Teacher Training to Increase Accurate Language and Decisions

Abstract

Effective training of teachers is important for the success of students, particularly students with disabilities such as autism. Critical teaching skills include the ability to talk with accuracy about students’ behavior and to create and read graphs of student behavior to allow teachers to make data-based decisions. The translation of research findings from controlled laboratory settings to the applied setting is an important step in the process of identifying and teaching critical pedagogical behavior. This case study was conducted with seven teachers of students with autism. The CABAS® Decision Protocol was used. This highly structured protocol focuses on training teachers to talk about student progress in a technical way, which can improve their ability to make accurate decisions and produce more effective teaching but is not often translated to less structured environments. Teachers were taught to increase their use of scientific language when talking about their students’ progress. All seven teachers increased their use of scientific language. Four teachers were taught to improve their ability to recognize opportunities to make teaching decisions and to describe a graph accurately. All four teachers improved. These findings suggest that the decision protocol could be useful when training teachers in less structured settings. These findings provide a starting point for translation of more technical work into applied settings.