Job Carving
Teaching Workers to use Natural Cues

Lesson 4

Job Site Training - slide 5

Teaching Workers to Use Natural Cues
Eliminate the need of the customer to attend to the cue.
Always try the least amount of assistance first.
Include the use of natural cues within the task analysis.
Select a prompt for instruction.

There are several things that I would like to touch on before we move away from our conversation related to natural cues. This first I've alluded to in another slide that we have already looked at, and that's the first point on this particular slide, which would be the fact that you can actually eliminate the need for the customer to attend to the natural cue.
This would really be for the learner with a significant cognitive disability who may not ever really clue into that relevant feature of the task that you are trying to instruct. Let me use the example of wiping off the top of a table as a very simplistic way of looking at this particular bullet on the slide.

You may have someone who has expressed an interest in doing some janitorial work. I am not here to promote janitorial work as the only thing that people with cognitive disabilities can do; but for argument sake, let's say that the person has decided that he or she would like to work in a cafeteria. Part of this task is to clean the tables. The issue with this particular individual is that he can't discriminate clean versus dirty. We could spend a lot of time and energy trying to draw the person's attention to the natural cue of the dirt or the trash on the table, or we could simply design a task analysis that allows for the individual to always systematically approach wiping off the table in same fashion whether it is dirty, clean or partially dirty in one area of the table.

You or I might approach a table with only a piece of trash on the top by throwing away the piece of trash and therefore cleaned the table. Someone who can't discriminate between clean and dirty needs to systematically approach the task in order to accomplish it successfully every time. You would need to teach this individual to always start at the left side of the table wiping from top to bottom working towards the right so end product is always a clean table. This concept could be applied to anything that you are trying to teach the individual to accomplish.

Another thing that we really want to talk about briefly is the fact that we always try to use the least amount of intervention or assistance first. Hopefully, the individual will respond to the natural cue in the workplace. If he or she doesn't, can we then rely on a coworker reminding the individual or pointing out the cue? If that doesn't seem like a consistent way of approaching the training need, can we add an external cue? If that's not of assistance, can we work at implementing a prompting strategy?

The next bullet is that we could and should include the use of any natural cues within the task analysis. In other words, if the individual is to respond to the flashing light, that needs to be one of the steps in our task analysis. Finally, if all else fails, consider prompting the person to attend to the cue. That might be something as simple as a gesture cue, a verbal cue, a model cue. Any of those things may assist the person in successfully beginning to respond to a natural cue within the workplace. We're going to talk later about more specific ideas relating to prompting strategies. I would like for you to remember that the person may need to learn how respond to the natural cue using a prompting strategy rather than just assume because the cue is there that he or she will naturally respond to it.