 Check it out, we're totally going to go move on to some teaching techniques and one of the backbones and pillars of applied behavior analysis is discrete child training or DTT and I don't mean like the wrestler like I thought when I was first at tech, I always thought this piece of it was like yeah we're gonna do a DTT on a kid. I said what? Just totally no that's not what we're doing. So one thing I do want to point out is that part of this is people have a misrepresentation of DTT because it's done in mass trials. Unfortunately there's a horrible history where that's all people are doing. That is not behavior analysis whatsoever. So if all you are ever doing is sitting at a table running DTT I would ask some serious questions about what's going on in treatment plan. But we'll move on and digress and to dive into what a discrete trial is. So this can be used on all of the skills. Literally. I'm talking like let's build some language. Let's start with maybe letter identification. You're gonna be like I have my visuals, my letter. The kid's gonna be over here. You're gonna be like hey what's this? You're gonna point to it. The kid's gonna go hey and you're gonna go fantastic that's an A and that's a discrete trial and you'll go through the whole alphabet just like that right and then you'll get into like discrimination between the two right so then you get like an A and a B and you'll be like hey touch the B and the kid will be like hey touches the B and you'll be like that's a B. That's another discrete trial and you'll go through the whole alphabet once again all for discrimination. It's fantastic but you can also do it for identification. So you'll be like hey kiddo what's your name? They don't know yet right? You're building skills and you'll be like what's your name? Steve and he'll go Steve and you'll go that's fantastic. Your name's Steve. Another discrete trial. Next thing you know he knows his name Steve. We're amazing. Fantastic. There's also just the ability to work on attending skills even right so you'll get things like kids have a hard time focusing on stuff so you'll grab an item and be like we'll go back to Steve just because he's still learning stuff right so Steve's sitting here and he's wandering his eyes are going out here. Steve his eyes are wandering and going everywhere and we'll be like hey Steve check it out and say we have a preferred item right? Let's back up one so we'll go he's wandering around we'll go Steve and he's still wandering around right and then we'll get this preferred item of some kind to be like hey Steve and he'll be like ah I'm looking at you look at me look at you look at me fantastic that's another discrete trial. So we'll go into what else you can do all the toileting steps in the task list all the hand washing steps in the task list math gross motor movement fine motor movement basically it's just little building blocks and contingencies of learning it's a fantastic tool. So one thing I really like to stress with technicians as we all practice working on tracking ABCs for discovering and solving problem behavior right this is using the ABCs so you are developing and driving the contingency for the person to learn right so you're going to be like your instruction A the targeted response say the kid wants to say his name Steve and C the reinforcement that you deliver for the response um yeah so generally what things we like to do is to make sure we have clear SDs so our A's right our discriminative stimuli make sure our A's are clear and consistent we also have a great idea of what the target behavior is because with like language and volume being into weird discrepancies between what one tech thinks over the other that's completely fine that's why we talk and have meetings and write session notes and then um reinforcers and schedules of reinforcement which your BCBA will um completely tell you what to do in that department uh so for instance you have a fixed ratio one that the BCBA comes up with because it's a new skill so you'll have your um present the prompt to say the kid's name kid says his name and then deliver reinforcement that's a great example of a program DTT Tert these are fantastic they're done in mass I like to think of it as a way to really bring up the frequency of a response that doesn't happen too often and that's where the deficit is it's a great building block and it can be really used for focusing specific skills and small skills to build into larger repertoires so discrete child training is pretty awesome you'll be doing a lot of it you'll get exceedingly fluent and um yeah it's a good thing