we do it is like we create a routine. So we know that a child can take a routine because they know what a discrete trial is, right? Because you give them a instruction, they perform an action, speak something, say something, whatever, and then they get a reward. So that's a whole routine. Another routine would be like teaching them to play toys that have a sequential step to it. Okay. No matter what kind of toys you're playing with, there must be some steps you need to do. You should away. First you do this, and then you do that, and then last you do that. Right? So that's something you have to teach structurally. And then slowly, if they are okay with it and they feel like it's actually fun, you don't need to reward anymore because it's embedded inside the toy. And this is the hardest step for a lot of people. And even for a lot of therapists who are stuck in ABA for a long time, a lot of them are stuck with doing, like, what they call manding, like, demand that mand. Like manding. If you're, you know, well versed in this therapy world, you will know what I'm talking about. And at the same time, I think at the end of the day, if you just want your child to start talking, all you need to do is to start off with this discrete trial training first. Okay? And once you have them, like, repeating after you and saying stuff after you, and then you can move on to something more naturalistic. You cannot stay on discrete trial forever. All right, that's just a disaster. I've seen some ABA centers keep on doing it. It's not cool, I think. And sometimes what happens is that they. They justify it by saying, oh, because they can't do this thing, I will take it out and teach it in a discrete trial manner. So, for instance, if they don't know how to play with a toy, then first of all, they will. Or they don't know how to wash their hands or something. They will actually only teach a child to, like, press on the soap or turn on the tap by using a discrete trial, which is kind of crazy because, like, how do you teach something without the context. Okay, so that is the main problem with discrete trial ABA methods. They don't have a context, and play gives back the context into it. All right, so I think that's all I want to talk about today. I know it's a boring, it's a lecture kind of. Kind of topic. Not a lot of parents know what the heck I'm saying, especially when I'm. I've spelled the wrong thing, so I'll change the topic, the title later on. But it's a good experiment now, I know. Cannot be too technical around here. Okay, so that's it, guys. Let me know if you have any questions in the comments. I'll try my best to get back to it. And I'll see you next Monday. All right. Bye. Bye.