The first step for any teaching program is to describe the behaviour you want. However, it is important to describe it accurately and in a way that captures the true behaviour.

The phrases in the blue box are examples of descriptions of behavior that don’t give us a clear picture of the how often the behavior is actually happening or what they look like which makes it difficult to create goals. “He is always off his chair” Taken literally, I might think that he has never sat in his chair. If that’s the case, my first goal might be to have him sit in his chair for 1 second. If in reality, he is off his chair 3 times every 5 minute, my first goal is going to be very different.

“She interrupts a lot in my lesson”. How many times is a lot? How long is the lesson? 20 times sounds like a lot, but if the lesson is 5 hours vs. 1 hour, that changes the picture significantly.

It’s beyond the scope of this course to delve into measurement systems. We do recommend that you learn about Precision Teaching, which is a measurement system for describing fluency in terms of rates (how many times a behavior happens per minute (or hour etc) and how that changes over time).

There is additional information about this in the Supplementary Materials section.