Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How does DTT instruction change from stage to stage?
Teachers adjust their instructional goals, content, materials, learning environments, and classroom management strategies to students’ stages of development and IEP objectives. They also adjust their own roles as significant adults in the learning process.
For Children in Stage One (birth - 24 months)
- Your task: Teach them to respond and trust
- Your role: Care and nurture; encourage responses; make good things happen
- Learning environment: Consistent routine; luring rather than demanding
- Developmentally appropriate materials: Exploratory materials with enticing sound, color, texture
- Management strategies: Stimulating materials; structure; routine; comforting feedback; redirection; controlled vocabulary; supportive physical proximity
Stage Two (3 - 5 years)
- Your task: Teach them basic skills for success
- Your role: Lead them to abundant success
- Learning environment: Active exploration
- Developmentally appropriate materials: Exploration; imagination; themes of adults caring for children and kindness to others
- Management strategies: Abundant encouragement to participate; positive feedback; verbal redirection; reflection of positive words and actions; model desired actions
Stage Three (6 - 9 years)
- Your task: Teach them to participate successfully in peer groups
- Your role: Be the group leader, benign sheriff, and motivator
- Learning environment: Group focus and teamwork
- Management strategies: Positive feedback about individual contribution to the group; motivate with success-producing lessons; redirect behavior; reflect positive words and actions; connect actions to feelings; positive rules; individual Life Space Crisis Intervention (LSCI)
Stage Four (10 - 12 years)
- Your task: Teach them to care about being contributing members in groups at school, with peers, and at home
- Your role: Group facilitator, advocate, counselor, role model, reflector of reality
- Learning environment: Reality-oriented group focus
- Management strategies: Positive feedback from peers and adults; help student interpret behavior and feelings; group and individual LSCI
Stage Five (13+ years)
- Your task: Teach them to use their skills in new situations independently
- Your role: Supportive teacher, mentor, counselor, advisor
- Learning environment: Natural teen settings for independent use of competencies and selected values
- Management strategies: Positive feedback and encouragement preferably from peers; interpretation; LSCI; remind the student to consider values and consequences
Q: Who can use DTT?
- Educators
- Administrators
- Psychologists
- Social workers
- Childcare workers
- Paraprofessionals
- Parents / foster parents
- Other adults guiding children and teens
Q: How can a teacher or parent assess a child’s current stage of development?
The Developmental Teaching Objectives Rating Forms-Revised (DTORF-R) is used for an in-depth assessment of social, emotional, and behavioral development. Baseline results become the foundation for instructional planning. DTORF-R also provides a functional behavioral assessment and a behavioral intervention plan (BIP) as part of an Individualized Education Program (IEP), Individualized Family Service Plan (IFSP), or Individual Transition Plan (ITP). DTORF-R assessments can be repeated for each grading period during a school year to track progress.When selected DTORF-R milestone objectives have been achieved, there is no further need to continue intervention focus on those objectives. Move on to the next objectives in the developmental sequence.At the end of the year, the number of objectives achieved documents progress made during the year.
Q: What does the research say about DTT?
Three separate research studies have documented program effectiveness for the U. S. Department of Education.
Q: How can individuals learn to use DTT?
Our extensive self-study resources, workshops, professional development programs, and technical assistance consultation are available for individuals, public and private schools, childcare programs, home school programs, and service agencies.
Q: What skills are gained?
DTT training enables you to: Assess a student’s current social-emotional-behavioral status. Design developmentally appropriate individualized educational programs. Select learning objectives and instructional strategies. Apply DTT in early childhood settings, elementary and high schools, mental health programs, and home environments. Use evidence-based, field-tested resources. Evaluate students’ progress. Document outcomes. Self-monitor your own skills.
Q: What is the cost of training?
Costs depend upon the type and extent of training needs. Costs are negotiated at the time an initial training agreement is made.
Q: What resources are available to learn to use DTT?
- A 2007 textbook, Teaching Responsible Behavior, provides a comprehensive guide to DTT (Available: proedinc.com)
- An interactive CD, "PEGS Behavior Managment", increases teachers’ skills in using positive behavior management strategies and reduces students’ negative behaviors
- A developmental assessment rating system, DTORF-R, to identify learning objectives and document student progress online, DTT Stages One through Five (Available: dtorf.com)
- Developmentally based early childhood lesson plans,"Circle Time Learning"
- Developmental Art Therapy textbook and art activity lesson plans, "Developmental Art Therapy in the Classroom"
- Onsite training
- Workshops
- DTT Leadership certification