Steps to take when TAGteach “doesn’t work”

1 – Rule out physical/emotional causes

• illness
• injury
• discomfort
• fear
• anxiety
• hungry
• thirsty
• need to go to the bathroom
• too hot/cold

Ask the learner! Once these possible causes are ruled out, then you can move to troubleshooting the two other components:

2 – Antecedent

Take a look at what’s happening on the antecedent side.

Reduce the demand on the learner by adjusting one or all of the following:

• Arrange the physical environment to be comfortable
• Arrange the physical environment to make it most likely for learner to succeed
• Remove major distractions
• Break the skill down further
• Go back to a point of success
• Evaluate your prompts (targets and verbal)
• Confer with your learner if possible

3 – Reinforcement

• Use a more powerful reinforcer
• Vary the reinforcement
• Increase the rate of reinforcement
• Confer with your learner if possible

For an interesting discussion among some of the TAGteach faculty on the topic of “when TAGteach stops working, or doesn’t work” and what to do about this, you can watch the Faculty Q&A here (also linked in the Supplementary Resources section):

https://tagteachmembers.com/2020/04/12/qa-for-tagteach-members-3/