How I Used Burps, Farts and Fairytales to Teach Writing Skills

By Luca Canever, TAGteach Faculty

Everyone knows from their own experience that it’s not fun to do things badly. A certain amount of effort is required to gain enough skill with a new activity in order to get to the point that you start to see some progress and to enjoy the activity for it’s own sake. For some of us, for some activities, the motivation of future success is enough to get us past the initial frustration in the learning process where there is more failure than success. For others, especially kids who can’t understand why they need to learn something hard in school, there just seems no point in putting forth the effort to practice and get better. Here is my story about overcoming this problem of motivation and reinforcement with one student. I hope it helps you to discover how to instill joy in the learning process for your learners (or even yourself!).

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kids at school writing at a table

TAGteach at School – Writing Skills

By Luca Canever – TAGteach Faculty

TAGteach at school has proven to an effective technology in many different areas of application, especially when teachers have to deal with basic skills. Skills that students need to manager in order to have access (and learn) more complex behaviors. In this article we will talk about writing, and we will give you some examples of how we have applied TAGteach.

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The Effects of Using TAGteach™ to Promote Earthquake Safety for Children in School

By Luca Canever, Elisa Casarini and Eleonora Galanti

Canever, L, Casarini, F. and Galanti, E. (2014) The Effects of Using TAGteach to Promote Earthquake Safety for Children in School. Presented at the 7th Conference of the European Association for Behaviour Analysis. University of Stockholm. Stockholm, Sweden. Sept 10-13, 2014.
Read Abstract: http://www.europeanaba.org/events/submission/7/62

Obviously, the more you train the more skilled you get, or at least, you should get. We wished to find out if, given the same amount of training time, using an event marker (like the box clicker we use in TAGteach) could make any difference in terms of learning quality. We wished to find out if a marker based teaching could be a more effective way to improve learner’s retention, endurance and application of new skills.

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Interview with a TAGteacher – TAGteach in the Classroom with Luca Canever

Listen to this interview of TAGteach Faculty member Luca Canever with TAGteach cofounder Joan Orr on the topic of TAGteach in the Classroom. Luca tells us how he got started with TAGteach and tells about how he uses TAGteach in his classes. He talks about the following topics:

  • His applications of TAGteach in a typical middle school classroom in a group setting
  • His application of TAGteach with special needs students one on one
  • How the kids responded at first
  • TAGteach for math and reading
  • TAGteach for behavior management
  • Some challenges in working in a classroom environment
  • Using peer tagging
  • What he’s going to be up to next

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TAGteach in the Classroom

By Luca Canever, TAGteach Faculty

Managing the reinforcement for a group of people is one of the major difficulties that we may encounter. Especially if the people in question are 20 kids, 11 years old, with interests and personalities different from each other.

For the last two months I’ve been working in a school as a teacher. For the first time, I have the chance to use the marker with a large group — a group with no particular desire to be at school! How can we reinforce them? Some of the kids enjoy candies, some others like beads or extra time for recess. There are (they exist!) students who find study itself reinforcing, but, they are very, very, very rare.

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More Than Just a Sticker: How TAGteach Prevents Kids from Being Punished by Rewards

There is a book called “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn. I saw the title and thought “how can that be?” and so I bought the book. Dr. Kohn explains how endless stickers and charts and ribbons and praise and approval to children for every single accomplishment no matter how small is creating children who cannot function without outside approval. They have no confidence in their own abilities and low self esteem because they judge themselves through the eyes of others. They are not self motivated and do not derive satisfaction from achievement for its own sake since they have been systematically trained to look to others for approval as a result of the frivolous doling out of rewards by parents, teachers and coaches. This is of course an over-simplification, since it is quite a long book with lots of scientific references, but you get the idea.

The Praise Junkie

Theresa McKeon (TAGteach cofounder and professional gymnastics coach) calls these kids “praise junkies”. They are the ones that always want the coach to look at them. They can’t work independently. They are not focused on learning, but are focused on what the coach (parent, teacher, etc) thinks. They require constant approval and encouragement. They may even misbehave in order to have the attention focused back on them if other children are getting in the way of this.

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Should We Pay Kids to Behave and Do Well at School?

By Karen Pryor (first published in 2010)

Last week TIME magazine ran a cover story about paying kids cash money to get better grades.
The objections to cash ‘rewards’ for schooling have been around for a long time and can lead to tremendous political uproar. There are moral objections—children should do what’s expected of them without reward. There are philosophical, theoretical, religious, and of course financial objections.

Right-click here to download pictures. To help protect your privacy, Outlook prevented automatic download of this picture from the Internet.

Well, this fellow at Harvard, economist Roland Fryer Jr., decided the first thing to do was to find out if paying kids to do better in school actually worked or not. Forget all the existing studies and opinions. Forget those specific schools where reinforcers, large and small, are built into the system. According to TIME, Dr. Fryer “did something education researchers almost never do: he ran a randomized experiment.” (Just think about THAT for a minute. They opine stuff and put it into the schools and they don’t TEST it?)

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TAGteacher Tale: Spelling and writing, oh my! TAGteach saves the day

By Martha Gabler MA, TAGteach Faculty

TAGteach is so Versatile

Not only does TAGteach help with behavior, you can also use it to help kids overcome learning obstacles.

Here are two examples of how people used TAGteach to help kids who were unhappy about completing their spelling and writing assignments. These were quick, spur-of-the-moment interventions, but they created great outcomes.

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Interview with a TAGteacher: TAGteach in an Autism School Setting

Have you wondered how to apply TAGteach in a classroom setting? Will it be too noisy for the learner to hear the tags? Will the learner be too distracted by everything else going on the room? Will you need to give too many food reinforcers? Can you use TAGteach to manage aggressive and dangerous behaviors? Is it OK to let the child use the tagger and be the teacher? Listen to this month’s interview with a TAGteacher and watch the accompanying videos to get answers to these and more questions.

This month’s interview is with Anne Wormald. Anne is one of the first TAGteachers and has extensive experience from both ends of the tagger, being the daughter of Joan Orr, one of the TAGteach cofounders. Anne is working on her BCBA and is a Level 2 TAGteacher. She has many years of experience working with special needs kids and at the moment is working in home and school settings with children with autism.

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Back Chaining: The top secret teaching tool that is the key to professional success

Professional trainers and professionals with advanced degrees in Applied Behavior Analysis know about the trainer/teacher’s secret weapon for extreme reliability. That is… back chaining. If you are a teacher, coach or parent who teaches skills to others, you need to know about this too!

Back chaining is a concept foreign to many and counter-intuitive to most who first learn of it. We want to talk about it briefly here, because it is a very effective way to build highly reliable behaviors and it is one of the key techniques that any TAGteacher should understand and apply properly. A reliable behavior is one that looks the same each time the subject performs it. For example, with forming the letter “E”, we would consider the behavior to be reliable if the child drew the letter the same way every time and the letter was drawn correctly.

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