I believe that a major component of effective organizations is to have a mission that is meaningful, motivational, and measurable. After some work on this issue, I crafted the mission: “Teach more, better, faster; now as well as in the future.”
This mission generally had great social validity among staff, parents, and other BCBA’s where I tried it out. We could easily measure how many new skills children were acquiring and increase that over time. We could use the best available research data to design treatment checklists and measure whether our instruction was getting better and better. We could look at rates of acquisition to determine if those were improving. Finally, we could look at whether our procedures were continuing to be used over time. We were on a Poogi!
I was pretty happy with this for quite a while. But one day, I realized that I was focusing on the wrong things. There are a lot of ways that we might be performing well on those measure and still not doing what is in the long-term best interest of the child. It is great that he is learning new words faster, but would he have learned them naturally through play if he wasn’t in therapy? It is wonderful that he is reducing problem behaviors and increasing appropriate social skills, but does he use them outside of therapy?
It doesn’t really matter how well a child is doing while they are still in your care. In most situations, that care is not going to last forever. What matters is what happens after the person leaves your care. Did the person go on to have a better life without your assistance?
Measuring things like how many skills are acquired, how fast those skills are acquired, and if the staff are implementing procedures accurately are all relatively easy to measure. They seem like the common-sense things that, of course, we should be doing. Maybe that’s true. My argument is not that these things are bad, just that they can be a distraction from what’s really important, which is making a socially significant difference in the lives of the children we serve. That could involve teaching, more, better, faster. But maybe not. For some children, it may be that more is not better. It may be that teaching just a few things really well is what they need. The ultimate goal is not success during therapy, but success when the child is no longer in therapy.