Practicum Placement Reflection

The previous week in my practicum placement has been very rewarding. I have been able to start the fixed interval reinforcement schedule with my student. The increase in attentive listening skills during instruction over the last three weeks has resulted in increased learning. Discrete Trial Training (DTT) has been used with the student to teach colors and letter names, and the reinforcement used after each trail has been verbal praise. The student has struggled to learn colors and letters with traditional instruction, so DTT was used to break the skill into smaller parts giving opportunities for repeated practice. DTT allows for high numbers of trials to take place over a session, which provides the student with high amounts of practice with
Peer modeling began last week, as a suggesting intervention by Quill (2000), as a method to model appropriate listening skills during class instruction. Later in the week, Shyne began showing some verbal resistance when the Social StoryTM, but would stop immediately after Dustin said, “This is my favorite story.” Now that Shyne has nearly met his goal during every tracked opportunity, it may be appropriate to begin reducing the frequency of the story to once per week. Evidence for a short Social Story intervention is also supported by Kokina and Kern (2010) who explain, “Brief interventions (i.e., 0–10 sessions) yielded higher scores (PND = 71%; range, 0–88%) than medium (PND = 66.5%; range, 12–100%) or long interventions”
Aspy and Grossman (2011) suggests that the antecedent intervention will consist of explaining the expectations, to make it more structured and predictable for the student. The use of visuals will also be used, due to the student’s speech and language impairment. The targeted instruction will include the same concepts taught in the Social StoryTM, including staying in the work area, keeping eyes on teacher, and sitting in his chair appropriately. The short session will include a presentation of the appropriate behaviors with the use of visuals, questioning the student for comprehension, combined with role-play. Another added alteration to the intervention is adding a visual schedule. Although our class has a consistent routine, the use of visual supports may help facilitate improved structure and predictability (Aspy and Grossman, 2011). I would like to experiment with the visual schedule during phonics instruction, breaking the 45 minutes of instructional time into specific tasks (flashcards, new letter instruction, white board practice, coloring letter, magnetic letters, and then