What is Incidental Teaching?

Incidental teaching involves creating an environment in which students’ interests are easily fostered and nurtured, and one in which students can be most successfully motivated. This process maximizes learning opportunities through typical activities.

Here are some steps most commonly used in incidental teaching:

• An instructor will arrange the learning environment so that necessary materials are within the student’s sight, but not within his reach, thus impacting his motivation to seek out those materials.
• An instructor waits for the student to initiate engagement.
• An instructor prompts the student to respond if needed.
• An instructor allows access to an item/activity contingent on a correct response from the student.
• The instructor fades out the prompting process over a period of time and subsequent trials.

Here is an example of incidental teaching:

An instructor places a train set on top of a cabinet. When the child points or walks towards the cabinet, the instructor prompts the student to say “train.” Once the student says “train,” he gets access to the train set.

Our approach at North Shore Pediatric Therapy

In every ABA program at North Shore Pediatric Therapy, incidental teaching is used to take advantage of naturally occurring activities in order to teach different skills–such as expressive and receptive language–and promote generalization of those skills. Data on either prompted or independent responses will be collected during each session and recorded in order to keep track of the student’s progress.