Author: Barry Morgenstern

Polly was a 3-year-old girl referred for intervention in a preschool. She had well developed language for her age, but had lived abroad with her parents who were non-native speakers of English. Therefore, her language sounded unusual – especially for a 3-year-old. She was referred for the following concerns:

• She did not engage in cooperative play
• Never used peers’ names
• Did not touch peers
• She did not speak to peers
• She did not play on the playground equipment
• Most of her interactions were hanging onto the teacher and engaging in “baby behaviors” which appeared to be imitations of her 1-year old brother. These included baby talk, hand flapping, hopping, and speaking in incomplete sentences.

What would you do in this situation? Are you considering a social skills curriculum? Maybe an FBA or some type of behavior plan for the baby behaviors? Maybe training the peers to initiate to Polly? There are numerous plausible possibilities. I suspect that what Polly’s team decided to do would be unusual today. Polly’s team decided that they would simply prompt Polly to use the playground equipment, provide differential teacher attention for using the playground equipment, and then fade prompts. They also ignored problem behavior which occurred on the first few days they prompted her to use the equipment. The idea was the natural consequences of being around the peers would shape the other behaviors. What happened? All the other behaviors improved without any other interventions.

Does this story sound familiar? Maybe you heard it before as it is from this classic study. I think there are several valuable lessons we can learn from Polly’s story.

1. When you are presented with a whole list of problems, you don’t always have to address every single one. If you pick the right targets, you might get improvement in a wide variety of other important targets. Research has confirmed this finding under a wide variety of names for similar phenomena (e.g., collateral behaviors, pivotal response training, learning-to-learn, behavioral cusps, keystone behaviors).
2. Natural contingencies can produce appropriate behaviors in ways that are sometimes very hard to do when the adults contrive the contingencies.
3. Be careful deciding you are finished with the intervention. Although the team had successfully made the reinforcement more intermittent, and the teachers judged that her behavior had improved sufficiently, I’m not convinced that the team’s intervention plan for Polly was sufficient. During the 2^nd reversal phase Polly showed significant decreases in performance. This seems to show that while the natural contingencies were influencing her behavior, she was still not fully responding to peers like the other children in her class. Therefore, there was significant risk for regression. It seems likely that when Polly moved to a new class next year, she might have gone backward. Maybe the natural contingencies took over eventually, maybe not–no way to know.

I’d guess Polly is probably a bit older than me at this point, but if someone knows what happened to her I’d love them to contact me and let me know! I’ve always been inspired by Polly’s story.

In this important article from 1979, the authors summarized the literature on programming for difficult-to-teach learners including some learners with autism and other developmental disabilities. One of the important implications of that article was that recently (at the time) new teaching procedures had been developed that made certain types of skills possible to teach that previously most people had thought weren’t possible just a few years earlier.

One of the prominent examples in that paper was research on teaching learners with disabilities to tell the difference between a circle and ellipse. It took seven program revisions until the researchers found a successful procedure that was effective.

I think there are two valuable lessons we can learn here. First, recognize that we still sometimes assume that it’s impossible to teach difficult skills to certain learners. Sure, the first thing you attempt or the second thing you attempt might not be successful. But if you are using science-based procedures, what people think is impossible often becomes doable. As the researchers discovered, it can require many program revisions before finding an effective procedure. Don’t give up too easily.

Second, in addition to deciding if something is possible to teach, we also have to decide if it is worth teaching.  Articles like teaching the difference between a circle and ellipse are important for the scientific knowledge gained by the field, not for any significant improvement made in the lives of the people who learned to differentiate between the two shapes in those studies. It is unlikely their lives were any better as a result of learning the difference between a circle and ellipse. This is also still a problem today. Frequently, in schools we are tasked with helping learners with targets that no one thinks is going to make a difference in the student’s life. Yet, we develop those teaching programs anyway simply because it is part of the curriculum. There is limited time and limited resources to make a socially significant difference–we can’t afford the waste. It’s OK if people don’t agree.

Ogden Lindsley often used the term HINIBUS (Horrible If Not Invented By Us). Often, I see BCBAs want to invent their own version of everything from programs, to data sheets and graphs, materials, and more. As I have encouraged before, if you see someone doing something great, just steal it.

My question is: Why do BCBAs want to create their own version of everything? Other professions don’t do that. Every cardiologist doesn’t have her own procedure for doing heart surgery. Every dentist doesn’t have his own cavity-filling technique. Why is behavior analysis different?

It is probably because we don’t have strong standards in behaviors analysis. Most of us can look at our data, see that the children we work with are making “good” progress, and don’t feel any urgent need to improve. We think that it is obvious that what we are doing works well.

That might be the case.  There isn’t a good procedure for measuring your success as a behavior analyst–yet. But I strongly suspect if you are a HINIBUS, you are probably not doing nearly as well as you might. Stealing when you see someone doing something great, reading a great research article –you get the idea–is the fastest and easiest way to Poogi.

The BP Oil spill happened in 2010. The environmental, health, and economic consequences were severe. What you might not know is that in 2007 the company publicly made a big commitment to focus on safety. In fact, the company declared that safety was the company’s number 1 priority.

Did the company make any changes to focus on safety? They sure did. They put up signs in the company offices! The signs said things like:

• Don’t walk and carry hot coffee.
• Use marked walkways in the parking lot.
• Hold banisters while climbing the stairs.

The investigations after the spill found that very little had actually been done to improve safety on oil rigs. In fact, they were still extremely dangerous with poor safety practices.

I think the lesson here is that it is often easy to set the right goal (safety is our #1 priority) and still fail miserably. Setting the goal is deciding on what results you want to achieve. But after you pick the results that you want to achieve, you also have to select the right behavior changes that will have a significant impact.

I think this problem happens in behavior analysis all the time. We want the children we work with to “learn to communicate,” “live an independent life,” “make friends,” or lots of other great-sounding results. The next problem is to decide what behavior changes will lead us to those results. In any practical case, there are almost always an enormous number of possible choices. Narrowing down those choices is an incredibly underrated skill.

There are numerous Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) articles on how to increase staff cleaning up after themselves. I’ve also been in numerous presentations where the examples used involve staff cleaning their work area, cleaning the break room, etc. Why? Are people interested in behavior analysis naturally slobs?

I understand this is not a trivial concern. There might be funders, parents, or other visitors, so we want the workplace to look professional. Food on the floor might lead to bugs. Toys on the floor might be a safety hazard. Sure, no problem. We have to make sure our work areas look reasonably good.

Still, I strongly suspect another reason for the focus on cleaning. The real mission and why we come to work—to make a socially significant difference in the lives of children—takes a long time and is much harder to measure. Likewise, it is hard to measure staff performance. Sure, we can take measures of how well the staff are implementing the treatment. But the subtleties of measuring things like shaping skills and facilitating social interactions is very difficult. Getting measures of those results are even harder.

There are lots of other examples in addition to cleaning. It is not just that sloppiness bothers people so much. Many OBM studies in the literature focus on relatively trivial staff behavior changes. Often, the studies don’t even bother to measure whether it had any impact on the clients or does so in a very trivial way. It isn’t that these studies aren’t needed or important. We do need studies like this in order to effectively study complex phenomenon like management. In order to do that, it is essential that the targets selected are easy to measure and the results can be achieved in a relatively short period of time. Many of these studies don’t demonstrate any practical improvement. That’s probably OK, that’s often not the main purpose of those studies.

The trap comes for those of us who are completely focused on Poogi and want practical improvements immediately. I think that sometimes we are so focused on the measurements, that we emphasize what is easy to measure instead of what’s really important. It’s essential to first decide what’s really important. Only after that should you then start to focus on measurements.