SPLED810:

Professor: In this segment, we're going to talk a little bit about why content and supervision is necessary. So as a behavior analyst, I've been supervised by people and I will provide supervision to others. So think about your, your time Now, you're not at your studying to become a BC Ba Ha board certified behavior analysts. There's the coursework no provision that the requirements that you're complaining. But there's also that supervised experience where you receive feedback from somebody who's presumably higher stature or more knowledgeable in the field. And you're kind of soaking it up, this feedback, your behaviors changing based on that feedback. So there's that type of supervision that, that, you know, you, you provide a trainee, and it's usually the word I'll use when talking in that situation. But then there's also situations as a behavior analyst where you are teaching other people to implement programs that you were writing. So, you know, fast-forward ahead a little bit and now your, your board certified behavior analyst. You are writing plans that others are often going to implement and you need to train them on how to the nuances of those plans and on data collection and on, you know, what happens when you don't use extinction correctly, and how to use a DRA, and how to use IP sequences, and how, why are you using an event recording are simple. Frequency count versus partial interval and so on and so forth. So someone has to provide that information at differing levels, at appropriate levels to make sure the programs or roll out appropriately and make sure that programs are being implemented with high levels of fidelity. Kind of related that. I thought I'd talk a little bit about the four levels of certification so that you can sort of see from the top. The RPT register behavior technicians or the the the the least trained person all the way down through OBC BAD, who's presumably would have the most training. So let's just kind of go through each of these and with an eye towards supervision. So an RB T. And I'll give you a second to go ahead and read this. Maybe you can pause and just take a quick reading of this slide. And I'm going to come back and focus on those aspects of this description which really focus on supervision. So here we are at RB t's a paraprofessional. They have at least a high school diploma. Typically are trained within an organization. So if I work at a at a center or some other school or organization, I can get my RB training through that. There is approved providers and so on and so forth. But that the bottom line with RB teases. They assist in delivering behavior analytic services under the direction and close supervision of a supervisor. They often assist qualify be CPAs and BC EVAs and their service delivery activities. So they're always supervised me. They do not write their own behavior plans. The BPAs writing or writing behavior plans. They are sort of the independent level intervention people. They writes programs, other people implement them. And hopefully with fidelity in the way you get fidelity is through supervision. You got it? Bca, BCA, BCA. Bca assistant level. I will give you a second to read this over and then I'll go over the the key pieces here. So here we go. Professional certified that the BC AABA level provide behavior analytic services under the supervision of a board certified behavior analysts. So this is where that again, that word supervision comes in. The BC. Aaba can provide services, do you know a little more than than behaviour to X can do, but they are under the supervision of a B CBA. So you will again be call upon to supervise professional certify. The BC ABA level may not provide behavior analytic services without supervision, meaning they are not independent contractors are not independent interveners. So let's go to BC Ba. You're all studying to be a B CBA, graduate level certification, BC, ABA is undergraduate level. You can go to the behavior analysis Certification Board website and get the full blown descriptions of each of these. I'm just giving you a quick thumbnail sketch here, but you can kind of look those over. The key areas here are professional certified as B, CBA level, or independent PR practitioners or divide behavior analytic services. The key here is as a B CBA, you write programs, you're, you're there's no one supervising you. You are which is good and bad. I mean, it at one level, you are free to kind of do your thing based on your training. The downside is there's no one looking over your shoulder providing supervision all the time. That said, here's the caveat. You have to know your limitations is a board certified behavior analyst. You definitely want to look at sort of what's your, what's your, what's your skill set is. And if you're not comfortable working in a given area, don't work in that area, go get outside help. You know, there's some folks that are very comfortable and skilled at working in feeding Disorders are self-injury or what have you and others who aren't. So don't get yourself don't get in over your head, I guess is what I'm saying. When you're be CBA, there's no one necessarily looking over your shoulder. Be CPAs may supervise the work, be CABAC and RB teas, and other professionals such as teachers and others who were implementing behavior prions that the B CBA is writing BC BAD doctoral level. Key thing here is it's not a separate certification and does not grant any privileges above or beyond the B CPA certification. So there's no higher level certification. They may doctoral level, probably went through more course work, did some more training and some different things like that, more research-oriented, oftentimes. But it's not a separate certification. It costs more to maintain. I can tell you that, but it's not a separate certification. So it's important, I think, you know, do you know those levels of certification, know which one you're operating under, and know how to supervise, which is really the content for the rest of this course, or a good part of the course anyway, is going to be focusing on that supervision, how to do it, right? It's more than just telling people what to do. It's using all the things we've learned about in terms of behavior principles and applying them to a totally new area. And we'll get more more more in depth as we move forward.

Professor: So we've talked about through different levels of certification and who supervises who in that kind of thing. The next step is really to think about what skills are needed for supervision. It's a, it's a real, it's an art and a science. As I can tell you, there's an art to delivering feedback and having rapport. There's also the scientific part. And hopefully by the time you go through these, these next few lessons, you'll at least be able to pick up on some of that. It's a skill that, you know, going back in the in the certification history, wasn't paid a lot of attention to early on. It was all about basic principles and data collection intervention. And I think we pretty quickly saw that, you know, you need to provide be CPAs with PCBs are teaching other people to run programs. And we need to find ways to do that well and to manage programs. If we have somebody working for me, I have the best program ever. I develop it. It's the most intricate, eloquent, whatever you want to call it. It's perfect in every way. It's great. But if the person implementing it can't implement it with fidelity, then we have a problem. The client's behavior will never change. So I think over the last 1520 years in our field, we've started to recognize the need to really make supervision a big player and what we do. So let's dig into this just a little bit. I'm going to talk a little bit about just the skills needed. And these are from the task list. So you should be very, very familiar with task list. You should read it all the time twice on the weekends if you have time to do that. And I'm not going to go into each of these in any great depth, but I just want to hit some highlights of this. And this is basically the outline of this section of the course. So stating reasons for using behavior analytic supervision and the risks. Max is going to cover that in another segment. So let's kind of kick the can on that one, establishing clear performance expectations for supervisor. Supervisor, who's gonna do what as a supervisor? How often am I going to show up? When am I going to show up? What's the expectations for the supervisor? What did they need to show? What do they need to provide? Making sure that everybody is on the same page is really important. Select supervision goals based on an assessment of the supervisory skills. So you got to supervise someone. It's not just kind of the Wild West out there and you're observing anything and it's sort of willy nilly, you really want to look for specific things. And it's no different when you work with clients or students or whoever you're working with, I want to target, I want to focus in on some, some, some, some places where that person needs support. So remember supervising students are supervise ease our trainees, I went goals that are based on their needs for support. So if I have a student that is not delivering reinforces appropriately, One of my goals will be to address that situation and put that trainee or that supervisor in situations where I can provide feedback and I can reinforce their behavior of appropriately reinforcing client behavior. That's pretty confusing, but you want to develop goals that are based on an assessment. And one way to assess is to go through that task list. That's a really good way to, to self-evaluate. One of the things, again, that I would do now is have that task list and read it over. Start to check off skills that you feel like, Hey, I got this one down, I do it all the time versus skills that I'm a little weak and talk to your supervisor on those skills where you little weak and put yourself into positions that you will need to use that skill and receive feedback on that skill. Training personnel at a couple of competently perform assessment intervention procedures, again, through behavioral skills training. How do I do that as a as a Board Certified Behavior Analyst? Yeah. I probably have this down pretty well. I can reinforce behavior, I can use Extinction, I can run a functional analysis, so on and so forth. But you need to train people to perform these, these functions as well. How do you do that? We'll talk more about that. Use performance monitoring, feedback and reinforcement systems. Again, I'm going to monitor performance as a supervisor. I want to see as I'm teaching you, if, if that teaching is sticking and you're changing your behavior, I'm going to use feedback and reinforcement systems to do that. You use a functional assessment approach to identify variables affecting personal personnel performance. So again, I'm going to use function, I'm going to use structural analysis. I'm going to look at motivation versus skill deficits. And I'm going to determine What's going on with a given skill. As a supervisor, can you perform the skill? Now? I perform it, but can you perform it at the right time? Can you perform it to a high level of fluency, too high criterion? And we're gonna use those data then to develop interventions to increase our treatment fidelity. Use function may strategies to improve personal performance. Again, using looking at function, why do things happen? Why does behavior happen? And then basing interventions on that information, evaluate the effects of supervision, client outcomes, and supervise these repertoire. So here's why we supervise increase client outcomes, outcomes. But we do that because as a supervisor, I'm that directly intervening on the client, indirectly intervening on the client. I'm training somebody to a high level to implement whatever strategy, whatever intervention, who that implements out with a client to change their behavior. So it's almost like as a supervisor, My goal is to change the supervisor, ye are the trainees behavior that then results in a change in the client outcomes. So that's sort of the the yeah, I'll call that sort of the outline of of overhead it but again, based on the task list. So the super the baby Certification Board has a supervisory curriculum. And what happens is once you become a b CBA, immediately people will start asking you to supervise them. What I would suggest to you again, as you work or work a little bit, get comfortable in your own behavioral skin, so to speak, you know, get, get kind of an understanding of where we are with that. But at some point, you're going to be called upon to supervise. And you in order to supervise, you have to complete training. And it's a block of training right now. It's eight hours that you complete and you do that training. And then you need to do a certain number of hours every Continuing Education cycles. So you get a block of training, then you get boosters along the way. So this is the supervisor curriculum and I have provided for you and you can read it and you can see it's in really great detail. So you can read all of that. But I just wanted to go through a few of these just to see where we are. This is for ongoing supervision. So sort of broken into two components, ongoing and then trainee. Ongoing supervision is when on the B CBA and I've working with others teachers, PCA's are BTS, whoever. And we're running behavior programs for our clients. That's sort of ongoing supervision. I hope you'll think about that as the upkeep of the programs, right? So in that kind of situation, supervisor should be able to state the purpose of supervision to the supervisor. You're trainee and it's always to make helped the trainee help the supervisor perform better and a higher level. And that should translate into better client goals. Supervisor should be able to describe the strategies and potential outcomes of ineffective supervision. Okay? And we're going to talk about that in a little while here. And another segment supervisor should be able to prepare for the supervisor relationship with a supervisory or trainee. You're part of that part of what we do. Where do people oriented business and an endeavor. And we need to have rapport with people. So, you know, thinking about the supervisor relationship. As a supervisor, you want to be professional, you want to have good, good rapport. You also want to sort of match personalities. And again, I'm sometimes set of sort of laid-back person and, you know, some folks who maybe a little higher strung may not want to work with me and others might. So sometimes personality's gotta match up well and sometimes they don't. But the idea here is, you know, with, with preparing for the supervisor relationship, it's about ethics, it's about rapport, it's about being truthful and honest about performance. Supervisor. Again, this is an ongoing supervision. Supervisors should be able to establish a plan infrastructure, supervision content, evaluation of competence. So how am I going to plan for supervising my group of team members on an ongoing basis because we all slip a little bit over time. We all cut corners over time, and there's those kind of things that go on. How can I have a plan for basically a professional development plan for my staff supervisor should be able to create a committed and positive relationships. Again, goes back to rapport. Supervisor should be able to use behavioral skills training to teach new skills. Will talk more about that. This is, this section of the curriculum really has to do with trainee supervision. So a lot of you folks are, are trainees. You're going to be become board certified behavior analysts someday. You're going to likely be supervising folks. So supervisor should be able to comply with the requirements. It's very important that can be very complicated. So it's important that you follow those and do that in an ethical manner. Supervisors should be able to evaluate the effectiveness of supervision of the trainee. So, you know, again, going back to data collection, you're, you're using behavioral skills training using a variety of approaches, behaviorally based approaches to intervene with a trainee. How do you evaluate the effectiveness of that supervision? Supervisors should be able to incorporate ethics and professional development into supervision of training. This is really important. A huge part of the certification test is on ethics. So you should really incorporated into everything you do. And again, we'll talk more about this as we go. But you know, and of course you have the whole ethics course here. But I think it's really important because every time you get involved in a discussion with the supervisors. So what's the ethical, what am I ethical responsibilities here, just just kind of spinning those, those kind of scenarios are really, really important. So just to recap, we have supervisory guidelines and a curriculum. We have the task list. And it kind of merging those two. And you can see that they're pretty similar on some of the content. But this course is, this block of this course anyway is really geared towards those. Those ideas are providing effective supervision feedback. I don't know that you can learn. You can't learn without feedback. Some type of feedback must be given. Sometimes it's a human working with you, other times it's feedback sort of arranged haphazardly by the environment. But we learn via feedback. And I think a lot, if I were to, in a word, kind of encapsulate supervision, it would be feedback. So we're going to talk more about feedback, how to deliver it, how delivery enforcers to our, our teammates and our team members and go on from there. But again, it's a very important topic that has traditionally been understated in behavior analysis, but with a fifth, fifth edition has sort of been lifted up to where it needs to be.

Professor: So there are potential consequences of poor supervision. You know, when we talk about supervision in earlier segments, we sort of equated it to feedback. Feedback is such that it's part of supervision. But I think it's a huge part of supervision spends looked at poor supervision in terms of short-term and long-term difficulties or problems here. So I think the fundamental issue with poor supervision and kind of going a little backwards through this is, is it's an ethical issue because we sort of take an oath, if you will, or to abide by some ethical standards that state that we need to give our clients the best that we can do, the best that science has to offer, the best at our science of behavior has to offer. If we use Poor supervisory practices, it really doesn't allow that to play out. So I think it is an ethical issue, It's also an effectiveness issue. It makes a lot of sense that if I beyond the, the, the trainee or the, the, the teacher or the parent or whatever I'm doing. And I have someone telling me, hey, here's the intervention. You use this and I don't use it appropriately, it's not going to be effective. You know, go back to the example of taking the antibiotic. You'd take the antibiotic until it's gone, right? You follow the instructions. If you don't follow the instructions and you don't do it the way take that medication the way it's supposed to be taken, you're not going to be, it's not gonna be effective. The illness might come back. What have you, if you're had some surgery, let's say on some type of knee surgery, if you don't do what the physical therapist tell you and when you're kind of building back up in your therapy, you can't expect to have a range of motion and the strength that you once had so effect. And this is a big issue. Efficiency is another issue as well. It's sometimes it's overlooked. A lot of what we do is billable. A lot of what we do in one way or another, whether we see it or not. Sometimes, you know, you're the behavior analyst and you write the bill out and the client writes the check or somebody writes the check right back and it's insurance company, whatever the case may be, it might be that you are a teacher and you're obese EVA, and you know, the money doesn't change hands, but it's still your time. Someone's paying for your time. So when you have poor supervision and you don't train people well and have them operating at a high level of proficiency. It's very inefficient and it costs money. So there's an efficiency issue, a cost me on one side of the other side is a cause Quiet Time. So if it takes me three interventions, they find the right one or four interventions to find the right one. And it's because I wasn't supervised very well. I sort of went sort of went rogue and did my own thing. Yeah, maybe the behavior did change, but it was four or five months later when if I was Appropriately supervised. We could've got to immediately got to the correct intervention, changed the behavior in a week. Not always that save money, that's important, but it saves the client's time. It's more efficient. I think the other thing to recognize with what we do is this issue of potential injury. We change a variety of behaviors. We support a lot of pro-social, desirable behaviors. But, but some of what we do is really to address maladaptive behaviors, inappropriate behaviors that that are really not good for the client. I could for those around the client, There's a lot of issues with potential injury. I once worked at a facility for individuals with developmental disabilities way back in the day. And there was a lot of folks who come to lunch and you had to support them as they they had their watch. And you know that the potential for injury there was really high. You could aspirate food into your lungs and developed pneumonia without appropriate training and supervision to allow something as simple as or not at all simple. But something like supporting clients as they eat their food can really lead to something really bad. So there is a potential for injury. Oaky. Or another example would be, you know, the client who engages in self-injury. Let's say that they're, you know, just banging their head off a wall or off the floor. What do you, what do you do with that as a behavior analyst file? We have some really good interventions. But if you are poorly supervised, the situation like that with it, the risk of injury is so great and it kinda goes to little sidebar. I'm going to go down here. It kind of goes down to road of you need to know your limitations as well. So poor supervision can lead to problems there, but also not realizing unit you're in over your head. It's a big ethical issue there. If you feel like you're in over your head, don't take a case or move to contact another behavior analyst. So there is a real short-term issue with poor supervision division among team members. Have you ever been on a team where you feel like there are people that just aren't pulling their weight. You're the one that's out doing the continuing hours. You're out reading journals and all those things. But then there's people, a person, whoever, it just isn't doing their thing. And it causes division among team members, even, you know, a team of teachers, for example, if you have four or five teachers and you have one that's not kind of pulling their weight, it can cause real issues and division among team members so that yeah, there's a lot of short-term issues. I've just naming a few here for poor supervision. I think the negative, the long-term of this though is probably as important in some ways, if not more, has a negative impact on the field. If I'm a bad supervisor and you're not and you end up not getting trained properly, you're going to go out and you're going to work, and you're not going to change client behavior very well. It's going to be very effective, very inefficient, and probably a little unethical with that and maybe cause potential injury, other short-term things over time. When we replicate that effect over and over and over, at some point, people just yes, that, that ABA, stuff, it doesn't work. Our science is only as good or interventions are only as good as the people who were delivering them. We make sure that they're really using them to a high level of proficiency in high criteria. Or we're going to make a bad name for ourselves, we're going to have a negative impact on our field. Our science has so much to offer. We just need to make sure that we, we're stewards of that and be good stewards of that by providing good supervision, whether it's your ongoing supervision with folks that you're working with and making sure that you have a plan to talk to them and, and kind of move them forward in their career and their work with their clients. Or you have trainees, you have brand new, not quite be CPAs, but there's folks who were studying to be be CPAs. You really want to work on those things and make it so that again, these individuals are really sharp with what they're doing. So we don't have a negative impact on our field.