JOONDALUP 2-DAY WORKSHOP
JOONDALUP 2-Day workshop recap:
Day One:The focus was on supporting pre-foundation students by fostering positive associations with their names and developing key foundational skills such as joint attention, gaze, imitation (including gross motor), and matching. The use of concise, directive language enhances skill mastery. Teaching generative language, labels for broad categories, and encouraging generalisation were highlighted. Effective communication ('YES'/'NO') and fast mapping are essential, alongside skills in inferencing, prepositions, symbolic, and relational language. High levels of success facilitate learning. Strategies for sequencing and pattern completion were discussed, acknowledging that students vary in organisational approaches based on their learning strategies.
Day 2: Centred on the “10 Tenets of Excellent Classrooms” which promote baseline skill assessment, high-impact explicit teaching, thorough behavioural observation and analysis for improvement, and maintaining predictable, consistent routines. Reinforcement, understanding cost versus benefit, identifying practice deficits (visual and auditory skills), collecting data–especially for behaviour management–and the importance of planning were key themes.
Additional strategies discussed include:
Allowing students to select their own incentives or motivators.
Organisation of student work and tailoring instruction to individual skills via their One Plan.
Using and adjusting motivators as needed, including implementing a token economy. This approach motivates students, clarifies task expectations, and uses graded exposure to introduce tokens. Tokens acknowledge effort, not just correctness, with “jackpot” reinforcement to sustain motivation.
Prompting strategies ensure students achieve correct responses, using a hierarchy from least to most intrusive: visual, positional, gestural, modelling, partial verbal, full verbal, partial physical, and full physical (hand-over-hand). Prompts should be faded quickly and used as minimally as possible.
