POOGI for ABA

I know, I know — every BCBA is super busy. There are just too many cases to see and not enough time to see them. In my view, conversations with staff should be a major part of your Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) plan. Although hard to prove, I believe it dramatically improves program quality. It definitely improves staff satisfaction.

Staff often place a very high value on interacting with supervisors about training, discussing next steps for the client, brainstorming problems, opportunities to address concerns, overcoming obstacles, asking questions, learning new things, professional growth, and just getting to know the supervisor personally. Supervisors often enjoy and appreciate how much they can learn from these conversations. In addition, supervisors get the opportunity to set expectations, provide reinforcement, monitor performance, and give corrective feedback.

We train supervisors not to use “sandwich feedback.” Sandwich feedback is where you start with a positive statement, (e.g., I appreciate you showing so much enthusiasm teaching Mark!). Then slip in the corrective feedback (e.g., when I observed you running the behavior plan, I noticed you forgot step #5 blah blah). Then end with a positive statement (e.g., You are such a hard worker, I know he is going to make great progress working with you!). Sandwich feedback is problematic because it is mostly to make the supervisor feel better about giving the feedback. For the person receiving the feedback, they ignore the positive statements and focus on the corrections.

The general rule to avoid this problem is never mix positive reinforcement with corrections in the same interaction. Separate them in time while making the positive much more frequent. That is good advice, most of the time. But I think you can take this advice too far. If you sit down to have an in-depth conversation to solve a problem, undoubtedly both positive and negative things will come up. If you are working together to solve a problem, that’s often highly reinforcing to staff. If you worry about mixing your positives and negatives, you can’t have a meaningful conversation.

I believe these conversations are so important that I make sure they go on the schedule. I don’t believe you can maintain high performance without them. Sometimes, we think we can replace conversations with staff with emails, text messages, training days, or brief positive statement when we catch the staff doing something right. It’s just not the same. I recently went to a workshop by John Austin on conversations as a primary management intervention with similar (but not identical) ideas.

Sometimes, what is necessary to be successful seems obvious, but you can’t get the resources you need due to political forces at play in the particular situation. This is particularly common in school consultation.

“Well, we asked for 1-1 support but the school district said no.”

“I told them we needed a space to work, but the principal told me there is no space available.”

“The paraprofessional is not physically able to keep up with him, but the special education director said we have to train her.”

In these situations, I’d say that we have to advocate for the child, even though someone is bound to say “We can’t do that; they won’t like it.”

In this situation, many behavior analysts will compromise. In general, it’s a big mistake. If you compromise on what the student obviously needs to get along, in all likelihood the student will not be successful. Then, when it doesn’t work, no one is going to remember that you said it wouldn’t work with this para, without space, or without a 1-1. It is going to be your fault anyway.

But if you push, get what the student needs, and you are successful with the student, people won’t remember the little fights at the beginning. In fact, often the most dedicated supporters will come only after they see the dramatic improvements the program has made. Usually (but not always), when a student is dramatically successful, you will win the support of everyone.

So, the general rule is to advocate for everything you need to be successful right from the beginning. Don’t worry that someone might not like the recommendation if it is something critical the child needs. Yes, despite how socially savvy you might be, this might ruffle some feathers. Richard Foxx told us that a consultant needs a persuasive personality.

Fear of that reaction can cause us to back down. Don’t do that. Of course, we want to have good social validity in the places we work. Sure, some BCBAs have a reputation for not behaving well – not that I know anyone like that. Sure, use your best social skills, but get what the child needs. Bad compromises are bad for everyone. Even if you have short-term social validity, you won’t maintain it when the program isn’t successful. You have nothing to lose.

There is a lot of research on teaching children with autism conversation skills. Many times, I’ve seen children who have had a tremendous amount of this training, yet still there is something missing. It just doesn’t seem quite right.

What I believe the children are missing in some cases is enough background knowledge and interest in different topics to meaningfully engage. Some children spend so much of their time on iPads, video games, or extremely obscure interests that they don’t have a lot to talk about.

Although admittedly hard to prove in a scientific study, in my view helping children develop a variety of interests not only opens potential vocational and leisure opportunities, it can help with conversation skills, too. When you have a deep interest and knowledge about a topic, there is a lot more to say.

This goes a little bit against some of the conventional wisdom. Often behavior analysts want to know what is happening in the child’s current environment. What are the 3^rd graders talking about? Let’s teach him to talk about that. Certainly, in some situations that tactic can work great. But often it doesn’t.

Let’s say the kids are interested in the new Star Wars movie that just came out. The amount of background knowledge and language to meaningful participate beyond one or two exchanges is enormous. Often, you won’t be able to get meaningful conversation going using this strategy.

I strongly suspect it is better to take the long view of developing conversation skills. Helping the child develop an appropriate and deep interest in a few different areas will be much more successful in helping develop meaningful conversational skills and relationships than trying to teach the child to talk about whatever the current popular topics happen to be.