Spotlight on Special Education

Verbal Behavior helps students make sense of language learning

Part teaching strategy to encourage communication, part behavior plan, applied verbal behavior (VB) is helping students, many on the autism spectrum, learn like never before.

“I have been teaching in classrooms with students such as ours for 25 years and have never used an approach that created as much learning success as this,” says BOCES speech therapist Terry Cuomo, who began using VB with fellow teacher Katie DiPierro three years ago. “It’s so smart.”

The VB approach encourages development of speech, language and other communication skills through a set of highly effective teaching procedures taken from the science of behavior analysis. VB provides for evaluation of each student and routine assessment based on information that is recorded regularly by teachers on a color- and date-coded grid. These tools create a clear visual that help teachers see what students have achieved and which skills they still need to work toward. VB is structured in a way that allows teachers to select specific strategies to teach the skills that a student still need.

Jaime Covington, principal for elementary alternate assessment programs, is the person credited with bringing VB to the BOCES Special Education Division. Over the past three years, Covington has arranged for trainings and created a support network for his teachers and staff who use the approach in their classes. Seizing on the program’s great success, Covington has also secured funding for an additional training this school year for teachers who are eager to move to the next level.

“Jaime recognized that this has the potential to be a very effective instructional strategy and he made it a priority to bring it to our teachers and into our classrooms,” says Inge Jacobs, director of the Special Education Division. “The results of all this dedication can be found in the learning that’s happening with students in so many of our classrooms.”

The fact that this approach has been a team effort is another reason teachers believe students are experiencing such learning success.

“Everyone is on the same page in terms of approach,” says DiPierro, who notes that administrators, teachers, teaching assistants, speech therapists and, often, parents participate at trainings. “This has given everyone ownership in the teaching and creates consistency in the classroom. It also helps families back up the learning that happens at school once children are at home.”

DiPierro says that an added benefit of the approach is that as students become more able to communicate their wants, thoughts and needs, she and the other teachers who use the approach have experienced more desirable classroom behavior.

“We no longer have to use formal behavior plans, or at least not as uniformly as we once might have,” DiPierro notes.
 

 For more information about Verbal Behavior in BOCES Special Education classrooms, please contact Jaime Covington, principal, at (518) 464-6306 or jcovingt@gw.neric.org.