Precision Teaching

Prospect Academy will use the innovative framework of Precision Teaching (PT) for superior measurement and data-driven decisions. Through its use, students will gain fluency in their academic, behavioral, social emotional, and adaptive behavior skills. At Prospect Academy, we have a focus on the generalizability of academic, social-emotional, adaptive behavior, and life skills of students, as students’ abilities to use these skills across environments will have direct correlation to their success outside of the classroom and in the future. While we will teach these skills in mostly direct instruction formats, it is critical that students are able to use these skills under different conditions, in different environments, and with different people, and this is typically planned into quality programming for students with learning differences. While we will practice skills in other contexts, one of the best ways to ensure generalizability of skills is to make sure skills are fluent.

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Accuracy-only performance metrics, which are typically used in schools and in Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals, are not as accurate or sensitive measures for true mastery. However, measuring frequency of behavior, which means the number of instances of behavior in a certain amount of time, is a more sensitive and accurate measure of performance—it is the rate of performance that separates those who are beginners from those who are experts (Barrett, 1979 in Johnson & Layng, 1992). In addition to frequency, another important PT concept is Celeration, which refers to the root word of acceleration and deceleration. Celeration is the rate of student learning over time, and it can be directly measured (Binder, 1988; Binder & Watkins, 2003). Precision Teaching (PT) is the innovative measurement framework that we will use to help students gain fluency in their academic, behavioral, social emotional, and adaptive behavior skills.