Speaker 1 (00:02):

Good morning AnswersNow, for instance, family, your friendly neighborhood BCBA here, Adam Dreyfus. I am the co-founder of AnswersNow and chief science officer. What is AnswersNow? We are a mobile or desktop platform that connects you directly to your own board certified behavior analyst. So you can text him when you want we do direct services now we accept insurance Medicaid. So we can do it just like this video conferencing Texas support direct to your son and or daughter the full boat of applications, tele-health applications. We've been doing the parent support university for the last several months during the pandemic. We are on video modeling today. We're gonna be talking about video modeling. It sounds it's another one of those ones that sounds really straightforward. But as most of the parents and caregivers of individuals diagnosed with autism, it's never that simple.

Speaker 1 (00:59):

You can't just show a kid a video and they're like, Oh, I'm going to do it that way. So we're going to talk about that in a little bit of detail. I do want to talk about the resource in general so that you can avail yourself of it. What we're doing is we're just going down the national professional development center list of evidence-based practices to get all jargony, the NPD sees EBPs, no wonder people get frustrated with us. So yeah, we're at video modeling but we highly encourage you to go check that out yourself, the video modeling module, it takes about an hour and a half, two hours to complete individually. And there's I think 24, 25 modules in there right now. So video modeling has been used for a while and what we've mostly learned is what doesn't work, right?

Speaker 1 (01:49):

We've learned a lot of things that don't work. One of the interesting ways that videos usually manifest themselves with these kinds of kids is as affinities, right? As things that they like to watch over and over and over whatever that's not video modeling, right. A little different. You could say that fall somewhere between an affinity, like you might have an affinity golfer movies, same thing reading these are highly preferred activities that in our kids can frequently tip over into what we call automatically reinforcing just things that they do because they like that they do them and almost kind of like a form of stimming, right? As a way to self calm. If you think of it like a video is the exact same thing. Every single time, it's very calming, right?

Speaker 1 (02:40):

If you're like a little nervous and you're reaching for something like, Hey, I need something that's predictable that calms me down. Let me click, you know, like you listen to your favorite song, you might pick up a book that you're really familiar with and it just reduces your anxiety. It's good to think of almost all the time. All of us are seeking to sort of keep our anxiety as low as possible. I think of this at work all the time. I think of this in traffic, I think it is in my own life, like everybody's trying to sort of reduce their anxiety cause we're human. So we're a little bit like deer in the sense that we're like, what is out there, they can kind of get me. Right. So your brain's always going, Hey, everything's okay. Everything's okay. Everything's okay until it's not.

Speaker 1 (03:21):

Okay. so a lot of folks on the spectrum use videos, Thomas, the tank engine, paw patrol, you name it. One of the more famous examples of it is Disney, right? I always say Thomas the tank engine, because that seems like what I come across all the time is kids watching lots of Thomas tank engine and that's its own should be its own parent support university module. But there's a film called life animated about a young man who was just super immersed into Disney movies. And his parents were getting sort of increasingly alarmed by that was the only way he really seemed to connect to something. And then he, they began to communicate with him. And he began to come okay with them in kind of using we, we scripting right, like sentences out of the movie identifying with things out of the movie and there was a connection that was made and I've shared here before that one of my first real successes with profoundly impact young man almost 20 years ago was around Thomas the tank engine.

Speaker 1 (04:25):

That's that was his immersion. That was his affinity. He had $50,000 worth of Thomas, the tank, engine toys. He watched videos, he read books. And I didn't know very much about Thomas the tank engine at that time. I learned sort of working with him, reading the books and kind of playing with them, but that's all he wanted to do. And one day he turned to me and said, my boiler is full. It kind of had a pained look on his face. And I clicked instantly and thought, well, that's what Thomas says when Thomas his stomach hurts. Right. And Thomas belly is full. And so I said to him, I said, you're boiling, there's full. And that was our kind of our first communication connection. He nodded and said, my boiler is full. And so we had our first kind of like, I understand what you're saying.

Speaker 1 (05:17):

You understand what I'm saying? Not exactly video modeling. We're going to get to that in a second, but there's a lot of ways that the people interact with videos. And I want to kind of touch on those as we go through this module. It's a great way if your kid watches something over and over again, it's a great way to sort of enter their world. I would start just by sitting there watching it with him, then I would repeat some stuff back. If they said something, I would repeat it back. Anything to promote more kind of language and connection. Video modeling is used just in the same way. Regular modeling is used. Like if I'm showing somebody how to wash their hands, I bring them to a sink and I washed my hands right in front of them.

Speaker 1 (05:58):

And I show them what the steps are. And there's a lot of different things you can do in addition to that. But that's basically modeling video modeling is the same thing just through having them watch a video. One of the challenges is a lot of kids and adults on the spectrum don't watch anything, right? They don't, they're not, we call it conditioned to screens, right? Like they don't look at screens. It seems like they all do. But the truth is once you kind of start working with folks, a lot of them don't, they could care less. What's on a screen, probably not going to be video modeling is probably not going to be effective there. The other piece of it, and if you watch video modeling videos like this video modeling is a form of observational learning, right?

Speaker 1 (06:41):

You observe, and then you learn, and this is a huge deficit for our kids. And adults is the ability to just look at somebody doing something and learn that that's the way that it's done. So whether it's in person or in video, it's a big challenge. So for you, for this to be a successful intervention, they have to be the prerequisite skills are, they should be able to look at screens with interest and with attention, attention is probably the best word, right? Like they look at it to see what's going on there. The second one is that they can learn just by observing. There's a lot of kids that don't right. You work on that specific skill. And so if they don't possess that skill and you know, that video learning video model is probably not going to be very effective. The third one, and this is really important.

Speaker 1 (07:25):

And we learned this early on is a lot of times in ABA applied behavior analysis. What you want to do is give what we call a positive exemplar and a negative exemplar, the right way to do it, and the wrong way to do it so that you can tell the difference. But we learned in early video modeling that kids on the spectrum tend to kind of gravitate towards the non-examples, right? So like say you're like, Oh, Hey, this is how you wash your hands and you show somebody washing their hands, and this is not how you wash your hands and you show somebody splashing around in the sink and we'd show this to the kids and be like, all right, this is the way that you do it. And this is the way you're not doing it. They would start splashing around in the sink.

Speaker 1 (08:03):

There's this: we don't know exactly why this sort of tendency towards the like let's not do it that way. There were a lot of social skills videos that came out probably 10 or 15 years ago. They did this, that had like that the right way and the wrong way. And this is the right way to say hello. Hello, good morning. This is the wrong way. Hi, how are you doing? And the kids would do it the wrong way. Cause they don't, you know, we look at it and know which one's the right one and which one's wrong. They look at it as just two examples. I'm going to pick that one. That's probably a little far field. We're not sure exactly what's going on. But I would highly recommend if you're going to do video modeling, don't do, this is not how you do it.

Speaker 1 (08:44):

Video modeling only stick to this is how you do it in a perfect world, you get a video of them doing the behavior that you want them to do correctly. And then you have them review that if that's not available, which almost by definition, it's not like if you're deciding to do video modeling because they don't know how to do this thing. Whether it's tie your shoes, wash your hands, take out the dishes, play appropriately. There's a lot of, you know, going to YouTube, I got a six year old, his favorite thing is watching people play with toys, right? And unpack toys. I'm not exactly sure what that is, but that's exactly what video modeling is about. Right. Then they go and play with their toys that way. Hopefully be very careful with those YouTube ones. There's a lot of stuff that looks like normal adults play.

Speaker 1 (09:32):

Well, I don't know how normal you are an adult playing with a paw patrol toys. But there's some pretty dark ones out there. So keep an eye on that. So yeah, it can be, it can be very effective. If you can use siblings to do it, what you want is something that grabs their attention, right? So if there's someone in the video that they recognize, it's more likely that they're going to pay attention to that. And of course, once you've kind of done some video modeling, you want to transfer into the real world, see if they can do it, see if they can play with that toy appropriately. A little shout out to our frame behavior babe behaviorbabe.com. Exactly what it sounds like. If you go to behaviorbabe.com/video modeling, she's got a bunch of really great videos on exactly how this works.

Speaker 1 (10:21):

So we're always encouraging our fellow BCBAS out there and sharing resources. So definitely check out behaviorbabe.com/videomodeling for some examples of this, Amanda Kelly. Good on ya. So video modeling, don't show negative examples, make sure that they've got the skills that they can be successful at video modeling. See if you can catch them doing the behavior that you want a video model, you can do this on your phone. This does not have to be complicated. You can do it on your phone. You can do it on your camera. What you're doing is you're just making a little video and they're watching it. It's nice to get it on something that can loop. Like if you can get 15, 20 seconds of a good example and then have it loop a few times kids on the spectrum like that a lot that, that repetition they will try to do it themselves.

Speaker 1 (11:18):

Some of them can do it. Some of them know how to manipulate the controls of the camera or the, the phone to have that do that. So it's a, it's a very strong tool for certain kids. It doesn't work for everybody. So don't be frustrated if you don't have a BCBA it's not a bad idea to talk to somebody in your orbit that might be able to help out a little bit like a teacher or some other kind of therapist, but certainly you can go to getanswersnow.com and sign up. We've, like I said, we take insurance, we take Medicaid and you can get connected to one of our BCBAs and they absolutely know how to help set this up and can answer questions about how it works and set up a program for you.

Speaker 1 (12:08):

Just a quick reminder, I'm Adam Dreyfus, I'm the co-founder and chief science officer of AnswersNow getanswersnow.com is where you can go to find out more about us. See some of these videos, check out our blogs find out how we operate, but it's pretty simple. Our whole goal is to reduce the barrier of entry for you to access highly qualified clinicians. Master's level of board certified behavior analysts with years of experience working with kids on the spectrum. That's what we're all about is how do we make this knowledge more accessible? Originally we were just parent training, but now we do direct services to children and adults diagnosed with autism through this platform as well as parent training and text-based support. So I think that's about it for video modeling definitely go to A F I R M the afirm modules, which is where you can find out more about this for free. We try to provide access to as many free resources as possible. And I want to thank you for listening. Hopefully you're all doing well in these extraordinarily challenging times. And we look forward to talk to you next week.