Teach to fluency and not percent

I heard this at ONTABACON2022 and it’s stuck with me as it’s something I’ve already been doing.

I think a cornerstone of respecting children is understanding into your soul that they are inconsistent. As much as we teach and teach and teach and we see their successes, they just as quickly act like they’ve never seen the work a day in their life and it feels as if we have to start again. That’s the nature of this disorder. So long ago I learned to embrace it.

I set up systems early on that allowed for their errors to be recorded in such a way that it didn’t hinder their overall progress. I’m not about to share all my trade secrets, but just know: if you’re one of my families, you’ll see this in action. I do think there’s value in knowing what a child is repeatedly getting wrong; or that there’s a whole program they can never quite remember; or that something just keeps going back on the list. This gives us a pile of information about what’s important to them. What has value. What matters. I listen.

The other piece of this that resonated with me is that I’ve stopped forcing kids to meet a percentage when I think they know something and they’re just being saucy with it. And believe me: I’ve seen kids be saucy with their work. We were working with a child who would deliberately put the object in the wrong place, ensure we were looking him in the face, and when we would no longer react (to try and squash this exchange) would say “Whoopsie that’s not where it goes!" Silly!” Needless to say, I didn’t doubt for a second he could complete the task, so I decided just to master it then and there. It’s eased a lot of tension for the therapist.

It’s definitely a gut-check for me to over-ride my criteria, and my staff are very diligent about documenting it for my future self when I ask why it didn't meet criteria… but it’s certainly what’s in the best interests of the child.