A Few Simple Strategies Bring Big Results: Pivotal Response Treatment

This workshop requires some prior knowledge.  Project ACCESS recommends that you complete the following workshop (s) before you enroll in this workshop: Autism 101

If you knew there was an evidence based practice that easy to implement, could increase communication and socialization, and reduce disruptive behaviors would you want to learn how to use it? Of course you would! You are going to want to check out Pivotal Response Treatment.

Pivotal Response Treatment is an evidence-based practice that has been shown to help children learn faster and has helped interventionists to move away from needing to teach children each individual behavior. In the late 70s and early 80s Dr. Robert Koegel and Dr. Lynn Kern Koegel learned that there are certain pivotal behaviors that, when taught, can result in improvements in many other behaviors that are among the symptoms of autism. One of the best things about PRT is that it is easy to implement.

The Koegels found that children are more motivated to continue learning when they are having steady periods of success. Motivation is a basic pivotal behavior. They also found that when children with autism learn to ask questions such as “What is it?”, “What’s happening?” and “Where is it?” their vocabularies increased dramatically, without the specific vocabulary words being directly taught. The more children are taught to actively find out about their environment, the more they learn, and the better they do in the long run. Self-initiations and question asking are also pivotal behaviors.

Learning outcomes include:

  • Participants will learn basic strategies for teaching motivation
  • Participants will learn basic strategies for teaching self-initiation and question asking.
  • Participants will learn basic strategies to reduce disruptive behaviors.
  • Participants will learn basic strategies for data collection in PRT.
Workshop information
  • Duration: one day
  • Mode: online
  • Prerequisite: none
  • Target audience: Early Childhood Special Educators Teachers, Early Childhood General Education Teachers, Administrators, Related Service Providers, Paraprofessionals.