Incidental Teaching

Description of the Strategy

Incidental teaching is a systematic protocol of instruction that is delivered in natural environments. Although the procedures may resemble “motherese,” or traditional conversation between a caregiver and child, there is actually very little that is incidental about incidental teaching. Most often, incidental teaching is used to teach or expand language skills in the course of everyday situations. The major advantage of incidental teaching is improved generalization of skills from the teaching setting to use in everyday life.

An incidental teaching environment contains items, activities, or other topics of interest to the learner, but the teacher controls access to the student's interests. By providing instruction in the environment where the new response will later be needed, the student learns to respond to relevant cues amid the distractions that are often present in the real world. This feature is especially important for students who have difficulty in transferring skills they have learned in a textbook or classroom lecture to use in their daily lives. It is well known that people learn to use a foreign language most easily when they live in a country where that language is spoken, as compared to learning it in a classroom. Similarly, the advantages of teaching in natural contexts are recognized in the growing popularity of hands-on learning experiences.

The transfer or generalization of newly learned skills is especially challenging for children with developmental disabilities, and the problem is often worsened by the common practice of educating them in distraction-free settings. In the extreme, some children become so dependent on cues that are associated with the teaching situation that they cannot recall the new information or skill unless the original teacher is present or they are seated at the same desk where learning originally took place or identical curriculum materials are presented. For example, a child with severe reading problems may be unable to recognize a newly learned word unless the word is printed in exactly the same size and print as the word presented in the original instructional materials. Incidental teaching helps to overcome this kind of generalization problem because the presence of ever-changing distractions inherent in real-life situations forces the student to attend to the important stimulus events when learning first takes place.

A variety of similar teaching procedures is conducted during naturally occurring activities, including time delay, mand-model, milieu teaching, and pivotal response training. However, in addition to providing instruction in natural contexts, each incidental teaching episode is composed of a sequence of components.

Initiation. The feature that distinguishes incidental teaching from other naturalistic procedures is the student's initiation of incidental teaching episodes. In most teaching formats, a teaching trial begins when the teacher asks the student a question. However, incidental teaching episodes cannot begin until the student “initiates” by indicating an interest in a toy, snack, activity, or other topic. An initiation requires that there be an overt behavioral indication of the student's interest, not just the teacher's recall that the student enjoys a certain activity. A student's initiation may take the form of a verbal request or comment of [Page 1360]varying degrees of complexity, or an initiation may consist of simple nonverbal behavior, such as pointing, reaching, or even a simple shift of gaze. When a student initiates an incidental teaching episode, the initiation serves as a signal to the teacher that a potent “teachable moment” has arrived.

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