In this instructional video, board‑certified behavior analyst and former special‑education teacher Sasha Long explains why the ability to wait is a critical life and academic skill, especially for autistic children who often struggle with response inhibition, flexibility, and emotional control. She presents three evidence‑based strategies for teaching waiting: (1) offering meaningful choices through simple choice boards or body‑position options so children stay engaged while waiting; (2) using visual timers—such as puzzle‑piece timers, countdown clocks, and stack‑light systems—to make the passage of time concrete and provide advance warnings; and (3) clarifying expectations with concise, visual language and written cues that outline what the child should do while waiting. Throughout, she demonstrates practical tools, offers concrete examples, and emphasizes the importance of empowering children with control and clear structure. The video is aimed at teachers, parents, and clinicians seeking actionable techniques to improve waiting skills in autistic or neurodiverse learners.
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Waiting is a super important but sometimes super challenging skill to teach. The skill of waiting is something we need to do every single day in our lives, but some kids are really struggling to wait effectively. Today I'm going to show you 3 of my must-use strategies for teaching waiting and the tools that I use along with those strategies. I'm Sasha Long. I'm a former special education teacher and board-certified behavior analyst. So let's talk for a second about why waiting is so important.
It's a life skill, right?
You have to wait in line for the post office. You have to wait your turn to pay for groceries. It's also essential for academics. We have to wait our turn in class. We have to wait to get our papers turned in and get great and receive our grades. We have to— waiting is also an essential life skill that relates to safety, right? You have to wait your turn across the street or you'd get hit by a car. Now it's totally understandable that waiting is challenging for a lot of our kids. A lot of our kids struggle struggle with response inhibition, with flexibility, with emotional control. Those are all really important executive functions that some of our kids are still learning. Now we can break down the skill of waiting using 3 big strategies. 1, we're going to give choices. 2, we're going to use visuals to break down the waiting time. And 3, we're going to clarify expectations. So let's dig into what each of those strategies looks like. The first strategy is to give choices. You and I wait while doing other things.
We look at our phone, we talk to our friends, we check our email. We should give our kids that same right to do something while they're waiting. But we can give those options.
I love a simple choice board for kids that need that, those visuals.
You can put simple options like, hey, do you want to listen to headphones? Do you want to write in your notebook? Do you want to get a drink while you're waiting? A nice way to give some options of something appropriate to do while you're waiting instead of just sitting there. I also like this one: let's pick how we want our hands to be, our body to be, our mouth to be. Because for some kids, they may prefer to sit in a chair versus sitting on the floor. For some kids and people, it's just uncomfortable to sit on the floor, right? Give those options. I just use this with a simple dry erase marker, and again, I'm giving kids control and choice and power, empowering them to be in charge of their own body while waiting nicely and learning the skill of waiting. The second strategy is to visually show how long you have to wait and to show when waiting is almost done. Here are a few of my favorite tools to do this. This system is really one of my favorites. It's basically basically a puzzle. These two work the same way, but you can allocate these pieces to really mean any amount of time. You can do this with any picture you have of anything and just cut it up. And then let's say we wanted to wait— we had to wait for 5 minutes. I would have each of these pieces, you know, be about 30 seconds. I would give another piece of the puzzle every 30 seconds so the student can really see when— that we're almost all done waiting and we have only one piece left. We're almost there. And yep, we're done. We're all done waiting. Same idea here, we can have these mean any amount of time. Each one can mean 1 minute, 5 minutes, 30 seconds, whatever we're doing, so kids can see visually that passage of time. Super nice, really easy to do. You can do this with anything. Another way you can do this is with a countdown clock, kind of same idea. We can do this, you know, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Once we get to the last one, it's time for this. So we can just add on those numbers as the passage of time goes by. So kind of same idea. These stack lights are a little bit different, so I like to use these for a few different things. I think these are great for waiting for something exciting, like, oh my gosh, we're about to go to gym class, or it's not time yet for gym class, and then, oh my gosh, it's almost time for gym class. So we know, have that warning, it's not a surprise, we know that it's getting closer. I mean, think about when you work out and you're doing something really challenging, and you know, let's say you're in a gym class and someone's like, oh man, only 2 reps left, you're like, yes, we're almost there, right? Same idea, we're almost there, we're almost almost ready to do that exciting thing. Now it's ready to go. Another way you can use this is when a preferred item is going to be taken away, like let's say the iPad. So we can show that like, okay, it's almost time to give back the iPad. We can give that warning time. Half the time when we're taking away a preferred item, the struggle there comes from lack of warning. We want to give that transition warning. So this is a nice way to show, okay, it's almost time to give it back. And that, you know, that warning is embedded in this tool.
Last strategy that I love to use when teaching waiting is to really give the overall expectations in a way that is accessible and understandable.
Visuals and simple language are really key if our kids have low receptive language, meaning they struggle to understand all the verbal language we're giving. But give the expectations, "Hey, I expect you to stay in one spot. I expect you to be quiet." Give those expectations every time we're asking someone to wait. Having kind of simple rules and cues, even for students that are strong readers. Remember, text is a great visual cue. I'm a visual learner myself. I'm not a strong auditory learner, so I appreciate when things are written out for me. And talking about some of the hard things that, like, I don't like waiting, I might want to yell and run around, but I'm gonna wait nicely. So writing out, even if it's just on a dry erase board, or having some visual cue to show, hey, these are the steps to waiting, and These are the expectations and it's not going to last that long.
Alright, so that's waiting. I hope you are excited to help your students improve this skill. It is such an important skill for you to teach. If you'd like to learn more essential behavior strategies, subscribe to my channel. I've got a lot more coming.
