Last Wednesday, I sat down with my mentor teacher for two hours, and she taught me how to fill out and recording cold probe sheets. You see, at any given time, a student is working on around seven new skills at a time. These skills may look like the list I have created below:

1. Receptive: LR Action (Show me...(coughing))
2. Receptive: LR Pictures (Show me...(tomatoes))
3. Tact of Pictures: (What is it?...cat)
4. Tacting Action (What is it?...clapping)
5. Two-Step Imitations (Do this..Clap hands/tap thighs)
6. Echoic: (Say window: "Window")
7. Intraverbal Fill-ins (Peanut Butter and...JELLY)

It may seem quite simple, but when you are in the midst of cold probing and you are trying to keep the student engaged while remembering to reinforce intermittently and throw in some of the known target skills, it becomes pretty exhausting. During these two hours my mentor teacher also discussed the importance of making sure that the student has mastered a given target skill before placing it in the "Easy Task" bin. For example, generally when the student has mastered LR Pictures (tomatoes), she will leave the card in for one more day to make sure that the student knows this picture as a tact. For example, the teacher should be able to point to the picture with the prompt "What is it?" and the student should be able to respond,"tomatoes." 

Also noted in this discussion was the importance of teaching a skill. There is a method for everything you teach. Let's say you were trying to teach a tact... this is what it would look like:

1. Teacher Prompt: "What is it? Cat."
2. Transfer (transferring the skill from teacher to student): "What is it?________"
3. Distract (Teacher will pick usually three tasks that are tasks the student already knows or is working on."
4. Check (Teacher will point to the picture of the cat and prompt one last time: "What is it? _________"

If a student makes an error, you follow the same steps. However, there is one additional step the teacher must do first and that is "END" the behavior. For example, if the teacher was holding a picture of tomatoes and the student labeled it as apples, the teacher would not give any attention for this behavior and would look away so as to not make eye contact with the student. Then, the teacher would go through the regular steps again:

1. Teacher Prompt: "What is it? Cat."
2. Transfer (transferring the skill from teacher to student): "What is it?________"
3. Distract (Teacher will pick usually three tasks that are tasks the student already knows or is working on." 
4. Check (Teacher will point to the picture of the cat and prompt one last time: "What is it? _________"