The Three Try Rule – How to Make Sure Your Learners Stay in the Game

By Joan Orr M.Sc., TAGteach Cofounder

How do you feel when you try something and make mistakes over and over? How do you feel when it seems that you are disappointing the person trying to teach you? Do you feel energized and excited to be “learning from your mistakes” or do you feel frustrated and discouraged? Do repeated failure and “just one more”s make you anxious, frustrated and wanting to escape to do something less stressful?

Sometimes the result of too much pressure to try something too hard results in a full-on meltdown or a complete shut down of the learner. Once this happens, there is no more learning.

This is why we suggest the three try rule. If a learner fails three times (or fewer) to meet the specific learning goal (the tag point), go to a past point of success and move forward in smaller increments.

A point of success is something earlier in the learning process that you are 100% sure the learner can get right. By starting at a point of success and moving forward in small steps you build on existing success instead of searching blindly for a good starting point. Of course the ‘three try rule’ isn’t really a rule. The learner doesn’t HAVE to fail three times. If it is clear the learner will not likely achieve the tag point criterion after the first failure, or the learner is very sensitive to failure, jump right in and break the skill down further and change the tag point.

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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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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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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.

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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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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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The TAGteach Approach to Challenging Behavior in the Classroom

By Luca Canever, TAGteach Faculty

At School

A new pupil with ADHD (I’ll call him J.) arrived in my sixth grade class a while ago. As soon as I was able to find the right reinforcement for him, I was also able to strengthen “good” (for the teacher) behaviors, such as sit, write or watch what is written on the blackboard. I was able to tag (make a click sound with tagger) in order to mark (bring to his attention) his “good” behaviors and follow up with a reinforcer (something he liked and wanted to get more of). After the first hour of practice, J. understood the significance of the tag sound and began to exhibit these behaviors more consistently. There is just one problem remaining to be solved, and that is the subject of this article… transitions.

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