Association for Behavior Analysis International

Within the human service industry, often a diversity of professionals with various backgrounds, training, and credential come together to support individuals. This diversity can create more specialized treatment for the individuals they support but also may create difficulty when working to support individuals. Collaboration with all levels of professionals working with our clients and stakeholders is essential to ensure ethical and inclusive practices for all consumers of behavior analysis. The papers presented here represent a behavior analytic approach to measuring collaboration as it relates to ethical and inclusive practice. Included here are the results of an inclusive team collaboration model implemented in a special education school that includes direct instructional staff to increase staff and student performance, the results of a survey of behavior analysts and other professionals that collaborate with behavior analysts on collaboration and the use of soft skills, the results of surveys of students and faculty of behavior analysis on inclusive practices within their experiences in higher education as it relates to inclusivity and belonging, and the results of an ethical decision making model as it relates to both behavior analysts and registered behavior technicians.

Intermediate audience is required. Those who supervise or teach behavior analytic programs are recommended. Experience with supervision and collaboration of staff members across domains and at various levels of education would assist in comprehension of material presented.

There is a substantial body of research on the importance of providing frequent opportunities to respond (OTR) to increase learning outcomes for students. In special education classrooms with multiple treatment providers, treatment coordination to ensure that these opportunities are provided can be complex and challenging. This paper will discuss an intervention designed to increase the opportunities to respond for 3 students in an autism classroom in the context of a multiple-baseline design. An inclusive team model, involving weekly scheduled meetings with the direct instructional staff, the classroom teacher, clinical team members, and a lead BCBA-D interventionist was implemented. The results showed that collaborative goal setting, nondirective consultation, feedback, and reinforcement strategies implemented at the meetings were effective in increasing OTR to IEP programs. The positive role of team collaboration was reflected in acceptability surveys, where direct care staff rated the team discussions as the most helpful treatment component.

Scientifically established, effective treatments for autism are based on the principles of applied behavior analysis. With the increasingly high prevalence of autism and growing demand for effective behavioral interventions, now, more than 70% of the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) certificants work in professional areas specific to autism. However, given the complex symptomatology and dynamic interaction of the deficits associated with autism, treatment from an array of professionals, each representing different disciplines and specialties within medicine, education, and allied health is typically warranted. Therefore, to best meet the various needs of individuals on the autism spectrum, behavior analysts will often be required to work collaboratively with professionals from other disciplines and must acquire the skills to do so effectively. To learn more about these collaborative relationships and identify opportunities for further education and training, we surveyed behavior analysts and professionals from other disciplines including speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, educators, administrators, and psychologists. Overall, participants agreed that continued collaboration was useful although the results indicate challenges in collaboration and disparities in reported perceptions and experiences. These findings, as well as ideas for fostering better collaboration will be reviewed.

Recent events have confirmed the need for behavior analysis to attend to issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in service provision and in higher education. This leads to a call to action to increase cultural responsiveness and cultural humility in training opportunities for students of behavior analysis and practicing behavior analysts. In order to ensure that training opportunities for students and staff appropriately address these issues in the field, surveys were developed and deployed across an ABA department of higher education to assess the effects of various initiatives taken by the department to increase inclusivity and belonging. The surveys identified areas of growth for the department and serve as ongoing assessments for inclusivity and belonging within the department and the higher education institution as a whole.