Polly was a 3-year-old girl referred for intervention in a preschool. She had well developed language for her age, but had lived abroad with her parents who were non-native speakers of English. Therefore, her language sounded unusual – especially for a 3-year-old. She was referred for the following concerns:
- She did not engage in cooperative play
- Never used peers’ names
- Did not touch peers
- She did not speak to peers
- She did not play on the playground equipment
- Most of her interactions were hanging onto the teacher and engaging in “baby behaviors” which appeared to be imitations of her 1-year old brother. These included baby talk, hand flapping, hopping, and speaking in incomplete sentences.
What would you do in this situation? Are you considering a social skills curriculum? Maybe an FBA or some type of behavior plan for the baby behaviors? Maybe training the peers to initiate to Polly? There are numerous plausible possibilities. I suspect that what Polly’s team decided to do would be unusual today. Polly’s team decided that they would simply prompt Polly to use the playground equipment, provide differential teacher attention for using the playground equipment, and then fade prompts. They also ignored problem behavior which occurred on the first few days they prompted her to use the equipment. The idea was the natural consequences of being around the peers would shape the other behaviors. What happened? All the other behaviors improved without any other interventions.
Does this story sound familiar? Maybe you heard it before as it is from this classic study. I think there are several valuable lessons we can learn from Polly’s story.
- When you are presented with a whole list of problems, you don’t always have to address every single one. If you pick the right targets, you might get improvement in a wide variety of other important targets. Research has confirmed this finding under a wide variety of names for similar phenomena (e.g., collateral behaviors, pivotal response training, learning-to-learn, behavioral cusps, keystone behaviors).
- Natural contingencies can produce appropriate behaviors in ways that are sometimes very hard to do when the adults contrive the contingencies.
- Be careful deciding you are finished with the intervention. Although the team had successfully made the reinforcement more intermittent, and the teachers judged that her behavior had improved sufficiently, I’m not convinced that the team’s intervention plan for Polly was sufficient. During the 2nd reversal phase Polly showed significant decreases in performance. This seems to show that while the natural contingencies were influencing her behavior, she was still not fully responding to peers like the other children in her class. Therefore, there was significant risk for regression. It seems likely that when Polly moved to a new class next year, she might have gone backward. Maybe the natural contingencies took over eventually, maybe not–no way to know.
I’d guess Polly is probably a bit older than me at this point, but if someone knows what happened to her I’d love them to contact me and let me know! I’ve always been inspired by Polly’s story.