Episode 14 Supporting Early Development Through Play and Naturalistic Intervention

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Tracy Raulston, Assistant Professor in the Applied Behavior Analysis program at Texas State University. She shares her journey from classroom teaching to doctoral research, and how her passion for developmental science, early intervention, and child-led learning shaped her commitment to Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Interventions (NDBIs). With over 20 years of experience in autism support and early childhood special education, Tracy brings a unique blend of clinical practice and research insight to the conversation. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Wonderful. Hey everyone, welcome back. I am so excited to have with us today Dr. Tracy Ralston, who's joining us from warm and sunny Texas. On a cloudy day, actually, she does. And she's an assistant professor at Texas State University. And we are going to sit down and talk about how she got into NDBIs, her motivation, her interest. And then we're going to dig in a little bit into some of the really incredible research that she's been doing that I've been reading and we've been talking about in the membership. So, Tracy, welcome. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited. I know. I just love your stuff on LinkedIn. I've been following you, and that's where I came across to you. So I'm so excited to get to meet you virtually one day, hopefully soon in person, and to learn more about your NDBI journey. So, can you start us off with telling us a little bit more about yourself, your background?

SPEAKER_00 1:01

Sure. So as you mentioned, I'm an assistant professor in our applied behavior analysis program at Texas State University, which is in San Marcos, Texas. I'm a native Texan, actually. And kind of my journey really started in my undergraduate studies at Texas AM, I studied special education. And I remembered this was back in 2004, 2005. And as I was completing my coursework, you know, we have to make our student teaching decisions. I really thought I wanted to be an early childhood special education kind of preschool teacher, but they had an opening in an autism unit in College Station ISD. And I had done some practica with autistic students, and I really, really enjoyed it. I really enjoyed just connecting with them, understanding what their special interests were, just really hanging out with them. And so I thought, okay, yeah, I'll do that. And I fell in love with it. It was a self-contained classroom kindergarten through third grade. You know, so there was inclusion that we supported. We also had some spending a lot of time in the classroom working on learning communication skills, language. Um, it was, it was kind of based in that verbal behavior model. Um, it was this was pre-VB map. So there wasn't a VB map yet, but we had the ables we used. Um, and we also use like read well and we taught lots of pre-academic skills. Um, I just loved it. I loved that every day was different. I loved that we got to um, you know, incorporate children's interests and and try to um take you know a problem and solve it really quickly and make their day better and laugh with them and teach them new skills. And I just loved, you know, everything about it. So I went on to teach um in an autism support classroom in for I did this for four years, um, two years, no, three years in college station, two years in Austin. I wanted to get to the big city of Austin. So came back here too. I I love it here. Um and as I was telling you earlier, what I realized was um we had consultants that would come and help us, you know, work through different issues that we were facing. And the consultants that were BCBAs just had so many great ideas that worked. So I I remember vividly sitting down at one of these meetings and saying, what is ABA? Because I just had no idea. And one of our consultants, her name is Susan Catlett, she's uh out of Houston, she kind of drew this big umbrella and wrote ABA. And then she kind of had, you know, little um lines coming off of it like there's discrete trial training, there's naturalistic teaching, there's pivotal response training, there's visual schedule. So all of these are different strategies, but this is the science. And so I felt very determined to learn more about this and I wanted to learn just everything that these fabulous women knew. And so that's when I went back to school for applied behavior analysis at Texas State. And um I just fell in love with the science, I fell in love with the research, and I decided to continue on. And I wound up at the University of Oregon for my doctoral studies. And that's where I think I got just more breadth in early intervention practices more broadly, um, sort of just child development, um, families, just the correlational research between, you know, parenting and stress and risk factors and protective factors. And I just felt like I still didn't really know how to support families as best as I could. I was very good at working with the child, right? And I feel like a lot of us as teachers and BCBAs, we we get into that because we do love children and we love working with them. But then we realize there's this whole um, you know, children don't develop in vacuums. There's family systems, right? And we think of Rovenbrenner like ecological systems theory. And so um I feel like I'm being a bit tangential, but um, you know, I just wanted to learn more about how to support the whole child and how they interact with their environment. And um in 2015, um, the seminal article, I guess we can call it seminal since it's been a decade now. Um crazy kind of coining in DBIs came about. And I was always very interested in naturalistic teaching and natural environment teaching, incidental teaching. But then I just became more curious about all of these other developmental approaches. Um and, you know, the more that I learned about them, the more I realized I feel like every BCBA who works with young children should know about these practices. So I feel really passionate at just about um disseminating, learning more. And um yeah, I'm really excited about the work that you're doing and just putting all these resources together. I think it's wonderful.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Thank you. Thank you. And I love hearing about your journey. Um, I think it's always interesting when people come into the BCBA kind of ABA arena from a different background. If it's child development, if it's education or SLPOT, I just feel like they bring people like yourself, they just bring such knowledge about supporting children into a field where we support children, but I don't know that we always get that type of coursework experience in our in our programming right now. So I feel like that's a great support that comes in that you all bring. And it's just you just you teach children, right? Like we're good teachers. We know it to do. We have this amazing science over it. But when it gets into the nuances of supporting young children, it kind of changes things a little bit for me, anyways, in terms of the goals or the curriculum I might be using for a young child might look very different than what I would use for an old child for me is five. Let me put that disclaimer out. Like that's old for me with the population that I support. Um, and I see a lot of these um a lot of providers sometimes using curriculum or strategies or putting a focus on learning that they would do for a four-year-old or a two-year-old, but not really understanding that a two-year-old is a vastly different human than a four-year-old, right? They're not a smaller version of four developmentally. There's big, big gaps there. Um, and I think because they don't have that developmental background, my my worry is they they're not programming for some of the right things at the right time. Does that make sense to you?

SPEAKER_00 8:38

You see that? Yeah, it does. Yes, definitely. And I when we think about our assessments that we typically use, right? Um many of them are not normed. So what that means is that we don't have psychometric properties on the VB map, for example. Um, we get such great training as behavior analysts in how to teach, I think the best out of anyone. We really know how to analyze every single contingency and to develop a prompting hierarchy, fade that prompt, and you know, achieve stimulus control, right? Um, that is ideal. But we don't always understand what we're supposed to be teaching at what time and what are the most pivotal skills that we should be teaching for a given age range, right? And I think a lot of that does have to do with the assessments that um we are trained in. Um where, you know, and I keep talking about the VB map, and but I think it has so many strengths, right? Like it really can help you understand, you know, like listener responding by feature function in class. I feel like we we know that better than anyone. But if you look at the play skills in the VB map, it's might might not be developmentally sequenced. Um it's it's it's not normed. And so um, you know, I think it comes from from really being exposed to a lot of different assessments and and understanding, you know, what would a two-year-old be doing? Um like playing with objects, what are exploratory play behaviors? Um, is mouthing an object a repetitive behavior or is that just exploring, you know, with your sensory system, right? Um but if they're scratching things, you know, like that's how toddlers, you know, explore their environment. Um it's that taste, small touch, all of those, you know, and then what are functional behaviors? Can is dumping repetitive, or is that just something that every toddler does, right? Um, and all the way up to some of those pre-symbolic and then more advanced symbolic play skills. So I think like you were saying, it just has to do with um like understanding trajectories of developmental um sequences.

SPEAKER_01 11:18

I agree wholeheartedly with all of that. And when I had a two-year-old, again, lived it cause and effect, all the different play schemas, trajection, you know what I mean, like that's what we're living here. And I spent some time talking about some of the self-stimulatory, kind of repetitive patterns of behavior that we see in some of the children. I really think if we view those as play schemas that are still developing, how you approach that behavior puts it in a whole new light. You were throwing things and bouncing things trajection. I can join that. I can make an activity around that, I can embed learning opportunities and I will have your interest. So I appreciate you saying that you know, what kids are kind of doing at different developmental ages, because you know, we might have a four-year-old chronologically, but developmentally, where are they at with their skills? Um, and that's very different. And I'm just thinking if you have any assessments that you use, some of the ones that I have encountered, you know, I used to work for Dr. Pardington, so I used the Ables, and then Mark put out the baby map. And then I looked into ESTM, of course, because that's where I hang out most days. But there, you know, and there's Carolina curriculum, there's the help, the Hawaii one. There's so many great kind of assessments and curriculum guides out there that I wonder if it'd be helpful to create something for behavior analysts or SLPs, OTs, whoever about. Here are all of these different assessments andor curriculum or curriculum guides that are available for a zero to four population that you might want to get familiar with. Are there any that you can think of that I'm always hoping to learn?

SPEAKER_00 13:00

I'm trying to think that um would be a great resource. Um I in my clinical work when completing assessments on play, I always struggle to find like one assessment that would work. But I did love the early start Denver model. I always use that um assessment and I kind of mix and match that with the vineland, actually. Because I I think if you look at the independent play domain and the social play domain, they're it's not super detailed, but there are a lot of very pivotal skills that then we can task analyze. And then those, those are kind of the two I would use for play um the most frequently for that birth to five range. Um I haven't used the help one, but I have seen it for my own son, the fine motor one, but I am interested in learning more about that one. Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that ACE, there's ASAP, which is uh Brian Boyd, it's actually a free resource.

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Love it.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

And I can share that with you.

SPEAKER_01 14:16

I would be happy to share that with everyone. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 14:18

It came out of an IES grant that he had, and um, he wrote this with a a speech language pathologist. That's a really great resource as well to use. Um, I also think the Jasper manual is a good one.

SPEAKER_01 14:33

I wish she would put in a curriculum and it's just been out for it.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yes. Yeah. When I look at There's a lot, I I think um, you know, the developmental play assessment, the lifter scales. That's a good one to look into.

SPEAKER_01 14:48

Um yeah, so um so the lifter, I'm taking my notes here, lifter. Yes. Yeah, because I know some of your research revolves around play dates, right? I thought that was really interesting. And how, and I definitely want to talk about beyond trial count, how we measure play and engagement. And I think what you measure matters and what we are measuring should be mattering and meaningful for the lives of the children that we support. So for me, I always think about like this profile for a child that comes in. What do they need? What do the parents need help with? Like that's build these overarching profiles. If Liam, for example, if that child is not a people-oriented person, that's a priority, right? And then we have these priorities. He's not engaging in reciprocal back and forth interactions with or without objects. That's a priority. So I kind of sketch out three or four buckets of priorities. And then within those overarching profiles, what I would call it, then the objectives, the teaching steps, everything kind of filters in and it ties back to these main overarching areas of need for learning. It's like learning to learn skills. So for me, that's such an effective way to teach it. But I don't know that there's an assessment out there that looks at it, because I haven't seen one. Um, but I'm curious about when you were looking at assessments or thinking about taking data for the play dates research. If you can talk about that, what do you guys use or how do you measure that? Because that would be an incredible thing for people to learn more about if they wanted to facilitate play dates between peers in the different areas that they're in.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Yeah. So um when we think about play dates, there's so many benefits to those for children and parents, right? Because I think having community is so important for everyone. Um, and to feel socially connected, but also, but especially if you're going through some very unique experience, to find someone else who's going through or has a similar lived experience can just normalize your grief. It can normalize your hopes and dreams, everything, right? And so why I'm so interested in play dates is that I think it can help parental well-being, family well-being, and then also just a natural way to get children together and not necessarily target teaching or targeting play skills, but just for this sheer just leisure and enjoyment and to have those opportunities to learn early social skills, right? So if I think about play dates, I really think of that as that's a time they can learn those early social skills, whether it's taking a turn, sharing when told to do so. This is a vinyland skill that comes to mind, a goal that I've often written. Sharing when told to do so, sharing without being told to do so. Um, just those synchronous interactions, just doing the same activity as somebody else, whether that's like making brownies or, you know, reading books at the same time kind of parallel play. So we can really work for those, work through those stages of engagement. Um, and then also some of those initiations and responses, right? So um whether that's manding to appear or responding, you know, or even join attention, like look at this, or you know, look at my teddy bear, or even if there's no vo ver vocal verbal behavior, but just showing someone something. There's so many different skills that we can um teach parents to scaffold and support and not necessarily make it so rigid, right? But um just kind of I think of them as like clusters of skills that can really help. Um, but also I think just the just getting together um that is a lot of work, number one.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

Coordinate, right?

SPEAKER_00 19:12

Somebody with a child knows, like just following through with an engagement is a lot of work. So like just helping families find someone to invite over. How do I even find someone? Um, and then when they get here, like what do I do? Like, oh, you could have some, you know, how do we find shared interests, shared snacks, like all of those things I think are really um can just really help, you know, across the family.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Yeah. And when you guys do the research on that, is it a dyadic kind of like there's a one peer that comes over? Is it a small couple of peers? I'm just thinking for like families who, you know, it might be overwhelming to go out to these wonderful play places and that's too overstimulating for my child. It's gonna be a safety issue. So having the ability to have another child come to their home or to go to another child's home is a much more secure, maybe comfortable type of environment where you can have that beautiful engagement with all the all of that extra, extra, you know, whatnot. And we have play dates sometimes, and one friend is, oh, it's great. When we get three over, whoo, it's just hurting wet cats, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:28

It's a lot. We do one. We so um in the literature, play dates are usually described as uh a meeting between two children at one of their houses, at one of their homes. Um, but that doesn't mean, you know, obviously you can meet at a park or a community center. Um, but I do like we keep it small um where it's just one other child. I also meet with the teachers to determine who would be a good peer ahead of time based on if they're in the same classroom or in the same early childhood center. Do they tend to gravitate towards the same centers, right? Or when you're outside on the playground, do they tend to gravitate towards the same area of the playground? Um, so we want kind of that genuine connection, right? Um and I also have um um predetermined games that have that I think really help facilitate more turn taking and are really easy for parents to arrange the environment. So I choose games that have multiple pieces, like tangible pieces. So think of like a balancing game. Say you have like monkeying around balancing game where you put the tree up there, then there's all these little monkeys, and then each child puts a monkey on and at some point it falls down. So we also kind of have that sensory aspect to it because we want it to be mutually reinforcing. There's some literature through the Kagels published a couple of PlateAid studies back in the early 2000s talking about mutually reinforcing activities. And also these multiple components, I want them to be able to put them in a container so that there's a very discrete way that we can practice turn taking. So I have used like plastic bags where all the monkeys, for example, would go in the plastic bag. And then, you know, for the beginning of the game, we would take like five turns and then we could just go free-for-all. But then if we do have some dexterity things, then I've also used a bowl to put things in. Even like a fishing game, right? Um, instead of having like two fishing rods, you can reduce that to one fishing rod so that you have more opportunities to practice those turn-taking skills. But you also don't want them to have to practice that the whole time. So it's a balance between opportunities and then enjoyment. And it that's always a balance, I think.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Absolutely. And I love that they don't have to practice that the whole time because that's that ebb and flow and creativity of play that children just make up their own roles as they go and they're flexible and the focus shifts. And that's so important, I think, for the children we support to also experience that. It's not a prescriptive set of roles. Play is just play. And so I'm thinking some of the play dates we've had where we started out with the floor is lava and all the pillows and the stuffies are on the floor, and we're jumping around. And then at some point the lava monster is coming and you're purple. I was just sitting in the room, like, we're playing color friends now. You're purple. I don't know what that means. I'm green, you're purple. Chase me. And I'm like, do we make a rainbow? Like they just went on about their game, and I just kind of sat there. I don't know this color friend game that you guys are making up, but it was so, so creative. It was also, you know, executive functioning, cognitive flexibility, creativity. It was all of that great stuff kind of mixed in there. But wouldn't happen if that play date wouldn't have had an opportunity to grow organically in that way. Um, and I think that's wonderful that you have this ability to kind of get these predetermined ideas and games for families to get that support and then kind of scaffold it back and like you said, let it go for the kids to do with it as they want to. That's great.

SPEAKER_00 24:41

Yeah, it's you definitely want it to also just be fun and free-flowing. And um even if that's watching a video together, right? Um, if if there's gaze shifting happening, right, then there's joy engagement occurring between those children and whatever else is going on. And so um there's so many different important skills that we can look at.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

And how would you measure that? That just made me think those awesome talking about some are discrete, some are kind of packaged in with other skills. How would we measure that for people who are listening who want to, oh my gosh, read your articles, learn how to do play dates? What would be some of those key pivotal or foundational behaviors? Is it shifting gaze? Is it turn taking when asked or when not asked? Um, is it a duration of amount of time that they're in close proximity to one another? What could they think about measuring to show that they're making progress within play dates?

SPEAKER_00 25:46

Yeah, so this is a really tricky question and something I've thought a lot about because when we look at the literature, the way that we measure joint engagement is not a feasible way to do it in practice, right? So we can't just take the way that it's done in studies and necessarily expect an RBT, for example, to do that. Um, because these are usually like a percentage of time by total duration of spent in a certain engagement state. So if we think about like unengaged, object-engaged, person-engaged, uh coordinated joint engagement, where we have a child who's actively shifting their gaze between objects and people in a seamless way. Um, it also takes a lot of skill to understand what that is. And it's really hard to measure that and also engage the child and prompt them, reinforce, praise, arrange the environment. So um I really like to use rating scales for this type of skill when I'm when I'm trying to understand their level of engagement, we really are kind of estimating a percentage of time that they're spent jointly engaged, coordinating their attention versus maybe person or object-engaged or unengaged. And maybe if I have a child who's mostly unengaged, I really just want them to be person engaged. Right. Um, but if I have a child who they can engage with objects or they can engage with people, but they're not really able to engage with both of those things simultaneously, then I want to increase just their percentage of time with coordinated joint engagement. Um, so maybe I have an individual's individualized rating scale with five anchors, and then I'm going to operationally um define what each of those anchors are.

SPEAKER_01 27:52

So some bars.

SPEAKER_00 27:53

Yeah, just saying like, okay, a zero is when they are unengaged for the entire session, right? That means that they're not looking at people, they're not really manipulating objects. They're maybe they're eloping, right? Um but if I have the next might be they are engaged with objects at least half the time, right? Or they're engaged with people at least half the time. Then maybe they're jointly engaged at least 25% of the time, 50% of the time, 80% of the time. We would never want them to be doing this 100% of the time. It's not realistic. We are all off task or unengaged sometimes, right? Um, and so we also don't have a great norm data on this. So um you kind of have to use your clinical judgment and think of these as free operant behaviors, right? So when we think about um measuring behaviors that we're targeting to reduce, we are we are looking at those graphs every day, right? We are not presenting contrived opportunities and determining yes or no and then converting that to a percentage. I feel like a lot of times that's our go-to with skills. And these are not um, these are unrestricted free operant behaviors. You can decide at any point to look at something. Your attention shifts all the time. So we really need to be looking at those graphs often, right? And and and reevaluating what our goal is.

unknown 29:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:40

And that takes us kind of into the beyond trial count article that you guys just published this year last year. Sorry, we're in 2025, in 2024, looking at different ways. You know, there's no right or wrong way, but there might be a better way. And how do we measure play and engagement in an early childhood ABA and DBI types of sessions? What are we looking for? Um, and I think the go-to is X four out of five times, 80%. Like that's kind of the unofficial gold standard that you see in reports and and whatnot. But some of these behaviors, like you mentioned, they're not discrete. They're kind of co-happening together, and attention and motivation shifts from moment to moment. It's fleeting for some children. That doesn't mean that's not a valuable data point to capture, but what is that realistic? Like you said, I'm teaching it, I'm watching. If I'm taking data, I might have missed an opportunity. So, what kinds of data collection do you guys highlight in that article for everyone that I'm gonna put the link to so they can Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:46

Yeah. So I think really the most important thing is to understand levels of play. Um, right. And so kind of having a background in um if we think about levels of object play, for example, I um I have a table in that article that describes different ones, but you know, um, we have we would start with exploratory, right? So these would be like banging objects, mouthing them, scratching things, basically just um entry level, like just like exploring sensory motor um with objects, understanding what it tastes, smell, touch, feels, does, right? Um, right now I have a one-year-old son. He loves to just uh throw things and watch it drop and the sound, right? It sounds a certain way. These are actually developmentally important play behaviors, right? And so um understanding those for what they are and that this might be the best way to really engage with a child, right? Then we would have more functional or relational play where we're gathering things, putting them together. Um, we are putting things in a container, we are um, you know, um moving a car around on the floor, maybe we are um putting shapes in a shape sorter, maybe it's a chunky puzzle, um, those types of things. And then we have some pre-symbolic beh uh play skills where we are starting. I'm just gonna use these because these are my husband's, but like these are like little dolls, right? So maybe I am um pretending to feed the doll, or I'm pretending to feed someone else, right? All the way until now I'm actually bringing the doll to life, where I'm walking the doll, I'm bringing it down to feed an imaginary bull, if it's a dog, for example. So really all the way to incorporating figurines, sucked animals, and dolls into play and where we have sequences. So what I do see when we are measuring these is we fall into a trap if we have very rigid goals where we do have that 80%. Um, because like you said, play evolves, it changes. So I don't want to have to run five trials of the same exact play target. I don't want a child to have to roll the car down the ramp five times so that the data look pretty, right? Maybe they roll it down once, then they crash it, then they park it, right? Those are three different behaviors, but they're all really, you know, functional or pre-symbolic play skills. So I could also just count those as that they did three different things, right? So, and I think a simple frequency count where we're at the child's level or one step ahead. So kind of that Vygotsky zone approximal development, where we we're basically we're we're teaching within their level, but like one step ahead, but coming back and always just in their instructional zone approximal development. Um, but if I can just count that, I'm gonna be able to be engaged with them versus if I'm staring at my iPad, having to look at the very specific skill they're supposed to be working on, it might be a different, a totally different behavior the next day, but it's still in their same level, then there's there that to me, it's more about these levels that I want to build on up versus having them do 50 different skills that are in a tracking sheet. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 34:50

So it's kind of like going up and going out, so up level and then out variety, complexity, diversity of plants.

SPEAKER_00 34:58

Exactly. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 35:00

No, that's great. And then I love the thought of you know, a frequency. And then what's a realistic number of times? And I think how um technicians are taking the data and collecting the data is it's how they're told to. So it depends on who's teaching them. And then it goes back to the assessment and the goals and considerations for certain types of behavior. There are certain ways to measure it that might bode better, but also, like I said, from research to practice, what's realistic and what's the most important thing is keeping that connection and getting that relationship with the child to get the engagement. For me, that's like the core, but we do have things to measure and you know, funders to appease. So we have to have that thing there. So I love that you have that ability to in the article kind of outline for the readers different levels and maybe different ways to track that level performance engagement, however, you want to define it. Um, and some that might work better than others. Um, it goes back for me kind of thinking about skill development, you know, maybe it's it's this programming and clinical judgment. As you said, um, we have a kiddo who might be working on uh pointing, triadic joint engagement. They don't have dyadic joint engagement to reference a person. Why are you working on pointing? Like you're missing the really important part before you get to the third part. And I think that's back to assessment, understanding development, and understanding um some of the complexities that the children we support encounter, you know, the differences the way their brains work, right? That doesn't work that way for them. Trying to take this circle and shove it in the square peg is not gonna work. We have to have these accommodations and adjustments, but we do want to kind of follow that trajectory of development. Like we are wanting all kids to develop, you know, along that trajectory. They're not gonna do it the same way. But it's really important, I think, to look at that. You can't teach skills at four that they're missing, and it doesn't make sense to, well, he's two, that's practice now to get him ready for when he's three. Development doesn't work that way. Um, so I think that's really important within NDBI is that we bring that D, the development, into the support that we offer. If it's in an NDBI program or an ABA type program, more traditional. If we are supporting zero to three, zero to four children, I think we ethically need to be looking at and understanding child development and engagement and play, because that is the the vessel for how they're learning at those early, early years.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

Definitely. And I think another important piece, um, and I mentioned this in the paper, is to not have pre-selected targets. So um going, you want to have a plan, right? So I'm not saying go in without a plan. You wanna, you wanna have a plan. You want to know what their favorite things are, what are some uh play skills that you might model, right? If I have a car, I you know, I can park the car, crash the car, say beep, beep, um, I can make the car fly, you know, go down the ramp. But or if I have a baby doll, I can rock the baby, feed the baby, burp the baby, put a sleep sack on the baby, right? I want to have a plan, but I don't want to have to park the car.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

I don't want to have to make the car fly. I want to really be able to follow the child's lead so I can look at where their motivation is going in the unfolding moment and be really present with them. And I and I have a whole, you know, um library of play skills that I could model or um expand upon whatever they're doing. But that's why I think, you know, how we measure it really matters because if I am using restricted event recording where I'm converting everything to a percentage, I have to hit those targets a minimum number of times, right? To meet my trial count versus can I follow their lead? And am I looking at just increasing diversity? Well, then I want to, I want them to do three different things, but it doesn't really matter what those three things are as long as they're within my instructional level, right? So I think um that's kind of a really important um piece to this is in the moment targets, like flexible targets versus pre-selected targets.

SPEAKER_01 39:42

I love that. And when we think about learners who are not as flexible as some of our other children, what are we doing by giving them inflexible targets with inflexible teaching? How are we supporting that for them? We're not, we're kind of compounding it. So I love the thought of unrestricted recording because if we have that really restricted, what's going to happen? Your teaching will be restricted, like you said, to meet the targets. So we are not flexible because we have a data target to hit. They will not be flexible. It's like two competing agendas versus with an ESDM, you know, we're co-constructing ideas together. And we're within that proximal zone of development, kind of pulling out and pulling up and moving it around. But also just think about from human to human. You want me to feed that cow another time? The cow is full. I fed it five times. Can I do something different with the cow? I think about from the view of a child of why why do I have to do this five times? That's not how children play if you watch them. So why are we teaching the children we support to play that way? It doesn't track.

SPEAKER_00 40:49

Right. And if we think about, oh sorry, my earring just fell. Um if we think about um other free operant behaviors, and I always like the comparison of the behaviors that we are targeting to reduce, we aren't providing a set number of opportunities for a child to engage in challenging behaviors. It's a frequency count, it's a rate, it's a duration, right? Um that's how we should be measuring play behaviors as well. And we can do it, our systems are set up for it because we do it for those behaviors. Um, and so we I really believe we should be thinking about is this a trial-based um skill, or can this child do this at any time? If so, I should be uh measuring it in ways that align with free operant behavior.

SPEAKER_01 41:42

I love that. I love that we're gonna have to come do a webinar for that because that is incredible of examples that I think will change how people are supporting play skills in so many different ways. And if we are supporting young children, you know, working through routines and play is one of those routines, that's a big part of their waking hours, what they're spent doing. And if this prescriptive and flexible type of teaching is happening around play, what are you probably gonna get? Dysregulation, pushback, child doesn't want to do it, and then you have all of this big kind of anthill that kind of builds up, where if you just arrange the teaching and developmentally kind of focused on things with the viewpoint of flexibility and co-constructing and creativity, all that goes away, right? So just from like an antecedent perspective, if you just arrange it a little bit differently, teach and track it a little bit differently, all of these issues that you might be encountering for the child who doesn't like to play, maybe they don't like to play your way, right? And so that's a um thing I think all of us as professionals could learn from and better understand some of the work that you have out there. Um very impactful.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

And maybe we are targeting play in a level that's just a little bit too high. We need to bring it back down a little bit more exploratory, or just kind of research different things, you know, that we can do um to make it to bring the variety back, right?

SPEAKER_01 43:16

Um I love it. I love it. Yes, we're definitely gonna have to webinar on that because this is so important and it's so needed, and you are such the expert person to guide us on this. Thinking about um people who are interested in NDBI, professionals, research practitioners, do you have any advice or recommendations or how do you stay up to date? What resources do you access to, you know, keep an eye on new things that are coming out or new resources? Any advice or recommendations, resources that you could share?

SPEAKER_00 43:51

Well, I get notifications in my email about new articles. So I'm always looking at, you know, new articles that are coming. Related to in DBIs, I do think a piece of advice that comes to mind for behavior analysts is to, if they are working with young children who have developmental differences or are autistic, to read articles outside of ABA. Look at articles in autism journals like Autism, the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, the Journal of Early Intervention, topics in early childhood special education. So there's so many very behavior analytic articles that just are also maybe a little more interdisciplinary that I think could be very important, you know, to helping us learn about different protocols that might be out there, different ways to approach teaching, pretend play, or you know, just different um ways that we might measure things, um, different viewpoints of um adult advocates, um, just different views outside of your um traditional ABA journal articles. Um, I mean, if they're if they're on your website, I'm sure that they they they might know about more about resources related to NDBIs than I do for practitioners, because I didn't even know about the Navigator website until today, but that's amazing. Um, you know, going to conferences, networking social media, you know, um, looking on there's a lot on LinkedIn. Um, you know, it's it still is a pretty young effort as far as there's a SIG, a special interest group through ABA that's focused on MDBIs. I would encourage folks to get involved with that. They I think they have some online meetings. Um yeah, I mean, I think a lot of this stuff is um it's evolving and you're doing a lot of this work. Um, and I'm so grateful for that. But I'm still learning where to go for for new info as well. But I think the biggest piece of advice would be to look into other autism-specific things or early intervention resources that aren't in Java or behavior analysis and practice. Um, another assessment that is good is the Project Impact um book has an assessment in the beginning that does look at some early social skills and things. So that's another good one uh for the behavior analyst to have in their file.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

In their toolbox.

SPEAKER_00 46:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:56

This has been incredible. I am so again grateful to have you on and to chat with us about this and any links that you can think of. I'd love to link to your LinkedIn and your um university website or anything that you think would be helpful if somebody wanted to reach out and connect with you for a follow-up or hey, I want to be a student. Can I come work with you? Um, but I would love to link anything and just share that with them so they can continue to learn and and just make that change happen.

SPEAKER_00 47:26

I would love to chat with anybody who um wants to, and I'll send um, I'm gonna send that ASAP um resource to you and anything else I can think of. But um, you know, the pleasure is mine. I really appreciate you having me on and um being able to talk. I obviously could talk about this all day long. So um thank you so much. This is the highlight of my day.

SPEAKER_01 47:51

Oh, me too. Thank you so much.