High-P Requests: High School Example & Non-Example

Every IRIS Fundamental Skill Sheet offers educators the chance to brush up on the discrete skills and practices that form the foundation of effective classroom instruction and behavior management.

High-probability (high-p) requests are a sequence of requests to which a student is highly likely to respond. High-p requests are made before the teacher provides a low-probability (low-p) request— one with which a student infrequently or never responds—to promote student compliance for a target behavior.

Mrs. Ward wants to use high-p requests to encourage Virginia to begin her independent writing assignment. Note the procedures Mrs. Ward uses to implement high-p requests in the example and where her delivery falls short in the non-example.