DTTC Is Not Play-Based (But It Can Be Joyful)

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole coming in from the NYU Motor Speech Lab with a very quick PSA on DTTC, and that is: the DTTC technique, developed by Dr. Edythe Strand, is not play-based. It's joyful, it's fun, but it is not play-based.

So remember, the way we're organizing our practice is in blocks. And during those blocks, where the child is actively repeating the target word with your guidance and your multisensory cueing, they need to be focused on you. If you have them engaging in an activity while they're doing imitation, even if they're saying the word, they're not fully focused on you. And that takes away from the conscious practice part of it.

I was teaching my pediatric motor speech disorders class the other night, and I had a student group giving a presentation on this technique. And they did an amazing job, but they kept strategizing how to make it more fun, and what activity you could do while you're working on the target word "in" or "out" or "eat," and how you could feed a dinosaur, or what have you. And it's like, no, this is not what the therapy is. This is how we have been trained to do articulation therapy, language therapy, even therapy with play targets. But DTTC, that's not how we do this technique.

We are in blocks of practice, repetitive practice, while we are sitting in front of the child and they are looking at us and they are attempting the production with our multisensory cueing.

I want you to think about it like this. If you go to the gym, or if you're someone who goes to the gym, I'm always thinking about motor learning this way. Let's say you're doing a bicep curl, right? When you're doing a bicep curl and you're actively engaged in that practice, you're not doing anything else. You are standing there doing the bicep curl. When you're done, you take a minute, maybe a two-minute break, and you go right back to another rep of your workout.

This is exactly how our sessions are organized. So you have your blocks of practice, and then you have your little breaks where you can have something fun to do. I always have fun stuff. And then you go back to your practice. And believe it or not, the kids are happy. They're making progress. They start to understand the parameters of the sessions and the way they're organized, and they trust you as a clinician. And you start to see really, really, really wonderful improvement.

So again, DTTC is not play-based, although it can be fun and it can be joyful.