25 Essential Skills and Strategies for Behavior Analysts: Expert Tips for Maximizing Consulting Effectiveness | Date: 28 April 2011, 02:56
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25 Essential Skills and Strategies for Behavior Analysts: Expert Tips for Maximizing Consulting Effectiveness
By Jon Bailey, Mary Burch
* Publisher: Routledge
* Number Of Pages: 341
* Publication Date: 2009-10-28
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0415800684
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780415800686
Product Description:
25 Essential Skills and Strategies for Professional Behavior Analyst is a much needed guidebook for behavior analysts who want to become successful at consulting. Jon Bailey and Mary Burch present five basic skills and strategy areas that professional behavior analysts need to acquire. This book is organized around those five areas, with a total of 25 specific skills presented within those topics. Every behavior analyst, whether seasoned or beginning, should have this book.
Preface
I come home from working at the Developmental Disabilities Center
twice a week, drop on the couch, and just cry. I don’t know what’s
wrong with me. I think they just don’t like me and don’t trust me.
I feel like an outsider. I have clients whom I love, and I enjoy the
challenge of solving problems. I’m well paid by my consulting firm,
but at the DD center they don’t respect me, and they won’t listen
to me. I’ve been told the administrator talks about me behind my
back. They like to use drugs for treatment instead of my behavior
plans. … I can’t admit to my supervisor that I’m in trouble. I don’t
know what to do, really, I don’t. I’m board certified, and I’ve taken
Dr. Bailey’s ethics course, but it’s not helping me in this situation.
This emotional and heart-wrenching plea came to us in the
form of a desperate phone call from Kimberly, a newly certified
behavior analyst. This extremely bright, enthusiastic,
go-
getting graduate student had such an intense desire to get her
first job and begin helping clients with behavioral needs that no
one would have predicted she would find herself in the depressing
situation she described. But she did.
We began to notice that many other behavior analysts were
experiencing similar problems, and we had a revelation—being an
expert in behavior analysis is not sufficient for a behavior analyst
to be a successful consultant. As our field continues to grow, it
is critical that we educate behavior analysts on all of the skills
needed to be effective and make a difference in the life of others.
Applied behavior analysis evolved from the experimental analysis
of behavior in the mid-1960s. Our field became formalized
in 1968 with the publication of the first issue of the Journal of
Applied Behavior Analysis under the editorship of Mont Wolf at
the University of Kansas. The blueprint for the field was established
in a seminal article in that issue, “Some Current Dimensions of
Applied Behavior Analysis,” authored by Don Baer, Mont Wolf,
and Todd Risley (1968). In this article, they outlined the key distinctions
of this new field that made it different from the rest of
psychology. As described in the article, behavior analysts were
interested in solving applied problems by using a to-be-developed
technology based on the science of behavior; that is, operant conditioning.
This technology would be inherently data based. It would
include its own methodology for demonstrating cause–
effect,
that is, the single-subject research design, and it would evolve
over time to give us a vast array of techniques that would show
how these procedures would help people improve the quality of
their life. In 1968, the cutting-edge thought-leaders who authored
this important article did not anticipate today’s overwhelming
demand for behavior analysis. This enormous need for services
has developed in the past 5 years, and services are now provided
in many countries by Board Certified Behavior Analysts®.
As a result, master’s degree programs have sprouted like wildflowers
across the United States and indeed the world. Two-year
and three-year graduate programs that turn out behavior analysts
by the hundreds are now working overtime to provide professionals
to work with individual clients who are autistic, developmentally
delayed, brain injured, or otherwise disabled. In some cases,
behavior analysts are working one-on-one with clients, and in
other situations, they are working with teams of paraprofessionals
who are implementing behavior programs designed by a behavior
analyst.
Behavior analysts are also working in business, industry, government,
and organizational settings to improve human performance
in safety-related areas or to increase productivity, product
quality, or service. In these settings, the behavior analyst takes on
the role of the consultant, the professional advice giver who must
know a great deal about how organizations work and don’t work
and about how to train, motivate, and manage people in settings
that were never designed from the outset to be optimal for human
performance.
As it turns out, being an expert in behavior analysis does not
provide all of the necessary skills to be an effective, successful
consultant. The settings where we work have often been visited
before by other consultants who had no behavioral training
whatsoever but who, with their finely tuned sense of business etiquette,
social skills, and gift of gab, have made it difficult for the
behavior-
technology-savvy behavior analyst to make much headway.
Upper-level management of human-service organizations
and CEOs of major corporations now have an expectation of a
quality of interaction that is hard to acquire in graduate programs
that offer only courses in applied operant conditioning, research
methodology, functional analysis, data collection, and practicum
experience working one-on-one with an autistic child. And it
turns out that working as a consultant in a developmental training
center, in a classroom for children with behavior disorders, or
with parents who need to learn how to manage their unruly children
requires that the behavior analyst must interface with a wide
variety of people who present (a medical term meaning “show up
with”) an amazing array of contentious and obstructive behaviors
that can thwart the unwary and unprepared would-be behavioral
consultant.
This became obvious when the first author was contacted by
the supervisor of a recent graduate—a hardworking and bright
individual who was failing on one of his first consulting assignments.
This budding behavior analyst was yet another young
professional who found himself in a dilemma much like the one
Kimberly described to us (in the case at the beginning of this preface).
According to the supervisor, the new behavior analyst had
missed the initial cues from management that he was in trouble,
and when he finally learned there were problems, he did not seek
help. His tendency was to blame the direct-care staff for their
shortcomings and failure to carry out his programs. Upon further
investigation, he had simply been unprepared for a semihostile
school environment that paid lip service to wanting behavioral
consultation but in truth was set in its traditional ways.
Rather than rebuke or blame the new consultant, the first
author made an attempt to determine what went wrong in his
training. This lead to countless interviews with current and former
students, supervisors of consultants, trainers of consultants,
and CEOs of companies that hired behavior analysts. In addition,
senior consultants were asked a series of questions about their
experiences dealing with tough problems in a variety of settings,
how they solved these problems, and what they had learned from
the experience. When possible, these consultants and supervisors
were asked to provide working scenarios that described in a concise
format the nature of the problems encountered.
From these interviews and written scenarios, we developed over
a 6-month period key words and descriptors of skills and s
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