Between appointments, families are often told to “practice at home.” That advice sounds clear until the tablet is open: practice what, with which examples, how much help, and for how long?
The solution is to agree on a small piece of work that belongs in family life and still produces useful information, not to recreate the professional room at home.
The four-line agreement
Before the week begins, family and Instructor can write four lines:
- What to practice: what should the child do? For example, select a named object from two, match different pictures of the same item, or request a preferred activity.
- Help: what support is allowed, and how will the adult wait before offering it?
- Stop: how many minutes or what signs mean the session ends?
- What to tell the Instructor: which observation should the family bring back — independence, a new example that worked, a repeated error or the conditions on a difficult day?
Interlaza can organize the route and record what happened. The agreement prevents the technology from becoming an invitation to improvise.
An example, already filled in, so you have something concrete to start from or adapt:
What to practice: touch the named animal from two photos (dog, cat). Help: point once if nothing happens after 5 seconds; don’t repeat the word more than twice. Stop: 5 minutes, or after the second time he turns away from the tablet. What to tell the Instructor: whether he needed the point every time or only some, and what he did when we tried it with his own stuffed animals instead of the pictures.
Consistency does not mean sameness
Using exactly one picture, one chair and one voice can produce a beautifully stable score that disappears everywhere else. A home is valuable partly because it is different.
Coordination means preserving the relation and the measurement rules while allowing planned variation in people, examples and settings. If a child identifies “spoon” with the Instructor and then with a different spoon at breakfast, the difference is not noise; it may be the question the program needed to ask.
What the family should not have to decide
A family should not be expected to invent mastery criteria, choose a prompt hierarchy or diagnose why a curve changed. Those are Instructor decisions.
The family can provide observations no dashboard has: the child was tired, the sound startled them, the real object worked when the picture did not, or the response appeared during play without being requested. Interlaza helps attach structure to the session so those observations have context.
When home practice should stop
Stop when the learner is repeatedly turning away, distressed, unable to access the response or no longer participating in the activity you agreed to run. A short incomplete session can still show that the conditions need changing.
Do not chase a correct final response so the graph looks better. The record is there to improve the next decision, not to grade the family.
A better conversation at the next appointment
Instead of “we practiced and it went okay,” the family can say:
- the route ran three times;
- independent responses appeared with one example but not another;
- the model was needed less often by the third session;
- a real object produced the response when the screen did not;
- Thursday’s session ended early because sound became aversive.
That is what real continuity looks like: not identical rooms, but a shared language for what happened and what should change.