The ABCs of Practice: Accessible, Blocked, Conscious

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab, coming in for Apraxia Awareness Month. I wanted to talk to you about the ABCs of practice in pediatric motor speech therapy. What am I talking about? A is accessible practice. B is blocked practice. And C is conscious practice.

Accessible practice: is this a target that is within reach for the child with multisensory cueing on the part of the clinician? We go back to the idea that this is errorless learning; we don't want to engage the child in negative practice. Is this child making gains toward the target with your cueing?

Blocked practice: remember, we're taking our target word and working on it repetitively in a block. I try to aim for 10 to 20 productions per block. If it's a challenging target with a lot of learning involved, it's okay to have five productions. We like to use a modified block schedule, so some of your blocks will be longer than others. But the idea is that you're organizing your practice in blocks.

And lastly, conscious practice, which we talk about a lot at the NYU Motor Speech Lab. Is the child there with you? Are they consciously thinking about the cueing you're giving them and about how they're moving their articulators, and really incorporating all of that into their production? Because we know that if they're on autopilot, or playing with something and their attention is elsewhere, then, back to Dr. Edie Strand, if it's not going through the cortex, no learning is happening. So we need them to be focused.

So it's accessible practice, blocked practice, and conscious practice.