This week, Rachel interviews Jenifer Eaton & Marya Hoff, two BCBAs who own Rooted in Play, an Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) practice in Orange County, California. Rachel shares about her experiences working with Jenifer and Marya to support one of her students, and why Rachel felt Jenifer and Marya were great examples of ABA and and SLP working together effectively to support language development and spontaneous utterance generation.

Before the interview, Chris and Rachel talk about their upcoming pre-conference at ATIA (find out more at) and some of the things that Chris is excited for at this year’s ATIA conference, including a discussion of the recent merger between Don Johnson, maker of Co-Writer, and Texthelp, maker if Read & Write. Learn more here.

Key ideas this week:

🔑 Rachel will often work with Behavior Interventionists who say “I’m just following the program I was given. I was told to target this in a specific way.” Rachel encourages these BIs to look at some less structured moments where there is not a program going that can be used for language development. Jenifer notes that BCBAs should ask their BIs to collaborate  with the SLP as much as possible. This can help the BI feel more comfortable collaborating with the SLP.

🔑 In Jenifer and Marya’s opinion, the “least-to-most” hierarchy of prompting is compatible with ABA therapy. If we over prompt, the student will just wait for us to tell them what to say. You want to meet the learner where they are at - certain students may need more prompting at first -  but you want to fade those prompts as soon as possible. 

🔑 When you give kids more wait time and they are doing something engaging, often you will get lots of spontaneous and silly language without any prompting at all. You don’t have to require, demand, or expect a particular response. We can just be present.

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