In programs based on Applied Behavior Analysis, it is fairly rare for the BCBA to be the one working directly with the client. In the vast majority of situations, the BCBA is acting as a consultant or supervisor to a parent, paraprofessional, Registered Behavior Technician (RBT), or teacher guiding how to implement behavior change programs.
The BCBA typically will have a written document that explains how to implement the behavior change program. Then the BCBA does training on the implementation of the plan, ensures the integrity of the implementation through observation, provides both positive and negative feedback to implementers, reviews the data, problem solves when the data do not show progress in the desired direction and makes appropriate adjustments to the plan if needed.
Most people with experience will realize it virtually never works like that in reality. One basic problem with this traditional view is that it makes it sound like the BCBA makes all the decisions. If you aren’t getting feedback on what can be improved from the people implementing it, the program will be weak. Making those decisions needs to be a collaborative process. But should the BCBA even be consulted on routine day to day decisions?
Some BCBA’s want to be involved in every single decision. The program says he gets to play with trains as a reinforcer, but today he wanted to color. Is that allowed? Should the prompt be delivered after two seconds or five seconds? Some days he is very distracted by looking out the window, can I close the blinds? As a general rule, if the staff doesn’t have enough training to handle daily routine decisions, the program is likely of poor quality and progress is sure to be very slow.
On the other hand, there are BCBA’s that try to stay out of the insignificant details. They try to focus on teaching the basic behavioral principles and let the people implementing apply those principles. That can certainly work, sometimes. But there are terrible programs where the BCBA is overloaded with too many cases and staff are making decisions all the time without sufficient training. They don’t understand the basics well enough to make good decisions. This often has disastrous results.
Every time a BCBA supervises a program, there is an essential decision to make. How much autonomy do I allow from the implementers? There might be a variety of factors involved in making that decision. Things like the experience and training of the implementer, how often the BCBA will see the client, the complexity of the procedures, safety issues, among others. Both too little autonomy and too much autonomy will likely lead to terrible results.
In my view, this one decision often results in how successful a program is likely to be. Think it through carefully.