This month is all about foundational skills at TAH! On Monday, Sasha’s blog brought talked about the most essential foundational skills-capturing attention. Today, I want to focus on using errorless learning to teach academic foundational skills.

I have to make a confession before I start…I’m not a BCBA, Also, when I first heard of errorless learning, I was a little skeptical (Why are we giving kids the answers? Shouldn’t they be answering the teacher’s questions?). However, after talking some ABA classes as part of my degree and learning from some fabulous BCBAs, I love errorless learning-it’s efficient, research-based and helps our students learn! Ready to jump-start (or continue) errorless learning in your classroom!? Here are five videos about errorless learning…sit back and enjoy!

1. Errorless Learning 

I made this video as my final project when I was getting my Masters in Special Education. I really wanted to create a video that explained errorless learning so others would understand why special educators do what they do.  My target audience for this video was new teachers, paraprofessionals, tutors and parents. While errorless learning makes so much sense for a low-incidence classroom, I also wanted to present it as an efficient method for teaching any students basic concepts that need to be memorized, like math facts or sight words.

2. Errorless Teaching

I like this video because it show multiple examples with actual students, learning a variety of skills (e.g. touching body parts). It also includes slides with written steps, which I know I appreciate as a visual learner. This video is a great overview of what errorless teaching and would be helpful to show any staff or parents who are not familiar with the concept.

3. Yes/No Errorless Learning Video Tutorial

I had the pleasure of working with Sasha and Amber, and learned so much from both of these brilliant BCBAs!  This video is short and sweet (under 3:00!) and demonstrates a simple and effective way to teach answering a yes/no question using errorless learning. While to many people, answering a yes/no question is simple, but special education teachers have seen students struggle with this concept. Is this video worth watching? Yes! 

 

4. Time Delay with Sight Words

This video is also part of the video series I created as my final project for my Masters. I wanted to show how errorless learning could be incorporated with other instructional strategies. Time delay is what I use most often in my classroom to teach letter identification, letter sound identification, personal information, number identification, math facts, sight words and more! This video is long, but it is thorough. This video is great for new teachers, teachers who have never used time delay, paraprofessionals and parents.

5. Gross Motor Fluency

While this video doesn’t exactly demonstrate errorless learning, I wanted to include it as part of the theme of foundational skills. Gross motor fluency, as Sasha says in the video, is a functional and foundational skill because it requires that a student gives you their full attention to the teacher or staff member. It is so important that students are able to imitate others in a timely manner, especially in an emergency situation. I also wanted to include it because sometimes it is difficult to determine what basic skills our lower students need in order to start to learn more foundational, academic skills.
I hope this selection of videos has inspired you to try something new and different with your students! Share videos that have helped you in your classroom!