Below is a general skill sequence for helping learners follow gestures with consistency.

Joint attention is a social-communication skill that occurs when two people, typically an adult and a child, use gestures and gaze to direct their focus towards a shared object or event. This skill is critical for the development of language and social interaction. Impaired development of joint attention is a hallmark of autism, so it is crucial to implement early interventions to promote this skill. Teaching learners to follow gestures is a component to working on joint attention as a whole!

Treatment Plan Goal Ideas

This is a list of treatment plan goals. These are different from the goals you will find in the skill sequence below. Your treatment plan goals encompass any number of goals from the skill sequence. Sometime they will include multiple goals from the sequence (”Learner will label 5 toys”) and sometimes the treatment plan goal will be simply consist of a really important goal from the skill sequence (”Will label caregiver”). An analogy I like to use goes as follows: Each skill sequence goal (commonly known as a “target”) represent each stair in a flight of stairs. The treatment plan goal is the flight itself.

Treatment plan goal ideas for this particular skill area are as follows:

• Learner will follow an adult’s gesture/point to a high value item before engaging with it.
• Learner will follow and adult’s gesture/point to any neutral value item.
• Learner will orient their body left, right, or 180 degrees to follow an adult’s gesture to a neutral item.
• Learner will follow a gesture to an instructional item from across a room.

Component Skills

Your learner may need to be fluent in these component skills first before introducing this goal/skill area. Component skills for this skill sequence may include skill areas that are fundamental to other areas. Fluency in the skill areas listed below may increase the likelihood that your learner will succeed in this skill sequence and those afterward.

One of the most valuable skills you’ll work on with your learner revolves around teaching them to follow gestures. Learners who can follow gestures are more likely to engage in joint attention with adults and peers. Gestures allow us to guide our learners attention to the stimuli that will ultimately help them experience reinforcement. Before we teach this skill area, it is important to at have started working on skills regarding reinforcer and preference expansion. Your learner doesn’t need all of the skills in this component sequence, but it might be a good idea to have at least gotten through a few.

Intro to Reinforcer/Preference Expansion

Skill Possibilities

Below is a possible skill sequence for working on increasing your learner’s ability to follow gestures. Note that every learner is different and that you likely will need to tweak and vary some programming to their needs. Click the triangle icon to view the full description for each skill in the sequence/area.

Concurrent Skills

Working on these skills at the same time could help with goal mastery. Maybe your learner has mastered these skills already. Perhaps they are already listed as component skills above. That’s okay! Targeting other learning channels might help your learner.

Intro to Scanning

Intro to Manding

Single Actions with Common Toys

Composite Skills

These are the possible next steps for learners who have mastered, or are mastering, the skills listed above. Note that new skill areas may require fluency in other component skills not listed above. Also, you can introduce composite skill sequences prematurely to keep your learner progressing, as generativity may occur earlier than expected.

Intro to Eye Contact

Intro to Joint Attention (Coming Soon!)

Follow the link below to better understand component-composite analysis.

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