Thursday, February 13, 2014
Generalization
May I speak generally about generalization?
Generalization has to do with learning a skill in an appropriate setting. Can you learn to ride a transit bus by practicing with a row of chairs in a base room at your facility? We used to to that in the agency I started with. And the answer - generally - was no.
We would practice handing a piece of paper (representing a bus ticket) to the "driver" (a staff person sitting in the first chair in the row), and then finding a "seat" on the bus. Clients got really good at that. Then we went to a real bus stop. Oops... the real bus doesn't look anything like our row of chairs... and the tickets don't look anything like the pieces of paper we had practiced with... and who is that sitting in the driver's seat? It sure isn't the staff person we said was the driver back at our facility. Its a stranger!
We know all about stranger awareness because we talked about it so much back in our facility.
In other words, the skills we were teaching weren't transferable. And therefore, we wasted a lot of time. You pretty much learn to ride a transit bus by riding on a transit bus.
We also learned that McDonald's won't take realistic looking plastic coins. We used to spend a lot of time learning to handle money with those plastic coins.
That's not to say that a review of skills at your facility is worthless. Talking about stealing before you go out into the community to go shopping can be very valuable. But its going to be more valuable talking about it in a store.
I hope you are all thinking about how the skills you teach will be used... and where they will be used. I talked to a parent once who said that her daughter was really good at shopping at K-Mart, but she couldn't shop at Target because the layout was so different and the clerks were different, and so on.
Generalization - an interesting concept.
Generalization has to do with learning a skill in an appropriate setting. Can you learn to ride a transit bus by practicing with a row of chairs in a base room at your facility? We used to to that in the agency I started with. And the answer - generally - was no.
We would practice handing a piece of paper (representing a bus ticket) to the "driver" (a staff person sitting in the first chair in the row), and then finding a "seat" on the bus. Clients got really good at that. Then we went to a real bus stop. Oops... the real bus doesn't look anything like our row of chairs... and the tickets don't look anything like the pieces of paper we had practiced with... and who is that sitting in the driver's seat? It sure isn't the staff person we said was the driver back at our facility. Its a stranger!
We know all about stranger awareness because we talked about it so much back in our facility.
In other words, the skills we were teaching weren't transferable. And therefore, we wasted a lot of time. You pretty much learn to ride a transit bus by riding on a transit bus.
We also learned that McDonald's won't take realistic looking plastic coins. We used to spend a lot of time learning to handle money with those plastic coins.
That's not to say that a review of skills at your facility is worthless. Talking about stealing before you go out into the community to go shopping can be very valuable. But its going to be more valuable talking about it in a store.
I hope you are all thinking about how the skills you teach will be used... and where they will be used. I talked to a parent once who said that her daughter was really good at shopping at K-Mart, but she couldn't shop at Target because the layout was so different and the clerks were different, and so on.
Generalization - an interesting concept.
