The most important role of a special education teacher is designing, implementing, and evaluating instruction that helps students with disabilities acquire, generalize, and maintain knowledge and skills that improve the quality of their lives in school, home, community, and workplace--now and in the future. Increasingly, students with disabilities--many of whom have limited social repertoires in addition to deficits in academic skills--are expected to learn in regular classrooms with their typically developing peers. To increase the likelihood of attaining success in these inclusive settings, students need to learn to use a repertoire of classroom survival skills such as listening, following directions, and completing assignments. Learning when and how to ask for feedback or assistance is an important classroom survival skill useful for increasing independence. Teaching students to recruit attention from adults and their peers is one way to promote success in the regular classroom because it increases the likelihood the student will fit in socially and improve academically. ********** The classroom is a busy place, a place where, unfortunately, many students who need approval, assistance, or feedback are often inadvertently overlooked. Additionally, students with disabilities typically retreat to passive roles when placed in situations in which they do not receive adequate levels of support or attention (Newman & Golding, 1990; O'Conner & Jenkins, 1996). Because students with disabilities cannot rely on receiving praise or feedback when they need it, they must be taught a proactive approach for obtaining attention. Training students to recruit teacher or peer attention is one way of helping students with disabilities function more independently while actively influencing the quality of instruction they receive. Recruiting Works Research has found that systematically training students to recruit positive attention increases recruiting responses and adult attention for wide range of learners completing a variety of tasks. Preschoolers were taught to raise their hands and make statements such as Have I been working carefully? or How is this? while working on pencil and paper tasks (Stokes, Fowler, & Baer, 1978), and approximately 90% of their recruiting responses were followed by praise. After teaching preschoolers to self-assess and recruit feedback for their cleaning-up performance during transitions, Connell, Carta, and Baer (1993) documented increased teacher praise statements and increased duration of time on task. Recruitment training has also been effective with adolescents and adults. Adolescent girls in maximum security institution for juvenile offenders who were taught to self-assess and recruit attention demonstrated increased vocational work productivity and positive interactions with staff (Seymour & Stokes, 1976). Adults with mental retardation also attained increased work productivity and supervisor feedback after being trained to self-monitor and recruit feedback (Mank & Horner, 1987). Six studies have examined the effects of recruitment training with upper elementary and middle school students. Recruitment training increased the frequency of teacher praise for 10-12 year-olds with behavioral disorders (Morgan, Young, & Goldstein, 1893), low achieving fourth graders (Hrydowy, Stokes, & Martin, 1984), and elementary school boys with autism and severe disabilities (Harchik, Harchik, Luce, & Sherman, 1990). Craft, Alber, and Heward (1998) taught four fourth graders with developmental disabilities to show their spelling assignments to the teacher two to three times per work page and ask for feedback or assistance with statements such as: How am I doing? or Does this look right? Not one teacher praise statement was delivered to 3 of the 4 students over 36 baseline sessions (representing a cumulative total of 12 hours of independent seat work for these three students). …