Posted by Natalie, MA, Special Educator
Now that your mouth is watering with an image of pie, let me take you back to when I first heard this analogy. In graduate school, I took a course on curriculum and instruction for students with disabilities. My professor, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA) was always telling us how the principles of ABA were beneficial for her students, and how important research-based interventions such as ABA are in all instruction (special education and general education alike). ABA was increasing in popularity as people learned more about the improvements students made, and with this increasing popularity came many misconceptions and misinformation. One such piece of information was that ABA is synonymous with DTT, or Discrete Trial Teaching. To this, my BCBA professor would say, "DTT is NOT ABA; it is a piece of the ABA pie!" You also may have read about this idea in my colleague Hiroe's post, "What is ABA?" She references that Discrete Trial Teaching is an effective teaching method utilized in many ABA programs, but that ABA is not wholly DTT. So what is the Discrete Trial Teaching thing all about?
Let's break it down DTT Style:
