This, my friends, is a conversation that I've been looking forward to sharing with you for quite some time. In this episode, I'm joined by Drs. Mara Vanderzell and Erik Jacobson from the Upstate Cerebral Palsy Center.  As you'll hear right out of the gate, we started the episode off by attempting to operationally characterize the Boy Band pop music genre. You read that correctly... but, don't worry if you're not a fan of Nsync or 98 Degrees... there's a lot of fantastic insights into the clinical leadership model in this conversation. 

And if you are indeed interested in organizational and clinical change on a big scale, this is the episode for you. As Erik and Mara describe, residential and day treatment centers have historically provided treatment from a care model. Over the past few years however, the leadership at UCP has been busy changing this philosophy to an active treatment model. 

As such, they've made considerable investments in bringing in various thought leaders in the field to implement things like Essential for Living, Pre-school Life Skills, the BALANCE program, Skills-Based Treatment, and much much more. In our conversation, we discuss what they've learned from this process, and where the organization is going moving forward. 

We also went down a few unexpected rabbit holes here and there, so you'll want to check out the entire conversation. One of those included Mara telling us about what it was like to be a student of Ted Carr. That's a segment you definitely don't want to miss. 

If you’re a Patreon subscriber, well, you’re not listening to this feed as the ad-free subscriber feed was published last week. That episode also featured an additional 15-20 minutes of content at the end of the interview, where the three of us discuss things like running, cross-fit, and health/fitness more generally. So if you’d like to learn more about this, please check out patreon.com/behavioralobservations.

Last but not least, I'd like to thank Dr. Tony Cammilleri, the Director of Education at FTF and all around great guy, for his help in crafting the questions and talking points for this conversation.

Here are the links to the things we referenced in the show:

• Carr and Durand 1985.
• Carr 1977.
• Upstate Cerebral Palsy.
• UCP YouTube Clinical Playlist.
• Practical Functional Assessment.
• FTF Behavioral Consulting.
• Essential for Living.
• DoBetter.
• Pyramid Educational Consultants. 
• The Daily BA.
• John Kotter.
• Adam Grant.
• Motivating Human Resource Staff, Reed and Parsons, 2006 (*disclosure: Amazon Affiliate Link).

This episode was brought to you with the support from the following sponsors:

• The Secret Agent Society Small Group Program helps kids 8 to 12 years old crack the code of emotions and friendships through an animated ‘secret agent’ theme.  Now with flexible face-to-face or telehealth options, services who have used the SAS program for many years are blown away and excited by the new digital health solution. Mention this podcast for a free Secret Agent Society Assistant Short Course to sample the SAS program. Also, if you’re interested in learning more, there will be a free SAS demo on November 2^nd.
• Institutional Tier Patron Greenspace Behavioral Technology. Greenspace behavior offers cutting edge supervisor coaching, performance and competency-based trainings, and organizational supports for new BCBA and trainees. Find out how you can optimize your supervision practices, improve clinical outcomes, and increase employee satisfaction at Greenspacebehavior.com.
• HRIC Recruiting. Barb Voss has been placing BCBAs in permanent positions throughout the US for just about a decade, and has been in the business more generally for 30 years. When you work with HRIC, you work directly with Barb, thereby accessing highly personalized service. So if you're about to graduate, you're looking for a change of pace, or you just want to know if the grass really is greener on the other side, head over to HRIColorado.com to schedule a confidential chat right away.

My friends at the Virginia Association for Behavior Analysis were kind enough to invite me to moderate their panel discussion at their annual conference that took place last April. One of the fun parts of moderating panels like these is being able to share it with the wider Behavioral Observations audience.

This event was no exception. The 2021 VABA panel featured Drs. Nasiah Cirincione-Ulezi, Christine Barthold, and T.V. Joe Layng. In our chat, we fielded questions from VABA attendees, which occasioned discussion of some of the following topics:

• How to deal with Imposter Syndrome.
• Subtle biases in the workplace.
• Advice the panelists would give to their early-career selves.
• Reading literatures outside of Behavior Analysis.
• Ecological Systems Theory and Meta-Contingencies.
• How perspective taking in married couples is overrated.
• The value of mentoring (including some exceptional mentee duties Joe performed as a graduate student... not to be missed, and gives new meaning to the phrase, "and other duties as assigned").

I should note at the outset that we had both connection issues and some general unevenness in the audio feed. I've done my best to smooth things out in post production, so please bear with us, because I think the conversation is really interesting.

Again, it's worth pausing and giving a shoutout to our hosts, VABA, as well as their conference sponsor, Mary Baldwin University. If you'd like to attend their 2022 convention, it is taking place on April 29th and 30th, with speakers, etc... to be determined (hop on their email list here to keep up to date as more info becomes available, and you can follow them on Facebook here).

This episode is brought to you by:

• The Stone Soup Conference, again, use the promo code PODCAST to save, and hear talks from folks like Drs. Linda LeBlanc, Adithyan Rajaraman, Jordan Belile, and more!
• Behavior University. (who incidentally is sponsoring the Stone Soup Conference!) Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their brand new 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations.
• Consider joining the BOP Patreon. Patreon members get early access to podcasts, bonus podcast material, discounts on CEU events from FTF and other continuing ed purveyors, occasional Zoom hangouts, and more!
• The Professional Crisis Management Association, or PCMA for short. Later on in the show, you'll hear from one of the most popular podcast guests, Dr. Merrill Winston, where he'll talk about how PCMA helps agencies support individuals who exhibit dangerous behaviors. For more info on them, go to PCMA.com.