In this very special 100th episode, we’ve rounded up some of the best professional advice our guests have ever received. Whether it’s building a community around you, learning to regulate yourself and staying calm in the moment, or fine-tuning your communication skills, being a BCBA requires constant learning and growth. We’ve hosted some amazing ABA professionals on our podcast; many of them have flourished, excelled, and became experts in their particular areas of service. We thought it would be a great idea to pick out some of the best tips and advice from our episodes, and here, you’ll hear straight from our guests what’s helped them the most in the field.

Whether you’re a newly minted BCBA or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with wisdom to help you along your personal and professional journeys.

What’s Inside:

• Top professional advice from our guests.

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Some students have difficulty learning words and manding with flash cards at a table. Sometimes the natural world is a much better learning environment, and that’s where incidental teaching comes in. Incidental teaching is a strategy that uses ABA principles to provide structured learning opportunities in the natural environment, and it’s all about motivation. Through incidental teaching, you utilize the child’s natural interests and initiation while still contriving situations.

Some of the misconceptions around incidental teaching are that it’s completely child led, and that you don’t get many practice opportunities. Here, we discuss why that’s not true and how to use the concept appropriately. We also discuss the differences between incidental teaching and natural environmental teaching and provide tips on how to contrive learning opportunities. To grab our free NET data sheet, click the link below. 

What’s Inside:

• Misconceptions around incidental teaching.
• The difference between incidental teaching and natural environment teaching.
• Tips for contriving learning opportunities.

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NET Data Sheet

As ABA practitioners, we have many teaching procedures in our toolbox. Here, we’re discussing precision teaching, which is also called fluency-based instruction, and how we can use it to benefit our students. Many of us remember having to memorize multiplication tables in elementary school. While it was an intimidating task, chances are we still know all the tables by heart as adults, because we learned them to fluency as children. In today’s classrooms, math is taught in a much different manner. Fluency in things like simple multiplication is diminished, which impacts math skills overall.

Precision teaching, or fluency-based instruction, is a system of teaching in ABA that utilizes exact measurements and data to guide instruction and curriculum choices. We discuss what it looks like when put into practice and how to define fluency. One way fluency benefits our students is through skill acquisition. When they can complete tasks quickly and with ease, they’re less likely to engage in escape or problem behaviors. We discuss all the ways to use fluency, including social skills like commenting. We also talk about how to make precision teaching less complicated and more fun.

What’s Inside:

• What is fluency-based instruction and how does it help our students?
• Why fluency is important in terms of skill acquisition and reducing negative behavior.
• Examples of fluency-based instruction in action.

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Published Fluency Aims
Episode 051: The Literacy Epidemic with Michael Maloney

BCBA Steve Ward has been working as a behavior analyst since the mid 1990’s. As the lead behavior analyst for a center school, Steve conducted more than 100 functional assessments and wrote behavior plans to address a wide range of behaviors. He has also worked as a consultant, where he has designed programming for a wide variety of repertoires, including verbal behavior, daily living skills, and academics, among a host of others. Today, he runs Whole Child Consulting along with his partner Terry. Here, Steve shares his story about how he got into the field and how he uses multiple methods when working with students.

Steve is passionate about play, and his personal experience served as an inspiration to incorporate more fun into making play motivating. He shares tips for how to make play more effective and fun for students. We talk about how to measure data during play and Steve’s Inventory for a Good Learner Repertoires (IGLR). Steve shares what prompted him to create it and how to put it into practice. We also discuss how practitioners can think outside the box, the value of supervision and mentorship, Steve’s courses on shaping, and more.

Steve is joining us on an upcoming webinar where he’ll be sharing more about the IGLR. The event is on Wednesday, May 17th at 12:00pm EST, and you can sign up via the events page on our website. 

What’s Inside:

• How to make play more motivating and fun for students.
• Info on the Inventory for a Good Learner Repertoires (IGLR).
• Steve’s tips for newly minted BCBAs.

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Whole Child Consulting
Good Learner Repertoires Facebook Page

As students become more proficient at manding and move to an intermediate requesting phase, their mean length of utterance should increase. The types of mands they use should also expand. Intermediate learners are those who can use phrases of three or more words. When a student moves into a more intermediate phase, we often focus on pre-academic skills and forget to expand their manding repertoire. These learners have a decent receptive vocabulary, but still get stuck on certain aspects of language. They still need help with manding to bring more variety into their requests.

Here, we dive into the kinds of skills we should be teaching at the intermediate level for requesting. We cover how to figure out what a student’s manding needs are and whether to expand their main length of utterance or their repertoire. We talk about requesting for action, why it’s helpful to stay away from words like “please” and “thank you”, and requesting for assistance. We also discuss how to teach self-advocacy through appropriate protests and requests for attention.

Click the link below for a free resource on manding with ‘wh questions’.

What’s Inside:

• Which skills to teach at the intermediate level for requesting.
• How to discover what a student’s manding needs are.
• How to teach requests for action, assistance, and appropriate protests.

Mentioned In This Episode:
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Free Resource – Manding with ‘Wh Questions’

BCBA and play consultant Kaylin Moss is one of our members. She works in the field of early intervention and natural environment teaching. Kaylin started her career as a teacher at a local charter school for children with autism. She was inspired by the behavioral analyst at the school, who was a big resource and began looking into her line of work. Kaylin then began education for behavioral analysis, and her partner at the school became her mentor and supervisor. At first, she focused on behavior therapy but then switched gears to early intervention, mostly due to a helpful push from her mom.

Here, we talk with Kaylin about her transition from teacher to BCBA and how she uses her skills in her current role. We discuss her supervision experience and how starting at the grassroots level in the trenches shaped her career. Kaylin shares information about the Play Project, which is an alternative to ABA therapy. It’s a natural environment, has a play-based strategy, and has a similar foundation to ABA. We also talk about what play looks like in an ABA setting, how to support parents through play therapy, and tips for new BCBAs.

What’s Inside:

• How Kaylin transitioned from teaching into behavior analysis.
• Information about the Play Project and play therapy.
• How to incorporate play in an ABA setting.

Mentioned In This Episode:
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Functional assessments are the gold standard of behavior analysis. They’re the best technology we have to show the effectiveness and the function of our antecedent and consequence manipulation. Conducting functional assessments in a school setting comes with its own set of unique challenges, and behavior analyst Matt Cicoria is joining us at our next live CEU event to cover just that. The event takes place on Thursday, April 20th at 12:00pm EST. Matt also hosts the Behavioral Observations Podcast, which is linked below.

If you’re anything like us, you have a hectic schedule. The next thing you know, three years have passed and it’s time to get recertified. We wanted to make the CEU process easier by offering all the CEUs you need for recertification as well as presenting our live CEUs once a month. Our website has a new page specifically for events where you can easily sign up and add our events to your calendar. Check out the new page by clicking the link below.

What’s Inside:

• Information on our upcoming CEU event with Matt Cicoria.

Mentioned In This Episode:
HowToABA.com/join
How to ABA on YouTube
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HowToABA.com/events
Behavioral Observations Podcast
EP 67: How to Use ABA in Classrooms

Shane Finkelstein is one of Shana’s original ABA clients from 20 years ago and is here to talk about his experience with autism. Ever since Shane was young, he had several social problems and was having trouble fitting in with people outside his family. He was diagnosed with autism at the age of two, which is also when he began ABA therapy. ABA helped Shane develop good social skills as well as a good work ethic. He attended several public schools where he excelled academically, but struggled socially. That changed when he started attending a special needs camp and school. Through school, camp, and ABA therapy, Shane is now able to form meaningful relationships with other people while still being himself.

Shane shares his favorite aspects of ABA, especially weekend outings, which helped him form healthy relationships and thrive in social settings. We also talked to Shane about the skills he’s currently working on and his experience in the workforce. Shane also shared with us a poster he created on the last day of his contract. You can take a closer look at the poster here: www.howtoaba.com


What’s Inside:

• How ABA had a positive impact in Shane’s life.
• Shane’s experience in the workforce.
• All about the poster Shane create on the last day of his contract.
• Advice Shane would give to his younger self.

Mentioned In This Episode:
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Shane on Facebook

Disclaimer:
Testimonials herein are unpaid and unsolicited. Experiences of those who have provided testimonials do not guarantee future results. None of the information shared in this interview is from a current client.

Erin Porter is a family autism coach from Ontario, Canada. As a teacher, she noticed some gaps in the school system and began to fill them in. She also noticed there was a parental piece missing, so she applied everything she knew about teaching and programming to supporting parents who have newly diagnosed children with autism. Erin helps parents fill in their own gaps while they wait for funding or to come off waitlists so they can get started with early intervention. Receiving a diagnosis can be an overwhelming time for parents and Erin walks them through the next steps in their own unique journeys.

Erin shares her thoughts on the major gaps and challenges she sees. Some of the challenges start before the diagnosis, including how to talk to doctors. Understanding communication is key as well as navigating services. Parents can also be apprehensive to take action and prefer to “wait and see”, but early intervention and establishing a connection are so important. The gap often gets wider when parents wait and Erin supports parents in trying different things, even before there’s a diagnosis. We also talk to Erin about how she supports parents through her Guided Autism Program.

What’s Inside:

• Common gaps when it comes to supporting parents of children with a diagnosis.
• Why early intervention is essential.
• Information on Erin’s Guided Autism Program.

Mentioned In This Episode:
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Launching Life with Autism – Facebook Group
Guided Autism Program Website

Functional communication, or FCT, is a way to decrease problem behavior through teaching effective communication skills. Shira once had a student who had a ton of language. He would talk all the time in sentences and communicate what he wanted to do, but he didn’t request things. He sometimes engaged in negative attention-seeking behavior but didn’t know how to appropriately get attention. She taught him how to mand for attention by using text cues, which is an FCT technique, and he stopped engaging in aggression.

All behavior is communication, and they’re two sides of the same coin. Kids don’t misbehave because they’re bad or challenging, they’re trying to get attention to get their needs met and it’s often effective. With FCT, we are looking at how to increase the skill and give the child a replacement for the negative or unwanted behavior. The replacement needs to be faster, easier, and better than the negative behavior. Here, we discuss where to start when teaching mands, how to collect data, and how to avoid developing chains of responses by using transfer trials.

What’s Inside:

• What FCT is and how it helps correct unwanted behavior.
• Where to start when teaching mands.
• How to collect data.
• The importance of transfer trials.

Mentioned In This Episode:
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The Purpose of Transfer Trials