What is Shaping and Chaining?

Shaping and chaining are two helpful techniques that you can use to teach your child many complex behaviors.

With shaping, the learner learns by first approximately performing the goal behavior.  As the teacher, you reinforce the approximation of the goal, and you help the learner take “baby steps” to the final goal.  As the learner gets better and better, you slowly raise the bar, repeating this cycle until the final goal is met. Some uses for the shaping technique include teaching a child how to sleep in one’s bed all night, how to clean his room, how to write his name, language development, and much more.

With chaining, you take a multi-step task and break it down into a sequence of smaller tasks. The learner is taught only one step at a time and is not taught any future steps until the current step has been mastered.  The chaining technique could be used to teach a child how to tie a shoe, how to zip a jacket, how to brush teeth, how to get dressed, and much more.