Identifying Values in Nonspeaking Clients: A BCBA's Field Guide

To identify values in a nonspeaking or limited-vocal autistic client, run a likes-and-hates list with the people who know them, treat any perseveration as a values clue (the way Brian Middleton read Fred's police and firefighter fixation as safety), and tact the learner's experience out loud while you wait for them to show you what matters. Do not wait for a robust augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system before you start. Jessica was a non-speaker with limited AAC use when her team began this process. The values work is what got her AAC, and then her vocals, moving in the first place.

Why You Cannot Wait for AAC Before You Identify Values#

The standard advice you hear at conferences is: get the AAC system in place, build a strong tact and mand repertoire, then run a values interview. That sounds responsible. It is also the reason so many nonspeaking learners go years without a real values inventory on file.

Middleton's case for Jessica turns that order upside down. Her team did not have a clean AAC repertoire to lean on. They had a kid, a few preferred items, and a lot of guessing. Once they treated the values question as a Day 1 question and not a Year 3 question, everything else started to move.

As soon as we started utilizing these values to inform our programming, our decision making, we started getting more engagement from her. We started getting her to be fully invested in what's happening. We started getting her to start using AAC. Then we started getting limited vocals from her. From the talk — Brian Middleton

Engagement came first. AAC use came after engagement. Vocals came after AAC. The values work was the upstream cause, not the reward. If you sit on a values inventory until the learner can answer a five-item questionnaire, you skip the step that gets you the questionnaire. You do not need the client's words to start. You need the people around them and an hour of honest noticing.

The Likes-and-Hates Two-Column Worksheet (Worked Example)#

This is the single highest-leverage activity in the whole approach. Two columns on a page. Likes on the left. Hates on the right. You fill it in with the parent, the registered behavior technician (RBT), the teacher, the speech-language pathologist (SLP), and anyone else who has watched this learner for more than a week. You write down what they actually do and what they actually push away, not what the team wishes they liked.

Here is Middleton's version for Jessica.

So here's our friend Jessica. Jessica likes watching and scripting My Little Pony and Barbie. She also loves pizza, fruit punch, swimming and spinning. Jessica hates puzzles, vegetables, being interrupted, being helped, unexpected changes, and being told to take a break. From the talk — Brian Middleton

Now you read across both columns and ask, what would explain both sides? Spinning and swimming go together as movement and body input. Scripting and Barbie go together as familiar narrative and repetition. Hating being helped, being interrupted, and being told to take a break all sit under one umbrella, which is autonomy. Hating unexpected changes pairs with loving the same shows on repeat, which points at consistency and predictability.

You are looking for the small number of themes that explain the most rows. Middleton's read on Jessica was control, autonomy, inclusion, consistency, independence, physical activity, movement, flow, familiarity, and organization. That is not a values statement the family signed off on yet. It is a draft list you bring back and check.

Do this for one client this week. Pick a kid you have known for at least a month. Write the two columns from memory. Then send the page to the parent and the RBT and ask them to add to it. The list you get back will be better than your best guess.

Reading the Perseveration: What a Special Interest Is Telling You#

When a learner perseverates, the field's old habit was to call it a problem behavior and program against it. Middleton's move is the opposite. The perseveration is a free clue. The learner is telling you what their nervous system keeps returning to. Your job is to ask why.

Fred would perseverate on anything and everything to do with police, military, firefighters, emergency search and rescue, EMTs, EMS. And it was because of that and me asking the question, what are his values, that I was able to figure out one of his values is safety. And so what I did is I created a safety thermometer. From the talk — Brian Middleton

Notice the order. Fred did not say "I value safety." He could not say much at all. Middleton looked at the pattern, asked the values question on Fred's behalf, and landed on safety as the working theory. From there the team had something to build with.

You can run this on any learner with a strong interest. Train tables, bus routes, weather radar, specific songs. Ask: what does this interest let the learner do, predict, or feel safe inside? Trains and bus routes often map to order. Weather often maps to early warning and safety. Songs on repeat often map to emotional regulation. None of these are the final answer. They are testable guesses you bring back to the team.

A perseveration that looks pointless from the outside is almost never pointless from the inside. Treat it like a directional arrow, not a target.

Tact Their Experience Out Loud, Even When They Cannot Tact Back#

This is the part of the workflow you can do today, on your next session, with zero new materials. You use your own verbal behavior to label what is happening for the learner, the way a fluent caregiver labels things for a toddler. You are not asking the learner to repeat you. You are giving them a verbal model of their own internal experience.

Use your verbal behavior. We're going to label their experiences. So we're going to tact. Oh, I see that you are feeling frustrated. Oh, I see that you're excited. Does that feel really exciting? Notice I'm doing more than just labeling the aversive experiences. I'm also labeling all of their experiences. From the talk — Brian Middleton

Two things in that quote are easy to miss. First, you are tacting positive states, not only the hard ones. "You look really proud of that" is values-relevant data. Second, you are not waiting for AAC confirmation before you do it. Repeated pairing of a vocal label with the internal event builds the foundation for the learner to tact it themselves, in whatever modality they use.

Watch what they do when you tact. If you say "you look frustrated" and the kid relaxes, you got it right. If they push your hand away or escalate, your guess was wrong and the data is still useful. Either way you are building the values picture in real time.

What the Learner Does When Nobody Is Watching#

The likes-and-hates list catches the obvious stuff. The perseveration catches the obsessive stuff. This step catches the quiet stuff, which is often where the deepest values live. Middleton's framing is to ask what the learner does when no one is observing, sit with how hard that is to figure out, and give them the space and time to show you.

Build unprogrammed time into the session. Five minutes of "you can do anything you want and I will not prompt." Sit on your hands. Take notes. Where do they go? What do they pick up? Who do they look at? A kid who keeps lining up the same three toys in the same order when nobody asks them to is telling you something about order. A kid who runs to the window every time is telling you something about either movement or escape, and you can test which.

Ask the parent the same question. "When nobody is asking anything of him, what does he do?" That answer is almost never on the intake form. It is almost always closer to a value than what the formal preference assessment caught. You will not get a clean answer in one session. The unflashy method is the method.

Turning a Value Into a Visual Tool (the Safety Thermometer Pattern)#

Once you have a candidate value, you owe the learner something they can use. Middleton's safety thermometer for Fred is the template to copy.

The pattern is simple. Pick the value. Build a one-page visual that lets the learner rate how that value is being met right now. For safety, it is a thermometer with green at the bottom and red at the top. The learner points or selects where they are. The team adjusts the room, the demand, or the proximity until the thermometer drops.

You can run the same pattern for any value the likes-and-hates list surfaced.

• Autonomy. A two-choice card the learner can hand you at any time. "I want to pick" or "I am okay with what we are doing."
• Predictability. A first-then board that the learner can rearrange themselves, not just watch you rearrange.
• Movement. A movement coupon the learner can cash in, which beats waiting for a prompted break.
• Inclusion. A small "who is here with me" card the learner can use to ask for a specific person.

Two rules for the tool. It has to be usable without vocal speech, and the learner has to be able to operate it without staff fading help every time. The thermometer worked for Fred because he could touch the level himself. If staff had to read it for him, it would have stopped being a values tool and started being a data sheet.

How to Write This Up So the Parent Team Sees It Too#

If the values work lives only in your head, it dies the moment you change cases. Write it down where the family and the next BCBA can find it. You do not need a new template. You need three things in the existing plan.

1. The likes-and-hates table. Drop it in as is. Parents read tables. They do not read paragraphs about "preferred sensory input." Use the family's own words for the rows.
2. The working values list. Three to five themes. Plain English. "Fred values safety, predictability, and being trusted to do things himself." That sentence does more for the next clinician than two pages of assessment summary.
3. The tool you built. A picture of the thermometer, the choice card, or the first-then board, plus one sentence on how the learner uses it and what the team does when the rating moves.

Add one rationale line tying each goal back to a value on the list. Not jargon. Just "We picked this goal because Fred told us safety matters and this target lets him practice keeping himself safe." A parent reads that and knows you were listening. The next supervisor reads it and knows where to start.

That is the whole writeup. Values inventory, working themes, tool, rationale. Four short sections. Anyone on the team can read it in three minutes.

Frequently asked questions#

Can you identify values without language? Yes. You use three inputs that do not require the learner to talk. A likes-and-hates list built with the people around them, a careful read of any perseveration or special interest, and direct observation of what the learner does in unprompted time. None of these need AAC or vocal speech. They need the team's attention and a willingness to write down what they actually see.

How do you tell the difference between a special interest and a value? A special interest is the topic. A value is what the topic gives the learner. Fred's interest was emergency services. The value underneath was safety. To find the value, ask what the interest lets the learner predict, control, feel, or belong to. Test the guess by changing the surface activity and keeping the underlying value. If a kid who loves trains also relaxes around bus schedules and weather radar, the value is probably order or predictability, not trains specifically.

What if the nonspeaking learner does not have a reliable AAC system yet? Start the values work anyway. The lack of a system is the reason to start, not the reason to wait. Use caregiver report, perseveration, and unprompted observation to build a first draft of the values list. Then use that list to pick the first AAC vocabulary you teach. If safety is a value, the icons for "I need a break," "too loud," and "who is here" earn their spot. The values work makes the AAC system worth using, which is what Jessica's case shows.

Watch the full talk#

Middleton's two-hour workshop covers the Values Detective framing end to end, the full Jessica case from non-speaker to using vocals when she chooses to, Fred's safety thermometer, and the part of the model that handles when a caregiver's stated value conflicts with the learner's revealed value. The likes-and-hates exercise runs in the first hour and the thermometer pattern is in the back half.