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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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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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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Interview with a TAGteacher: Occupational Therapist Mary Handley on Handwriting Instruction

Check out the latest in our Interview with a TAGteacher series. This time we talked to Mary Handley, a school-based occupational therapist who is working with a 3rd grader to improve his handwriting. Noah’s handwriting skills were not functional and this was affecting his grades and his attitude at school. Mary explains with several video examples how she helped Noah to improve significantly in just four sessions using TAGteach applied with her usual method of teaching.

“At that 4 week point I was amazed beyond my expectations. I knew this would work in the right circumstances, but it worked better than I anticipated. I just don’t see that in my week to week therapy. The retention was pretty amazing. His teachers were amazed. Even the librarian made a comment. This has positively impacted his whole attitude toward school.” – Mary Handley.

 

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