E-3.0 Cumulative Practice Test

Incidental teaching describes taking advantage of naturally occurring teaching moments that arise in the learner's everyday environment. In this approach, opportunities for communication or other skills emerge from the child’s interests during typical activities, and instruction capitalizes on those moments. You wait for the learner to initiate or show interest, then provide just enough prompting to encourage a communication attempt, and reinforce with natural consequences. Over time, this strengthens functional language and other skills in context. While capturing moments can be part of how incidental teaching unfolds, the established term for using these real-life opportunities is incidental teaching. Contrived opportunities would be artificially created for teaching, which isn’t the same as leveraging what naturally occurs.