Training and Comprehensive Learning Systems with Allyson Wharam Part I

ABA on Tap is proud to spend some time with Allyson Wharam (Part 1 of 2):

Allyson Wharam is the founder of Sidekick Learning, a company dedicated to streamlining training and supervision systems for Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) organizations.

 She brings a wealth of experience to her role, having worked hands-on in various clinical settings and served as a training coordinator for a large organization, gaining a deep understanding of the practicalities involved in creating effective systems in real-world scenarios. Her expertise also extends to instructional design, holding a Master's degree in Instructional Design and Technology from the University of Virginia and currently pursuing her doctorate in the same field at the same university. Wharam is also a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA), demonstrating her qualifications in the field of behavior analysis. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:01

Hey Dan.

SPEAKER_04: 0:02

What's up, Mike?

SPEAKER_01: 0:03

I've got something I want to share with you that I've been working on. It's called iLearn ABA. And I've been involved in this project for a couple of years now. We're trying to put out various products, but what we have right now available are twelve units, twelve CEUs that are available at a very affordable price. We need people's help out there to help us pilot our service. So I want to point everybody out to learn.com. That's learn.com is the website. And please use promo code ABA on tap to get fifteen percent on twelve available units that are very reasonably priced. And please do lend your feedback here. Let us know how we're doing. So again, that's learn.com. Please do check it out.

SPEAKER_03: 1:07

Welcome to ABA on Tac, where our goal is to find the best recipe to brew the smoothest, coldest, and best tasting ABA around. I'm Dan Lowry with Mike Rubio, and join us on our journey as we look back into the ingredients to form the best concoction of ABA on tech. In this podcast, we will talk about the history of the ABA brew, how much to consume to achieve the optimum buzz while not getting too drunk, and the recommended pairings to bring to the table. So without further ado, sit back, relax, and always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_01: 1:50

All right, all right. Welcome back to yet another installment of ABA on tap. I am your ever-grateful co-host, Mike Rubio, along with Mr. Daniel Lowry. Mr. Dan, how are you, sir?

SPEAKER_04: 2:01

Doing great. Good to be back. Took a little time off, although they won't know it because we had a good backlog, but really excited to have Allison on today.

SPEAKER_01: 2:09

Allison, yes, very excited for uh young professional superstar, doing a whole lot of things in the field that it's going to be uh quite a conversation today, no doubt. So uh just a quick uh intro. Uh our guest today is a licensed and board-certified behavior analyst and instructional designer. She's the founder of Sidekick Learning, a platform offering resources and training for behavior analysts. Without further ado, Alison Warham. All right, Alison, how are you doing?

SPEAKER_00: 2:47

I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me here.

SPEAKER_01: 2:49

Uh you're very welcome. Thank you for your time and thank you for coming on ABA OnTap. We're really, really excited to talk to you about a slew of topics. Uh, really quickly, I'll I'll kick right in. Um, Dan, this past week I wrapped up a two-year stint uh doing direct work with a very challenging student on a school site. And boy, was that a learning experience for me in terms of managing uh the politics, the logistics, the existing uh instructional framework, if you will, that you have to fit into that isn't very flexible at times. Um the idea that I was doing the direct work because this particular student went through six, seven, eight different RBTs that uh, you know, just didn't have the experience with all due respect uh to get the task done. Um but yeah, learned a lot. And and Alison, you have a lot of experience uh considering implementing, uh designing uh structures for ABA implementation in schools. Uh before we get right to that, tell us a little bit more about the origin story, what got you started in ABA, a little bit about your educational background, and then what what keeps you going these days?

SPEAKER_00: 3:58

Yeah, absolutely. So I started out uh as an undergrad studying psychology. I was in uh Scott Gelller's lab, who um is long, long established behavior analyst uh who does a lot of work in safety. And so I was in his applied behavior uh center for applied behavior systems uh doing really interesting stuff, collecting data on like bicycle helmet safety and credit card safety and all sorts of interesting projects. Uh, but I actually didn't know that the the field of behavior analysis existed when I was doing that work because we were really in this other realm. Um, and so under graduated with my undergraduate degree in psychology. There aren't a lot of jobs for someone with an undergraduate degree in psychology. So the the closest thing I found was uh an ABA center, and I had a very rudimentary understanding of ABA literally from my my coursework, which was the Lovasian description of what ABA is. I was still a little bit interested in kind of what that looked like, didn't couldn't wrap my head around it, and so applied and started working at this uh clinic, went on to do in-home work, uh, got my board certification, um, and really focused a lot in training at that point. Uh but in making the decision to become a BCBA, it wasn't really until I saw uh that I could do a lot with it, a lot outside of working with learners with autism. I love that work. I do that work, but I really love the science, is what really kind of ignited my passion. And so what kind of sealed the deal for me was seeing that I could apply it in all of these different ways. So even in choosing what I wanted to study, I made the intentional decision to study instructional design and technology and got my master's degree at the same time that I got uh my verified course sequence totally separately, but at the same time, because I already saw the overlap in how the science could just apply to everything. And then I really loved training and things like that. And so that kind of started me out in my career, transitioned to working in schools, uh, did some practicum supervision uh through a university and um some co-instructing as well through through that university. So that kind of opened the door to seeing more of the other side of that. And through all of this experience, through my own supervision, through seeing what it looked like uh as a BCBA, through being a practicum supervisor, I saw these huge, huge gaps in how we prepare behavior analysts, as I think many of them have seen and experienced. Um, but you know, as a trainee, I was like, is this just me? Is this just our site? Is this just how this is that I see these gaps? And then it became very, very, very, very clear to me that no, no, it was not, not just me, not just the site. Um, and so that really ignited my passion as I was starting to create these materials and resources and things uh during my own supervision. I realized how little was out there, which then kind of led me into the work that I'm doing today, which is uh really, I still do some school consulting work, but really my focus and my passion is supervision and specifically designing and training uh other supervisors in how to be effective supervisors and developing a curriculum for fieldwork supervision, on-demand RBT trainings and things like that. That right now our training approach, I think, is so disjointed at every level, at from technician all the way up. And so my goal is to really, uh my vision is for us to have a more unified approach to training that supports quality, because there are, as I'm sure we're gonna talk about, there are a lot of problems, obviously, within ABA that are not historical problems. They're they're continuing problems in regards to quality. And it's not getting better as we are adding in all of these constraints related to insurance funding and the growth and a boon of new behavior analysts. And so I think it's actually becoming even more important rather than less important as our field grows.

SPEAKER_01: 7:59

Yeah, we we couldn't agree more. We uh we're about six, seven months into our own operation. Uh, after talking so much on the podcast, decided to put our money where our mouths were. Uh, and that's one of our main objectives is to focus on the idea of the RBT and and what that means, and and uh, you know, the notion that there's this expectation that the RBT is going to become a BCBA and that's your only career route. It's almost like thinking that every registered nurse has to become a doctor, and that's not the case. You need people at a certain level of of practice, practitioners that are developing those content expertise, and I we agree with you that there are a lot of gaps, uh, a lot of things that we've seen historically. We like to say here on the podcast, you can uh you can train an RBT candidate to pass their 40 hour uh their 40-hour competency, however, that does not mean they're ready to go run a session. In fact, they're probably not ready at all to go do any of that because they're missing a whole other aspect of what it means to deliver the service, and this particular to autism intervention.

SPEAKER_04: 9:00

So you mentioned that uh your kind of initial experience in an ABA was instructional design. Can you talk a little bit about what that is, what interested you in that, and kind of where you went with that specifically?

SPEAKER_00: 9:54

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm very much a systems thinker. So even when I was a new technician, I was kind of thinking a lot about how, you know, to your point, we passed this initial competency. And I wasn't, this was like right as the RBT certification was even a thing. So I was never actually an RBT, I was just a technician.

SPEAKER_04: 10:13

Same.

SPEAKER_00: 10:14

Um yeah, and so I was seeing even then from a systems lens, the amount of responsibility that I had as this kind of green new person, um, and feeling the weight of that and taking it really seriously, but also almost questioning like, why how am I qualified to do this work? This is immensely important work. And do I actually have the training to do this? Um, and so then I moved into that kind of onboarding trainer role and saw that at scale, really. And that's where I started to, before I started my degree in instructional design, started to see training as a huge mechanism for quality, that we can't change all of the systems. We're not gonna change, we we just can't, like one person cannot change all these systems, but training can be a huge mechanism for supporting that. We're not gonna get rid of the RBT credential, but how can we, um, at least I don't think so, not in the not in the near future. Um so, how can we, if this exists and this is what our structures look like, how can we ensure quality at that level? How can we support those folks and how can we support organizations? And so even then, I didn't know how deep I was gonna go into all of this, but I just saw training and was really interested in training. And then even just from the client lens, I am very much someone who just loves skill acquisition. I love designing instructional programming and things like that. And so I just that was something I kind of latched on to. Um, and so when I was looking at jobs, I didn't know what the field of instructional design was as kind of a separate entity. It just was interesting enough that I thought this will diversify. Um, and so if I were to sum it up, as behavior analysts, most of us are instructional designers anyway, in the the loose term of the word. We're designing instruction all the time. And so we can do that from a behavior analytic lens for our clients. We can do that as we're doing training and things like that. But it is actually a really, really intentional process that, you know, as we're doing it for our clients, we we tend to be very intentional, at least most of us who have that background in training. Um, but often for our adult learners, we're not as systematic. So instructional design is both a skill, but it is also a separate field and practice with its own journals, with its own frameworks and models, some of which overlap with behavior analysis, some of which are kind of separate. And so it's kind of a nuanced answer of um kind of what that looks like at a couple of different levels.

SPEAKER_01: 12:38

So you you spent a lot of time in your educational background in the school of education, then specifically. Yes. So then your ABA introduction was really what you were saying, kind of your first employment opportunity or the idea of uh applied uh aspects of it in terms of autism treatment really was then experiential and not necessarily academic.

SPEAKER_00: 12:58

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that was more yeah, experiential. And then I went to, you know, FIT. I did the verified course sequence, but I just didn't I didn't see a huge difference, at least in the online, because for personal circumstances, I could not do anything besides an online program at that point. And so um I just didn't see a huge difference between the master's in ABA and the course sequence at the time for most universities. And so kind of the harder route in retrospect, but it was something I felt really passionate about. Um, but yeah, yeah, I had much more experiential uh experience. But yeah, to your point of it being in a school of education, that that was very difficult, to be honest at first. Um, because when you're in this ABA bubble, you know, you think of things with this very specific worldview. Um, and even I'm I'm finishing up my doctoral degree in instructional design now as well, and uh just a continuation of the same program. And I'm working on my capstone, and most everyone on my committee, they're not behavior analysts. And so it's really interesting trying to explain even like the nuances of what fieldwork is and how kind of unregulated it is. But yeah, it can be tricky, but I think it is actually a good thing to have some sort of like outside certification to pull you out of the bubble because I was firmly, firmly in the bubble, and it forced me to open my perspective to different kind of worldviews and ways of describing things, and that just because something isn't found in Java doesn't mean it is not or can't be behavior analytic.

SPEAKER_01: 14:21

I know what a cool foundation. I think I actually a developmental psychologist by training first, kind of fell into ABA and fell in love with it, and you know, much like you and seeing the differences and trying to find uh the overlap, right? I like to talk about the the professional thesaurus. There's so many times we're talking about the same thing, it's just different words, and I bet you went through a lot of that. And again, what a what a fantastic foundation to launch from in having that uh you know more staunch educational framework to then look at things like instructional design or curriculum towards intervention, for example. That that has to have helped you a ton.

SPEAKER_00: 14:56

Yeah, and it I mean it's even interesting within the school of education. We have like the CNI core, which was like the K-12 sort of focus, and then instructional design, which is really more of that subspecialty area, even within all of that. And then we have ABA and even then, how each of those, how curriculum and instruction generally versus instructional design kind of treat things. It's I don't know, like you said, we're often talking about the same things, but the frameworks are very, very different.

SPEAKER_04: 15:22

Can you speak to that? Can you speak to that? I guess I would say dichotomy, but trichotomy of ABA versus curriculum and design versus instructional design. Can you speak to kind of how they interact and might be similar or different?

SPEAKER_00: 15:34

Yeah, absolutely. So um there is a lot of overlap, you know, it's kind of a huge Venn diagram in terms of the roots of a lot of these things. I will say um what is different about curriculum and instruction, at least how my university kind of treated it, was it was very, it was a K-12 framework. So it was very I would I don't want to say it was kind of um like watered down, but I got in our doctoral program, we had advanced instruction, which is really just like instructional design. So I would say instructional design has like a lot of depth to it. It's very when we think about like programming from a learner, we're thinking about component composite analyses, we're talking about sequencing and scaffolding and you know, the just the depth of what that looks like and stimulus control. They're not using any of those words. Um, but curriculum and instruction, I think, is just a really broad in umbrella, whereas instructional design is is more of the drill down of what that looks like and how intentional you are. So curriculum is kind of like the scope and sequence, the what, the instruction is more of the how. And then instructional design is really drilling into that. And so instructional design versus ABA, there are really similar routes in terms of like behavioral philosophies and Skinner and Keller and all of those things, you know, all of that influences modern day instructional design. I think instructional designers think that they've moved beyond behaviorism because not a lot of people understand what behaviorism is. And so now they're they they say they're using like a more of a cognitive framework, but you can still break most of that down into behavior analytic terms. Um, and so that was as I talk about some of the like the frustrations of being in the program, that was sometimes what it was was uh people being like, oh, well, now like we can't use behavioral methods, you know, we're moving past that. I'm like, but like that's not actually what behaviorism is, and trying to not kind of uh overexplain all of that. But but yeah, there's a lot of overlap. But when we think about ADA, you can also have behavior analysts who are not really thinking about instructional design, either on the client level or the adult learning level. So like I'm gonna create this training, but this training is really just gonna be a brain dump of all of the concepts I think are relevant. And so I'm gonna just throw all of that into this training where versus I'm gonna think about the performance, design backwards to that performance, and then carefully scaffold the content. The way that we do for our learners, we often don't do that for um for adult learning. And then even for clients, you know, if you have someone who's not really trained to break that down, maybe they're trained in the VB map, and then they, from experience, were taught to even pull goals directly from them, they might not be thinking in that true like design framework. And so all that to say, to sum it up, there's a lot of overlap in each of them, and then there's a lot of variability with each of them in terms of how intentional you are. But um, what I would take away from all of that is that uh we all benefit when we have really intentional structures and think about training for our learners or for adult learners in terms of both what we're teaching and how we're teaching it, and then how that all translates to performance, because um, that is something I think instructional design and ABA specifically do really well is thinking about the transfer and how that impacts someone long term.

SPEAKER_04: 18:54

Do you find that so with that? I know it's something that we've talked about that I don't know if it's a result of the scaffolding um or just maybe the the breakdown of the way that uh instruction is done in ABA, but so often maybe we do have like a larger idea of we want to help this person with social skills or we want to help this person learn how to play, but then it gets uh truncated so so low that now we just have these individual targets that maybe scaffold it up um would result in what we want them to do, but then they get decontextualized and now because they're so far down the scaffold, they I don't want to say aren't functional, but it takes so long to build them back up that it it seems to be unfunctional, you know, like non-verbal invitation or randomly asking people to touch their nose completely out of context or clap your hands or all of these targets, which hopefully you know through a task analysis would work their way up. I'm not sure if they have. Um so kind of a long way of asking. I think a lot of times in ABA, maybe it starts top and goes down, but we end up building back bottom up and we never really hit the up part. Do you see that? Is that an ever something that's a great question? Uh yeah, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_00: 20:07

I think that's a good thing.

SPEAKER_04: 20:10

Perfect.

SPEAKER_00: 20:11

Yeah. No, I I think that's the core of it, is that like to your point, we have to have that long-term vision of what we're building towards in terms of a generalizable skill that helps someone long term. And when we're thinking so granular, like you do have to work backwards, but you start from that big picture and work to those smaller skills rather than here are some small skills, and maybe at some point this will help with this. So it's kind of going sometimes. I see people kind of going in the wrong order, or like you said, I think decontextualizing is. Great where way of framing that where people are just taught to pull individual goals and they they haven't even thought about it through that bigger framework, or they've gone and drilled down so much that we're teaching it in a really robotic way. I think we've all seen this where it's like we're creating stimulus control that's so, so tight that even within this specific target, we we're losing sight. So even when you build go to build to that bigger goal, it's really hard to do that because you've created this kind of faulty, overly tight stimulus control that's not realistic to any sort of real world settings. And I don't know that we do a great job in our training programs of even teaching that. Like a common skill I see, um, or not skill, but activity that I see a lot of debate about is like, is creating materials is that count can you count that for unrestricted hours? Is that behavior analytic? Well, if you're thinking in terms of instructional design and you're extremely intentional about what targets you're picking, how you're picking it, what materials you're selecting, um, all of those things, then that's incredibly behavior analytic. If you're saying I'm pulling these random targets out of our goal bank and going to Google and searching up the first five images that pop up, then that's not behavior analytic at all.

SPEAKER_04: 21:54

And so there's You mean every client doesn't need the same exact portfolio of materials? That's not how it works in ABA? Are you sure, Alison?

SPEAKER_01: 22:06

Um We get a little facetious here. It's okay on ABAP. Yeah. Um so what of the when I hear you talking about this, I think one of the things that trips us up, for example, especially for younger learners or clients that we're providing intervention for, for example, is the idea of developmental milestones. Right? You you run this assessment to this questionnaire, the scale or whatever it is that is required by this, that, or that, you know, this or that funding source, and uh you find those deficits, and then you draw this straight line through your goals for those deficits, which is not illogical. And then it's gonna hit all of those pitfalls that you just talked about somehow. What else do you see that maybe trips people up? And then how do you open up people's framework or mindset to say you have to have a it's good to have a specific instructional design, and then even within that design, you know, what what uh margin of error is there for the incidental or for something not happening exactly how you planned it, but still maybe being able to hit the target somehow?

SPEAKER_00: 23:08

Yeah, I think even the the linear view of that of like I'm teaching this discrete skill, which leads to this discrete skill, is actually a part of that where we think of everything as like these kind of siloed things or in isolation. Um, and that kind of made me think as well to Dan's point. Sometimes even when we're thinking about these really individual targets, that sometimes actually might be too high because we're teaching these rote skills because they don't have the underlying repertoires to meaningfully engage with that instruction. So, what do I even mean by that? So, even the VB map level one, there are some skills there, even the very first ones that are actually component skills of a lot of really, really tiny, smaller skills, even just like orienting to someone or you know, reaching, you know, things like that. And so as we're thinking about instruction, sometimes we jump too fast into instruction itself and don't see how we should be teaching some of those underlying repertoires. But I think the the biggest framework that I like to teach trainees and to have them to start to really think about this is component composite analysis and how skills can recombine with one another to create this generative performance that just multiplies out, that we get all of these free skills because no one is taught every single discrete skill or target in their life. And when you have these underlying repertoires, that's where they can recombine, create these new skills, and then it again just kind of ripples out. And so I think that is almost skill one for them, for someone to be able to say, okay, first off, is someone ready for this instruction? Uh developmental milestones, but also just developmentally in terms of their skill profile in their repertoires. Um, and then how do the how does that combine with some of the other things that we're going to teach them? The the example I give all the time to is um like uh toothbrushing. I had a client who we worked on this for forever with him, when I say forever, like over a year, and he still wasn't independently brushing his teeth, but he didn't have any of the fine motor skills to independently manipulate the toothbrush in his mouth. And so even if we signed it off and said, yeah, he's going through the motions, he wasn't going to be able to properly clean his teeth on his own because he didn't have the fine motor skills in addition to some of the routine following skills. You know, there's there was a lot there. Um, and so if we had taught some of those individual skills in isolation, some of those fine motor skills, that could have benefited. And we would have still needed to teach toothbrushing, but that would have been much faster. And we would have gotten all these freebies for in terms of the other skills that would have been much more efficient to teach. So I would say, yeah, it's it's a hard skill to tackle with folks as they're learning how to do this. But that I think is the biggest thing that someone can start to do and think about as a framework is how do we break down those skills and conceptualize them as parts of a kind of a whole and how they can recombine.

SPEAKER_01: 26:00

Yeah, no, that that's great. And and you know, the idea that again, it's not that straight line anymore. So the only way to uh bolster this particular uh child in brushing their teeth doesn't necessarily mean they have to practice brushing their teeth. There's there's now a million other things that you can do uh to build those requisite skills toward then brushing their teeth. And then yes, there needs to be a straight line toward are you brushing your teeth independently or not based on all these things we've done. That's a great example. I really do appreciate that. And I do think that um, you know, for for whatever it's worth, we miss that. We miss that along the way, whether it's training with younger professionals, uh, whether it's just the way uh the curriculum or or you know some set of instruction has been designed, uh, there's a lot of room for error. And oftentimes you find these isolated, decontextualized targets in isolation that don't necessarily they're good, they're good little parts, but they don't necessarily build up with anything else. It's just like an individual Lego piece with no other Lego pieces to connect to.

SPEAKER_03: 26:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: 26:59

One thing that uh you kind of brought to the table, Mike, maybe like a couple years ago um at our previous company was this focus on joint attention. And I'm I'm curious, Allison, um, your thoughts here because I think it was honestly more of like a top-down um approach to a lot of our programs that you know we would work on whatever, whether we're working on socialization and it would be eye contact or attending or engagement um or any sort of target. And um we were finding that again, they either didn't connect or the individual just wasn't that motivated, and they might learn it, but it wouldn't generalize. Um, so my kind of really focused on focusing on joint attention, which wouldn't get us the the goal mastery as quickly because we're not targeting these individual goals. There's some specifics of the joint attention. It would take a while, but once we were able to build that interaction with the person that we were working with, then we found whatever goals we would provide, we would be able to master off and they would be able to gain access to that's probably not the best word. They would be able to start to um show or exemplify more quickly because we did have that joint attention piece. So now kind of talking it out. I'm wondering if that's the high-level goal or the prerequisite goal. Kind of where would you put that and what are your thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00: 28:13

I think it it depends on the learner, right? Even as we're talking about component composite analysis, it's a component for one goal is a composite for another. And so joint attention, there are many different underlying repertoires that kind of go into that. And it's a pivotal skill that goes and is a component of many, many and almost every other kind of interactive instructional skill that you engage in. So yeah, and I think to your point, when you teach that, then like you said, it it takes time on the front end, but then it makes your instruction much more smooth on the back end. And I don't think we're we're not strangers to that with building rapport and therapeutic relationships and some of the work we need to do on the front end, but I do think that we we sometimes miss it when we think about how to even break down skills. Um, we just don't don't go back that far. We s we start it maybe where our assessment tells us to start without digging deeper and using our analytical skills.

SPEAKER_01: 29:05

Yeah, no, that's uh I like the way you describe that. And it was a shift, I think it was a purposeful shift. Uh just a quick background, we were moving into um pre-diagnostic intervention realm. And I just really wanted to um provide the motivation to our staff to start doing things a little to find new ways to do things. And the whole notion was well, we do this type of ABA for kids that have an autism diagnosis. These kids don't have that. Are we gonna do the same thing or does it warrant something different? Uh, and to your point, that was sort of the shift I wanted to make is in saying we have all these great stimuli that we present and these great designs that we create, and they're they're awesome. And then something like you're that that child isn't shifting their gaze toward your stimulus, and they're not even demonstrating by reaching toward it, or you know, these basic things, even like um hand leading or bringing objects over, which you know, hand leading can be seen uh diagnostically as sometimes worrisome. And it's like, well, no, that's actually joint attention. The the idea that that a child's sitting in their living room and they think of something that's in the cabinet and they see where you are and they know that they can't reach that object, so they're gonna go get you to get that thing that they're not seeing, that's pretty darn impressive. How do we promote that? And then how do we shape it into something else, right? So that was kind of the whole point there is uh yes, and and on, you know, maybe this spurs more discussion, but the whole sort of top-down, bottom-up is what we're talking about here, and and saying, yeah, we've got all this this great task analysis. We know what targets developmentally, and based on milestones and deficits that we've assessed, we know what we're looking for, and then just putting those stimuli and those targets out there is clearly not enough. How do we make them salient? How do we make them come to life?

SPEAKER_00: 30:48

So yeah, and I think your example with hand leading is a really great one because it it is something like often we jump to okay, well, they're not requesting, let's start with them just making like like we might jump to let's implement PECs or let's like try to aim for some one-word man's um, because they make some vocalizations or a coic or something like that. Well, if really the first thing we're looking for is communicative intent, that hand leading shows that and shows that like partnering with someone and I am going to use you as my communicative partner to access this reinforcer. And so that is a great place to start and reinforce. But what I wanted to highlight about what you were saying, I think is that um, like you said, it could be considered like troublesome or worrisome. And a lot of um where we can meet learners where they are, I guess what I'm trying to say is like you were kind of indicating that's moot, it doesn't really matter. Um and it's not worrisome because it can be functional and build to something else. And so, like even lining up toys, you know, as we're thinking about pairing and building rapport and joint attention, like the best way to get imitation is not to sit there and say clap hands and then hand over hand someone to uh get them to clap hands. It's to look at what they're doing, imitate what they're doing, see if they orient you, and then get some reciprocal kind of back and forth. And so uh even with like lining up toys and items, like the way that I compare with them is not by having them go and do something totally unrelated to what they want to do. It's kind of sit there with them and hand them the items that they're interested in. And so I think we have to get out of this framework too of seeing the diagnostic criteria, something that we're, and I know this is difficult within the medical model, that we're trying to get rid of or change when we can use those as tools to build upon strengths and interest and where that learner is. And that is a much more, I think, person-centered approach, but also in terms of getting outcomes, you're gonna find more success if that's where the learner is.

SPEAKER_04: 32:46

You gave her the handout that you would give our new hires all about contingent imitation and reciprocal imitation. That's that you primed her on that, huh? Because what you said is what Mike would tell all of our trainees.

SPEAKER_01: 32:57

So we I love the example of lining things up, right? And that's sort of a phrase I've used. Uh so how are they lining things up this way? Then maybe have them line it up that way. But the idea that they can't line it up, why? Why can't they line it up? If we developmentally look at um like the development of block building, you're gonna see kids line things up this way, line things up that way, make enclosures, then pile things up. It there's a it's part of a sequence somewhere. And I like the way you say we're meeting the learner where they are, we're doing what they're doing, we're getting into their world, and then we'll see what happens from there. And that can be difficult, especially if you've got a strong set curriculum and good instructional design, which is telling you you have to do certain things. So there's a good balance between those two things. What you know, talk to us a little bit more about how you try to strike that or what you recommend to people to say, hey, look, this is what we've planned, and yes, we want to stick to the plan. And then any given three, four-year-old is actually designed developmentally to sabotage your plan. So, what are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_00: 33:58

So, part one of any instruction is analyzing the learner, the context where they need to use the skill. And so as we're designing instruction, that is part of the instructional design itself, is ensuring that we're meeting that learner where they are. The other thing that is sort of related to that, that you're getting it, I think is flexibility in terms of responding to the learner. And so I think there are many different things there. The first is with any sort of instruction, making sure that the steps are small enough that you're actually shaping and are meaningful. So as we're thinking about like a curriculum or anything like that, that we're not doing kind of having huge jumps between those. But even as we're writing a program, we take one skill, we break it down into components, all of that, where we're shaping. We need to have in the back of the mind, first off, the entry-level behavior of where exactly where that learner is. Um, and then we need to have that clear context of where we're going. And then within that, I I am not, I know this is counter to how a lot of people are taught, um, where you have to deliver the exact SD all the time.

SPEAKER_01: 35:05

And that might be don't. Um a lot of ABA blasphemy that's a lot of people. I was gonna say we're gonna have to kick them.

SPEAKER_00: 35:17

But even I mean, and maybe in you know, in some cases for some learner, you are starting really specifically with one because they need to learn and then you're expanding that. But so often it's like, well, they mastered sit down and it's just sit down, and you're not thinking about all the ways that that might be said to the learner or the different contexts and things like that. And so often I see generalization framed as with people in three settings. Well, generalization is not just people and settings, it's materials and behaviors and contexts and all of those things. And so within how we're setting up our instruction, we want to program some inherent variability in the materials that we're using, in the stimuli that are gonna signal to engage in that behavior, all of that. And again, that might be part of the shaping process where we start with really a more tighter example, but we need to quickly um move on to introducing some of that variability. And I think where it comes really, really difficult, and I would love to hear what you guys uh say about that, is as a behavior analyst, you have the background training to make some of those in-the-moment decisions. As a technician, it takes a lot of training to be able to in the moment flexibly say, here is how I'm going to um fade out this prompt that I'm providing, or thin this reinforcement schedule, or they're not responding to this prompt. So I'm gonna, um, or the stimulus. So I'm gonna like decrease the field size, or you know, whatever it happens to be, making all of those different in-the-moment instructional decisions. That's where I think it goes back to our very early comments about the amount of responsibility that's put on a technician. And in an ideal world, we are giving them both the the skills and the tools to be able to make some of those decision decisions and the autonomy to make them, uh, but also the oversight that we're not putting all of that on them, that we're still giving them a structure to do that. But uh, that does not look like stay at full physical prompt for three days, then when they're responding to that, go to partial physical, like that. Um, that just kind of makes my skin crawl. But I have literally, literally seen that as I've, you know, you might have as well.

SPEAKER_01: 37:28

It's oh yes, it's the exact discipline that we came from. And and again, as you're describing it, I, you know, from a from an experimental design perspective, I understand why we we are we would we worry about all those variables or what we might even find them of interest. And then the notion that in a dynamic interaction, you're gonna be able to somehow account for all those things is also quite impossible. So it's uh you know, to your question, I'm gonna answer it very vaguely and pass it to Dan. Go ahead. But um yeah, it's a dynamic, it's a dance, right? So it I think the first thing I would say is for me in working with my RBTs, it means spending as much time with them as I can, uh, given all the other parameters, to be able to discuss uh open-ended client-directed pieces that are active uh during uh our implementation of our nicely designed plan and and almost teaching them, yes, this is the way you would run this plan ideally, and then you're looking out for anything else in the environment from a contingent imitation and a linguistic mapping perspective. We like using those phrases because it really makes the RBT pay attention to the learner. You can't contingently imitate or linguistically map unless you're not worried about your data, but you're worried about what the learner is doing. And then so that would lend very general parameters as to how I answer that question. But I think that's an ongoing question. That's an ongoing challenge to your point. Um, it's a dance, it's that's it's a choreography, it's a constant dance, and there's a little bit of improv and there's a little bit of planned steps. And um, I've I've used the comparison of going to a dance class when it's just you and your partner and the instructor on the floor versus hitting the dance floor when it's a bunch of other people dancing, and now those same steps you have to move in different directions, and you have to cut this one short. And and that's a real that's a real skill. And I think that's why we end up training people typically. I'm I'm gonna make a very general statement in a very linear fashion. This is the 40-hour competency, you're gonna have to pass this test. This is the way these programs looked, this is the way uh nonverbal imitation looks, and this is the way this looks, and then that's a good job doing that, and it doesn't leave a whole lot of room for how do I teach you to improvise, how do I teach you to to pivot, to shift in that moment, which now takes, I think, a uh greater understanding of of learning and development and behavior and instructional design and all those things that we're talking about here. So it's tough. And again, I it I do then empathize with younger professionals out there who received a very strict, very recipe-oriented training because that's the best way to capture all those things. And then you have to realize that you're gonna be a cook in that kitchen and you're not always gonna have those ingredients, you know, uh everything you planned isn't always gonna work out that way.

SPEAKER_04: 40:21

Um we try to do this as concisely so I don't ramble because that's such a good question. I rambled. No, no, you did a good you did it much more concisely. Okay, so Mike has a really good quote that I like, and he's like, um, he always says ABA has been proven in the lab. We don't need to continue to prove it with every client that we work with, we know it's been proven. We can just implement it to the client. And I think because I've done training in my companies for the last 15 years with ABA, that a lot of the RBT training is the specific technology of like proving ABA. And what I mean by that is like reinforcement schedules. You brought that up. That was one of the harder things for some of my trainees to pick up because it's technical, right? Are we using FR1 or VR5 or whatever the schedule is that we're using? And maybe this is blasphemy, but I don't think I ever went to an RBT actually in a session and was like, are you using a VR2 schedule? Like that wasn't really something that we used. But sometimes we would go over the training and they were like, Well, will my supervisor tell me when I go from you know FR2 to a FR5 and then we fade to a VR schedule? It's like, well, no, not necessarily. I mean, we could, but is your client engaged? Like, that's what we're talking about. That flexibility and fluidity is is your client engaged? But the RBT task is so scientific from the terms, it's like each R V T we're trying to get to prove the exact science, which has already been proven, and they're getting this, like you said, specific recipe with these specific terminologies and the whole thing they're losing. And if if they're either doing one of two things, they're not understanding it, or they're understanding it and they're trying to put it like physical prompting schedules, right? Like schedules of prompting. Like maybe there's a specific prompt fade out schedule, and they're actually ready to move to a less intrusive prompt, but that's not part of the fade out schedule that was provided to them. So it's like, well, they're gonna be very rigid because they were trained in this rigid way of you go, you know, physical prompt and verbal prompt and gestural or whatever it is, and they're only on the gestural, but the person might not even need that level of prompt. So I think it's that it goes back to that scientific piece of continuously trying to prove it, versus the just application of working with somebody one-on-one, trying to engage that person. And I think that's where a lot of it's lost. And that's where I wanted to ask you the question of do you find that there's like an inflexibility in the academic side of things? And like Mike, you mentioned linear. Like, do you find things are very linear and kind of inflexible? Because you do have to have a level of concreteness in academia that you don't have to have in one-on-one service. Hopefully, that wasn't too much of a rumble.

SPEAKER_00: 43:00

No, no, it makes sense. And I do want to highlight first kind of what you were saying because I think it's so important. Um, but we're natural science, we know that, but we are human service field. And so we have to respond. Like the skill that you kept going back to, both of you, is essentially just responding to the person in front of you. And so that is skill number one. Everything else we teach has to fall under that framework, whether it's reinforcement schedules, whether it's prompt fading, whether it's ascent, how to respond to ascent and reinforcing mandate, all of that requires at its core partnering with the person in front of you and responding to them. And so um I think yes and no, I think actually what I see is more of a lack of conceptual understanding, um, which makes it really, really hard. Not that that is that trumps anything, but you can't teach someone as easily, at least, um, how to be really thoughtful about all these dimensions if you don't have a way to talk about this and they don't have a conceptual framework for it. Sure. So uh the example I always give is, you know, even in our supervision curriculum, conducting an FBA is really late on there because you have all of these foundational skills. They have to understand motivation, they have to understand setting events, they have to understand reinforcement and all of those different contingencies at play, skills, compete, you know, replacement behaviors, all of these different things in order to be able to conduct an FBA. And yet I have people who have come to me who have finished their ABA master's program and can't even discriminate between positive and negative reinforcement. So, not that the technical understanding trumps the applied setting, but there are certain things that I see as a barrier to effective fieldwork supervision if we're having to teach some of those things from scratch.

SPEAKER_04: 44:52

Um, so your FBA piece, I just want to that highlight that for a second. So, like you take a young um person, a young BCBA doing an FBA, and I think what you said was so important that that there's another person in front of you. Usually with FBA, it's gonna be the parent. And I think so often, even in the field of ABA, and I'm sorry if I'm sidetracking the point, I just wanted to make sure that uh we talked about this before we moved on. Like, there's another parent in front of you. And historically, you know, FBA would be like, okay, what medications is your shot on? What are the areas of weakness? What do you want to work on? What are you having difficulty with? And there's this the structured FBA. I mean, every company I've worked for, including ours, has an FBA form. Like, you have to have an FBA form. But at the end of the day, there's somebody in front of you, and that person might just be struggling with coping with the diagnosis. They might be fighting with their partner every day, they might be fiscally insecure. So, like, you gotta connect with that person and figure out what, yeah, they might be having difficulty with their child going to the bathroom, but that might be number 12 on their life difficulties, but number 11 aren't on your FBA form, so you're not gonna figure out what those 11 are, so you're not gonna really help that parent. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but that you made me think about that when you were talking about conducting an FBA for a new professional. I think a lot of that gets lost with our structure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 46:11

Well, I think even interviewing, using interview forms and things like that, we might have a form. Someone can go through the motions, I guess, is the point of all of this, um, without first off seeing the person in front of them. And then also on the technical side, even if I'm I'm not even talking about technical jargon, just like a conceptual understanding. Someone can look, collect ABC data, say looks like escape, it's escape. I'm gonna like put a blanket intervention on here. But like deeper than that, even for the client, what if I peel back the layers? What are all of the things that are motivating? Okay, it's escape. So what? Escape to what, escape from what? Um, like what is motivating that escape, not just in the moment, but big turn, you know, big picture. And so, but you know, like someone can go through the motion, someone can fill out that FBA form, but they can do it without partnering with the stakeholders, they can do it without really seeing the client. Um, and so yes, but it is that kind of intricate. There's the conceptual piece, there's the interpersonal piece, there is uh the procedural piece of going through all of that. And so, in terms of training a new professional, it's really difficult because you have to kind of marry all those things together and make sure that they have the prerequisite skills, but they often um they often don't. And so, even writing, you know, again, designing materials, it's really tough to even explain that kind of difference of how we're we're thinking about that design to someone who can't even wrap their head around maybe what we even mean by planning for stimulus control and generalization and all of those kind of different aspects. Um, but I say all the time too, I would much rather like we're training prof uh applied professionals. And so I do care a lot about like being able to fully understand the science behind things, but I care much more about how you're able to apply them. So I need you to understand what positive and negative reinforcement are, but I don't need you to give me the Cooper definition. I want you to be able to explain it to me like I'm a parent or a technician.

SPEAKER_04: 48:10

Yeah, yeah. The science is so important. I I created uh the training for the companies that that I was at in the first, like after introductions, we jumped right into science and spent a bunch of time talking about the philosophical assumptions, you know, empiricism, determinism, things like that. Because I wanted people to understand the importance of the science and how everything we're talking about. Why do we measure behaviors, you know, empiricism, like why is determinism important? Like these things are important, and I think people sometimes struggle with that though, because a lot of the people that go into this field are either I I found one of two kind of demographics. Either they're like problem solver science-based people, which is probably more like myself, um, or they're people that really enjoy playing with kids. Um, the that kind of side. And and both have a very uh bring a lot to the field. One's not better than the other. Um, but I find the second subset of people is much more prominent. Um, and going over the science, people would really just struggle even understanding concepts of empiricism determinism, which would really falter later on, like trying to explain why we do what we do. So I want to make sure it doesn't seem like I'm in any way poo-pooing this science, like it's so important. And that's what I resonate with the most.

SPEAKER_00: 49:24

Yeah, no, it it's just it is hard because we do err too far on the other end, too, though, of being overly technical and um overly precise to the point that we lose again the the person in front of us. So it it has to fall somewhere between those two kind of things. And you know, even to that point, like I have had students that they're they're just not even thinking like a behavior analyst yet, which is where I think you're coming. Like, do for the exam, yes, you need to rattle off what which each of those things mean in terms of empiricism and determinism and all of that. But your understanding of the terms is much less important than your internalizing and being able to describe kind of your view of how you're influenced, you know, thinking about behavior and how that relates within the world. And so again, it just all comes back to how someone uses it in practice, I think is what what we keep coming back to.

SPEAKER_04: 50:21

Do you think there's like an inherent almost coldness to a behavior analysis that like we're looking at behaviors like just that that's kind of what they are? So there almost becomes like an inherent not roboticism, but like coldness to it, because that's I don't know if that makes sense on what I'm saying here. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 50:43

I don't think it has to be that way, but I do think um there's a behavioral artistry article, I think it's by Callahan.

SPEAKER_01: 50:50

Yeah, yep. Familiar with that.

SPEAKER_00: 50:52

Yeah, uh, and if I remember correctly, yeah, Callahan, um, 2019. And they looked at the interpersonal skills of ABA practitioners and found that we do score lower on some of these areas. I think one of them was like warmth, for example. And so whether or not that's inherent in our science, I would argue no. We're in applied science, it's just how we as a like the culture of our field, I think, has been shaped where um like maybe you are punished by your supervisor if you or if you explain something without like the the technical jargon. And they might, you know, want you to be super, super, super precise and give that Cooper definition. And so um, again, not to make blanket statements, but I do think it is like a cultural problem in our field that we are actively combating against, you know, I think there's more and more research about compassionate care and um partnering with caregivers, not just like training them. How do we actually partner with stakeholders and things like that? And so I think as a field we are paying closer attention to those things, but I do think it is something that culturally we we do struggle with.

SPEAKER_04: 52:02

I agree. And I think that where that came from is more of maybe historical ABA. Um, I think we tend to be pretty uh progressive. Uh, I'm not gonna use the word innovative because that word has been bastardized.

SPEAKER_01: 52:14

I stopped using innovation, it just doesn't mean anything anymore.

SPEAKER_04: 52:17

Yeah, I think we are pretty progressive and really focus on that. Um, although historically and from what I hear, still very prevalent, is the decline is just like a accumulation of a VB map score or vinyl scores or something like that. It's just like how do we increase these scores? And it's not like a person on the other end, it's just a bunch of vinyl scores. And I think sometimes people run the risk of, you know, back in the day when it was primarily DTT based, it's like, all right, we're gonna work on colors and we're gonna work on name identification and 15 tacks, and that that's what we're gonna work on. And if I do that, that's gonna be a successful day. And it was just like a bunch of targets rather than like actually interacting with somebody. So I think that's where it came from. I I hope our field is um holistically doing better. Um, I think a lot of people are. That's where my thought came from there.

SPEAKER_01: 53:07

Hey, this concludes part one of our interview with Allison Warham. Please do return for part two and always analyze responsibly.

SPEAKER_02: 53:18

ABA on tap is recorded live and unfiltered. We're done for today. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. See you next time.