Ms. Jones focused on response generalization. She wanted Marcus to learn different ways to respond to jokes.

Ms. Jones operationally defined one outcome that indicated her generalization lessons were effective:

• Across five different conversations, when a peer directs a joke toward Marcus, Marcus will respond with five different, appropriate comments across three consecutive instances.

Ms. Jones decided that the small group time provided during the lunch bunch would be an ideal instructional setting. There were several peers Marcus wanted to socialize with in this group. In particular, Ms. Jones knew there were a couple boys in this group who often joked and teased each other playfully. Ms. Jones decided to use role play to act out different scenarios with different ways of responding to jokes. Role play would allow the group to rehearse a variety of joking scenarios and promote response generalization.

• Instructional Setting: Small group
• Instructional Method: Role play

Ms. Jones realized that although Marcus wanted to socialize and joke with peers, doing so required a lot of effort on Marcus’s part. Peers were also unlikely to want to talk about many of Marcus’s preferred topics. Ms. Jones decided to train Mr. Park, Marcus’s paraprofessional, to use Marcus’s token system to help reinforce Marcus for responding to jokes appropriately. She also decided the best way for Marcus to learn to respond to different jokes was to practice joking with multiple examples. 

• Generalization Tactic: Train others to prompt and reinforce, teach multiple examples
• Support Strategy: Reinforcement

Ms. Jones’ Lesson on “Understanding and Participating in Joking”

Developing the Role Play

Ms. Jones developed several role play scripts with different roles for each student. Ms. Jones observed typically-developing peers conversing and joking throughout their day. She also watched popular comedic television shows. With this information, she developed 10 scripts involving a small group of peers joking about a specific topic or teasing each other in friendly ways. Students would rotate roles and take turns responding to joking / teasing and initiating jokes. The focus was teaching Marcus to contribute to jokes (rather than just say, “That’s a good one,” or a similar statement).

Three of Marcus’s peers participated in each role play scenario, and each person played each role in each scenario at least one time. After role play, Ms. Jones asked the students to think of other things they joked about and discuss how someone could respond. Ms. Jones also proposed several hypothetical situations in which someone made a comment / joke. She asked students to share different ways they would respond. Marcus received token reinforcement for his participation in the lesson.

Following the lesson, Ms. Jones took time to briefly chat with some other students in Marcus’s classes. She explained that Marcus was learning to joke with others and asked if any of them would be willing to help out. She asked willing peers to make jokes with Marcus when they were talking to him. Ms. Jones shared that Marcus might not always understand they were joking, and that he might not know how to respond. She also told them that just hearing different types of jokes and participating in different types of interactions helped Marcus learn.

Recruiting Support from the Paraprofessional

Ms. Jones then trained Mr. Park to prompt and reinforce Marcus. She explained to Mr. Park that Marcus was learning to respond to jokes and make jokes with others. She told Mr. Park that although Marcus knew when peers were joking, he was working on responding to jokes in different ways. Ms. Jones also communicated to Mr. Park that several peers had been trained to engage and joke with Marcus. Mr. Park would prompt Marcus to join these groups of peers, but step back so as not to interfere with the interaction. If Mr. Park heard Marcus respond to a joke in a novel way, he would praise Marcus and provide token reinforcement after the interaction.