ABA training from SA Special Education Specialist

In order to follow up with Sunshine Academy’s National training in March to help our teachers implement the special education principles better, Sunshine Academy invited our Special Education Specialist Rachel Gilmour to the Zhengzhou center for one week of training and coaching on ABA ( Applied Behavior Analysis).

ABA topics covered were Reinforcement, Task Analysis, and Prompting.

Our Sunshine teachers practiced these principles and received coaching from Rachel and our Project Management team giving our teachers opportunity to learn by doing.

Currently our main focus at Sunshine Academy is to help our teachers use ABA theory to manage children’s behaviors and teach life skill class. We have found out that with a clear reinforcement plan, task analysis and prompting, our teachers are equipped better to teach and help our students become more independent.

Rachel encouraged our Sunshine teachers with this analogy: “To help our students achieve the goals means to help them get to a destination. Task analysis is like the map, and prompting is like the car, while reinforcement plan is like to gas. With these three tools, we will be able to help our students achieve more and better.”

One teacher said “ I just realized that reinforcement is not just praising the children for completing the final step, but also for each step once they meet the task we need to reinforce which is exact time they will really get the skills for behaviors.”

Another teacher shared after learning prompting “I now know that we need to be very careful using prompting. There is actually a process which is from the least intrusive to the most intrusive, and what’s more, we need to give students time to react to the prompting due to their special needs. It sounds easy but we didn’t pay attention before and it’s not that easy to do during teaching. We need to be more patient to our students.”

Special thanks to Rachel for her generous and self-less support to Sunshine Academy by helping us improve our expertise in special education. Her volunteering of her time and expertises will forever move Sunshine forward! We are also grateful to all of our friends and supporters who are making it possible for our students and teachers to take this journey!