Natural Environment Teaching is a form of naturalistic behavioural teaching. While Incidental Teaching is used to teach manding (requesting), NET involves teaching and practicing skills across all verbal operants. In some senses, a NET lesson involves a combination of Embedded discrete trials and incidental teaching.
A NET teaching session can simultaneously include mands, tacts (labelling), intraverbals, echoics, imitation, visual discrimination and a variety of other categories of skills. These learning opportunities are embedded within other fun or practical activities.
For example, an arts and crafts activity might involve the following instructional activities.
Mands: Asking for glue or paint. Asking for a particular type of paint. Asking somebody to carry out an action such as pouring the glue or painting part of a picture.
Tacts: Tacting the paint, glue, brushes, paper or characters in a scene.
Echoics and Imitation: Echoing phrases such as ?I?m painting? or copying brush movements
Listener responding: Responding to instructions such as ?hand me the glue?, ?Give me the blue paint? or pointing to the correct item in response to the question ?Where is ____?
Intraverbals: ?A paintbrush has _____? or ?What do you do with glue? ?The bottle is ____?
By teaching in this format, we can increase the chances of somebody learning all of the meanings of a word. For example, in the above example, the learner would have opportunities to use and respond to the word ?blue? as a mand, a tact, a listener response, an echoic and an intraverbal.
NET interventions are typically run in loosely structured sessions and environments where there are a variety of motivating items present. There is often no pre-specified order to instructions. Target stimuli and target responses vary every few trials. The reinforcers used are often functionally or thematically related to the activity the learner is engaged in.
However, while teaching is often looser, planning for NET teaching requires as much effort as other behavioural intervention methods. A NET plan will include a list of both previously mastered instructions and new targets. As with other types of behavioural interventions, we still ensure that correct responses are reinforced, that prompting and fading is used as required and that we are developing appropriate stimulus control