In Session 186, I am joined by Chrissy Barosky, Clinical Director for Bierman Autism Centers. In this episode, we discussed how their organization adopted a Precision Teaching approach for their learners.
You heard that correctly, a large multi-state organization transitioned all of their data collection practices to the Standard Celeration Chart. So in this show, we dive into how Chrissy and her colleagues managed to pull this off, what they learned during the process, and the benefits they've seen from taking on such a large endeavor.
We also discussed a paper that Chrissy and her colleagues published in Behavior Analysis in Practice titled, Increasing Trials Presented to Children With Autism: Using Frequency Building With Modeling and Feedback. This is a case study of how the authors taught behavioral technicians to improve the efficiency of their teaching using a frequency-building approach.
Whether or not you care about the chart, I think this is an interesting episode because it speaks to a larger issue of organizational change. Chances are, if you're listing to this podcast, you're not using the chart. Imagine for a moment that your agency decided to adopt it? So in many respects, this episode presents an opportunity for a fun thought experiment about about changing clinical practices, and I hope you find the exercise helpful.
As a matter of housekeeping, I to apologize for some of the audio quality challenges issues we had during this episode, including my dogs barking for several minutes when my town decided to do some tree-trimming along my road. I don't think it detracts from the overall conversation, but wanted to make a note of this.
Here are links to some of the resources we mentioned:
Session 186 is brought to you with support from:
In Session 185, AKA Inside JABA Series #11, I'm joined by Drs. Linda LeBlanc, Jeff Tiger, and Javier Virues-Ortega for a deep dive into automatically maintained behavior. This session was inspired by the study Javier and his colleagues published in the Spring 2022 issue of JABA (Virues-Ortega, Clayton, Perez-Bustamante, Gaerlan, and Fahmie, 2022).
In this episode, we discuss the nature of, and challenges with automatically-maintained problem behavior. And this is tackled from both conceptual and treatment angles. As I mention in the episode, I don't encounter these types of problem behaviors that frequently these days, so it was a treat to update my knowledge in this area.
It's easy to think of automatic reinforcement as a monolith, but as it turns out, even dividing it up between positive and negative reinforcement may not be sufficient enough to render effective treatment.
We spent probably the first 25-30 minutes discussing some of the known challenges associated with assessing and treating these repertoires, and then spend the remaining time discussing Javier and his colleagues' paper, which presented two very unique investigations.
If you work with individuals with these profiles, you'll want to listen all the way through, and better still, check out the paper itself.
Here are some of the studies we discussed:
Lastly, I'd be remiss if I did not take a minute to thank Linda LeBlanc for reaching out to me to start the Inside JABA series. As I tell her every chance I get, I consider it an honor to be involved with the flagship journal in our field. If someone told me as an undergraduate at the University of New Hampshire that I'd be regularly involved with JABA in some capacity, I wouldn't have believed them.
As some of you might know, Linda's term as Editor in Chief is expiring, but we are planning to continue the podcast series with incoming EIC, Dr. John Borrero. More info on this to come, but in the meantime, please enjoy this installment of the Inside JABA Series.
I'm really excited to introduce a new special podcast series that I'm publishing with Dr. Jim Moore of Apollo Behavior. In this series, we're going to talk about a lot of practical topics that we hope will resonate with BCBA's of all experience levels.
We have great plans to discuss topics like supervision, functional assessment, skill acquisition, and much more. Real world challenges that just about every practitioner faces.
In this episode, we focused on a clinical problem solving model that Jim's been developing over the years. So if you're working with learners who are struggling to make progress, this is the show for you.
We don't have a ton of links for this one, but here are some things that we referenced:
Lastly, I should note that this series is brought to you ad-free by Apollo Behavior. If you're interested in what they do, and/or if you want to learn more about what Jim discussed, reach out to them either at info@apollobehavior.com or jim@apollobehavior.com.