PART 1: Don’t Save It All For The CABs: How to assess, identify, and teach relevant skills within HRE

Course Abstract: When you are designing treatment centered on SBT, the cornerstone of the process involves teaching from joy. Finding contexts with varying dimensions that bring joy to our learners and involve high levels of happiness, relaxation and engagement is well worth spending time developing before attempting to move through the rest of the steps of SBT. Depending on our learner’s history and setting, we may find ourselves spending a bit of treatment time working on this context before we can move ahead with the process. There may be pressure from caregivers, employers or funders to begin “working on the goals,” but moving ahead with the process before we have consistent reinforcement can actually impede progress and potentially set us up for unsuccessful treatment. Often, when we speak to people who said, “We tried SBT but it didn’t work,” we find errors within the process that explain the results, and moving ahead too quickly before developing HRE can be one of the top reasons. Addressing skills within the reinforcement context also allows us to work on boundary acceptance, which can be a challenge for maintaining HRE for many learners. When staff feel like the reinforcement context is a “free for all” time with no rules or instruction, this makes the process very challenging in shared spaces and difficult for staff to sustain for any period of time.

In this presentation, we will talk about the importance of developing a strong HRE context and, in doing so, assessing and identifying skills that can be taught within that context. Some of these skills will allow for speedier progress with later steps of the SBT process; some of them will strengthen the learner’s leisure repertoires and allow for wider ranges of reinforcement activities (thus lowering the EO for severe problem behavior); and some of them will be skills that could have been saved for a CAB branch, which you can teach right away instead. Embedding learning trials within the reinforcement context also paves the way for longer SBT sessions with more learning trials for the specific steps of the chain and allows the implementers to develop instructional control within shared joy.

Learning Objectives:

• Describe the importance and utility of setting learning goals within the reinforcement condition of SBT.
• Identify methods to assess for skills that can be taught or strengthened within the reinforcement condition of SBT.
• Identify and operationally define learning goals within the reinforcement condition of SBT.
• Identify specific activities and interventions that can be used within SBT, customized to a specific learner to both match their HRE components while teaching new skills embedded in those components.

Presenter Bios:
Emily Kearney is a BCBA in the US who focuses on using the nuance of our science across populations to teach effectively and safely. She is guided by the Constructional Approach, which aims to alleviate and prevent distress and discomfort by focusing on missing skill repertoires rather than behavior reduction. Using a component/composite analysis allows us to determine what is missing and why the behavior that might otherwise be labeled as disruptive, challenging and so forth, is perfectly logical from the perspective of the learner. The SBT process fits very nicely into this framework for some learners and Emily really enjoys mentoring other BCBAs to understand the components in a deep way so that they can best apply them in unique combinations for their learners, and really tease out the best teaching methodology to reach socially-significant outcomes for their learners.

Taylor Johnson has an MS in Behavior Analysis and Therapy and is a BCBA. She is also an Internationally certified Behavior Analyst (IBA) and a Board Certified Autism Professional. (BCAP). She has been implementing Skills-Based Treatment for over 5 years and has also been a Moderator in the PFA and SBT Facebook group since June 2021. She has implemented the process with both highly verbal learners as well as non-verbal learners and in both English and German. She has completed over 25 hours of online training with FTF consulting. She was clinical director of one of the first ABA clinics in Stuttgart, Germany and is currently offering direct services as well as parent training to clients in Germany and Switzerland.