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.

About the Presenter

Nicole Heal

Dr. Heal received her Ph.D. in Behavioral Psychology and an M.A. in Human Development and Family Life from the University of Kansas, and a B.S. in Early Childhood Special Education from the University of Maine at Farmington (UMF). Dr. Heal is dedicated to the teaching of behavior analysis in college classrooms and in clinical settings. She was an Assistant Professor in the Behavior Analysis and Therapy Program at Southern Illinois University and has held Adjunct Professor positions at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, Endicott College, and UMF. Dr. Heal was the Director of Professional Development, Training, and Research at Melmark New England and served as a district-wide behavior analyst in the Biddeford School District. She is currently the Director of Training at the Margret Murphy Center for Children in Maine. Dr. Heal serves as the Autism Area Co-coordinator for the Association for Behavior Analysis International Convention and has held an editorial board member position for the Behavior Analysis in Practice, Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, and the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis. Her clinical and research interests include designing efficacious and preferred educational environments for young children with and without developmental disabilities, the extension and refinement of preference assessment methods at the individual and group level, and assessment and treatment of problem behavior.