Welcome to our ACT Now ABA blog series. This company is like no other. We’re a group of dedicated applied behavior analysts who see this moment in our field as a turning point. We see an opportunity to bring rigor to ABA practitioner use of ACTr with people whose emotions, thoughts, and memories get in the way of their responding effectively to behavior interventions.
Thoughts, memories, and emotions are not the targets of an ABA intervention, but they matter. People care about how they feel and what they think, so why wouldn’t the practitioners that they entrust to help them?
How do you show others you care and help them through the swamp of their emotions or thoughts? How do you do all this while staying in your lane as ABA practitioners?
Here are a few key ideas:
- 1. ACTr easily fits within an ABA scope of practice. You target socially relevant, observable, measurable behavior. You assess the maintaining variables and construct a function-matched intervention. If things don’t work out, you re-assess the function and design a new intervention. If you’re still not getting criterion performance, you figure that maybe your client is engaging in some private interfering behavior. Identify it, address it, and if you’ve done well, you go back to your function-matched intervention and watch as the contingencies begin to evoke desired overt behavior.
- 2. ACTr does not need to be cookie-cutter activities that you pull from a protocol. Those exist and you can use them, but you can learn to work with your client to design completely person-centered interventions. Once you learn how to do this, the strategies you develop belong to the individual you’re working with. Why? Because they helped you design them.
- 3. ACTr involves data collection, social and nonsocial reinforcement, shaping, fading, rule-construction and rule-evaluation. You can find all of this in the BACB 5th Edition Task List.
- 4. Capture a Cloud is a 4-day ACTr intensive during which we use instructional methods rooted in behavior analysis (errorless discrimination to build composite skills, behavior skills training, and coaching) to build practitioner repertoires. Our aim is that upon completion of this course, attendees will be able to use skills they learned in the workshop as soon as they get back to work.
- 5. We see ACTr as it currently exists as being an approach that is highly adaptable to different contexts. Our evening session presenters will invite attendees into dialogues to extend ABA and ACTr into new areas – Black liberation, substance use recovery, work with Indigenous peoples, with domestic abuse survivors, Autistic people, and LGBTQIA2+ communities.
To learn more about us, check out our upcoming blogs. To learn more about Capture a Cloud, click here.