For years, I preached the importance of everyone to be consistent. Now, I’m not so sure it was a good idea. When working with children with problem behavior, typically an assessment is conducted, then the BCBA writes the plan, trains everyone on the plan, and then a day is picked when everyone will implement the plan. Of course, in that type of situation, if people are using different procedures, success is unlikely. Therefore, it is essential that everyone be consistent.
Certainly, that kind of approach can work sometimes. But often, that approach runs into problems. Specifically, three common problems emerge:
Problem 1: In nearly every case, it is not ideal to implement all the procedures at one time. For example, many behavior plans include teaching a communication response so that the child can receive reinforcement in another way besides problem behavior. If a child has problem behavior to gain access to the teacher’s attention, a BCBA might teach the child to say something appropriate like “Can you check my work?” Now, the teacher might have a whole class of children, and if the child asks too much, it will make the plan impractical. Therefore, eventually the child has to learn that sometimes the teacher will deny the request and you still can’t engage in problem behavior. Usually, those two different lessons–(1) Use communication instead of problem behavior and (2) Communication only works to get what you want some of the time–should be taught separately. If you try to teach them at the same time, success is unlikely.
Problem 2: Idiosyncratic events will distort the team’s focus. For example, if the initial parts of the treatment aren’t done under similar conditions, teams will often lose focus. Today was an assembly, fire drill, grandma was visiting, his brother had friends over, or the neighbor’s dog was barking. Of course, to successfully treat problem behavior, we need to help in a wide variety of situations. But if you don’t focus on the critical aspects of the treatment one step a time, failure is much more likely.
Problem 3: It leads to people getting blamed. When things don’t work, we often don’t consider the most obvious reason the plan was bad or impractical. If you start hearing people say things like, “how can we be expected to be successful when XXX does YYY?” you can be sure you are in trouble. Blaming people for failures is always counterproductive. As BCBAs, we should know better. This causes conflicts between people, mistrust, and general lack of effectiveness.
It usually isn’t critical for everyone to be consistent and do things exactly the same way. Implementing behavior plans in a systematic step-by-step fashion is the procedure of choice. Mom and dad are going to interact differently. The art teacher, para, and principal probably will too. If you plan to try to get everyone to be consistent, failure is much more likely.