Category: Blog

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. 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. 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. 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 5^th Edition Task List.

4. 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. 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.

ACT Now ABA is anything but the usual ABA training organization. We’re in business to change the business.

Our aim is to teach ABA practitioners to do their jobs with sensitivity, cultural humility, and care for the private world of their clients. We teach Acceptance and Commitment Training (ACTr) as a foundational approach to delivering ABA services.

That’s cool, but how we aim to do this is more important than the goal.

For example, check out our board of directors. The ACT Now ABA board is a coalition of diverse humans with a range of different views. We assembled the board to guide our decision-making based on our shared human-centered values.

Enasha Anglade is a Black American woman who’s bringing ABA and ACTr to the work of helping domestic abuse survivors access needed services.

Cinda Atwood is a neurodivergent doctoral student with two Autistic kids. She brings her unique focus to the needs of Autistic women, caregivers, and learners.

Nasiah Cirincione-Ulezi is a leading ABA voice for compassion, nonviolent communication, and seeing self in relation to a huge purpose in life. A Black American woman who has seen many changes come to ABA over the span of her career, Nasiah speaks to the need for creating brave spaces in which we speak up with heart and humanity.

Madison Dirickson is a doctoral student who’s committed to helping individuals recovering from substance use issues to get their recovery work completed so that they can live full, dynamic lives.

Brianna Kauer is a peer-reviewed ACT trainer – one of the very first BCBAs to be given a thumb’s up by the Association for Contextual Behavior Science for her training methods. She has designed a unique case conceptualization procedure that is rooted in radical behaviorism and consistent with common procedures in ABA.

TL Petty is a doctoral learner who is investigating ways to help families and friends of transitioning people use correct pronouns.

Tom Szabo is me. I’ve been a peer-reviewed trainer for the last decade and trained thousands to use ACTr in their ABA practices. My commitments are to make sure ACTr grows, changes, and flourishes within ABA and that practitioners from diverse backgrounds work together to make this happen.

Jonathan Tarbox is a leader in the research, practice, and social justice spaces of our field. His down to earth style of communicating and willingness to explore his humanity make him a visionary in our field.

Kendra Thomson is a researcher who has discovered the power of teaming with caregivers in teaching others ACTr. Her commitments to the well-being of parents is matched only by her interest in social justice.

To learn more about us, check out our upcoming blogs. To learn more about Capture a Cloud, click here.