The ABA & OT Podcast #20 The Trick to Writing ‘SMART‘er Goals - Part 1

This episode is part one of a two-part series featuring Liz Lefebre and Amy Evans, both highly acclaimed practitioners of Precision Teaching, as they discuss how to write more accurately measurable goals and their benefits. 

SMART goals are more overarching while precision teaching uses a more fine-tuned approach. By observing a learner's component skills and using charts, teachers can come up with more accurate goals and develop tailor-fit interventions. This includes determining pinpoints and a student's fluency in behaviors.

HIGHLIGHTS

03:13 Introduction to Liz Lefebre and Amy Evans

08:20 Writing goals begin with observable behavior and the component and tool skills

13:48 Determining the sufficiency of component skills in task analysis 

22:53 Comparing observations: Precision teaching vs percent correct 

29:12 How to come up with pinpoints

36:28 How to figure out the aim of fluency

GLOSSARY

RESA - Retention, Endurance, Stability, and Application

REAPS - The five performance results produced by fluency (longer Retention, greater Endurance, greater generalization to Application, Performance aims for teaching, and Standards for aims and evaluation.

Discrete Trial Training (DTT) - Discrete Trial Training (DTT) is a teaching technique used in some therapies for autistic children. It involves breaking skills down to their most basic parts and teaching those skills to children, step by step.

Pinpoint - A specific way of describing what a single countable behavior is.

RESOURCES

Join our The ABA and OT Podcast Facebook Group to get access to the following resources:

Facebook group link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/397478901376425

EXTERNAL RESOURCES

Organization for Research and Learning Website

Dr. Aditi the OT Website

The Databased OT Facebook Group

QUOTES

11:01 "Depending on where the learner is coming to you in terms of their current skill set, then that would definitely make me change how I word my goal based on the situation."

13:35 "It's almost like we would this overarching goal and then we would have all these little benchmarks that I might be working on simultaneously that will all move towards meeting that same larger goal."

24:13 "There's no way to get that information (correct responses) in terms of frequency or count per minute unless you're also measuring the time that it takes to do that."

35:34 "I'm still getting my data on whether I'm making progress on the larger goals but, by taking data on those smaller things, I get to celebrate at the end of the day even though I maybe didn't go from zero to a hundred."

39:13 "If I have a learner who I know has seizures or has something physical going on with their hands or something, then I'm going to look at their fine motor aims very differently than I would with somebody who doesn't."