Preschool Life Skills: Design, Implementation, and Extensions

The Preschool Life Skills (PLS) curriculum is a class-wide teaching program in which 13 social skills in the areas of instruction-following, functional communication, delay tolerance, and friendship skills are taught during daily activities. The teaching program consists of four components: instructions, modeling, role play, and feedback. Each skill is taught by arranging a specific evocative event, and providing behavior-specific feedback for correct and incorrect responses. The PLS curriculum was originally designed and evaluated as a Tier 1 intervention to prevent the development of interfering behavior. However, the curriculum has since been modified and delivered as a Tier 2 (e.g., small group) and Tier 3 (e.g., individual) intervention. The focus of this presentation is to describe the teaching procedures of the curriculum, provide recommendations on how to implement of the curriculum, and explore ways in which the curriculum can be extended to address a variety of skills, learners, and environments while maintaining the effective teaching components.

Learning Objectives:

1. Attendees will be able to identify the benefits of an active teaching model over a passive teaching model to teach life skills to young learners.
2. Attendees will be able to describe how to modify the curriculum to be delivered to a small group and to individual learners.
3. Attendees will be able to describe how to use the framework of the Preschool Life Skill curriculum to teach additional complex and important social behaviors in the classroom.