Consultants (How To) - Jun 20, 2014
Hiring a consultant/behaviour consultant/senior therapist/... can be a daunting task. Where do you look? How do you know who's good? and what makes a good supervisor?
Let's start out with where to look.
The field of behaviour analysis is amidst a shift. They have finally banded together, and created a "licensing" venture: called the bacb (www.bacb.com). This organization licenses two kinds of people. BCaBAs and BCBAs.
The first is a BCaBA, this is someone who has taken a combination of undergraduate courses, and is certified to assist a BCBA. This means they will always need to be supervised by someone else to do their job. This is not a stand-alone position. They are required to attend a certain number of workshops during their licensing period to qualify to stay licensed.
The second is a BCBA, this is someone who has taken graduate level courses, and is certified to be a stand-alone entity. This means they come up with the programs, do their research, and utilize best practices. They too are required to attend a certain number of workshops to qualify for their license.
Now, what does all this mean to the consumer? It means that there is a body governing behaviour professionals! Like you'd seek an "SLP" as opposed to someone with "speech-language skills", so too can you seek a "BCBA" as opposed to someone who has "experience in behaviour management". This means there is a body of ethics they are bound to, and a body to complain to if you feel they're not doing appropriate things.
Now, back to the question: where to look for providers? The bacb has a list on their website of providers, what their designation is, and where they're located. This gives you added comfort that the person you contact is in good standing with the bacb. Yes, it's an american enterprise at the moment, Canada is working to create a college in conjunction - but that might be some time away - so for now, use this list and these professionals if you can and wish to.
Next, how do you know who's good? Well, that can be answered based on information from other people. Ask for contact information for past clients. Get their experience, come up with a list of questions you'd like answers to. Find out what you can, and if it doesn't feel right, don't do it. Follow your gut. Always. You are seeking someone who will set the trajectory for your child after all.
Now, the last question, what makes a good supervisor? The most important factor I've found is that they are participating in, and have been participating in ongoing education. This can be the form of a masters degree, or some undergraduate coursework, or attending workshops. One of the luxuries of being a therapist is that if you work with a variety of supervisors, you can see trends in the types of programs, and newest and latest great ideas in ABA/IBI. However, as a supervisor, you can become very isolated, and lose touch with anything except your reality unless you stay up to date in the field.
So, ask your potential supervisor questions about what areas in ABA/IBI they're interested in. What have they looked up lately? Where do they get their programs? What are their sources? These are important questions because the field is always evolving. New great ideas are out there all the time, waiting for people to put them into practice.
I'll provide an example: I just finished reading "An evaluation of the number of presentations of target sounds during stimulus-stimulus pairing trials" by a variety of people (including Carbone). The results of this research (cause really that gets you down the importance of this experimental design), were that multiple repetitions of a target sound aren't necessarily better. It really depends on the child. The real winner (for language acquisition) is the strength of the reinforcer. In English: if you say "buh", the child echoes and you provide bubbles, you will get more reliable "buh"s every time if the child LOVES bubbles. If the child doesn't love bubbles, they won't say it. Also, saying "buh buh buh" isn't going to be stronger (necessarily) to get them to say "buh" at all for bubbles.
So some more food for thought. Choose carefully.
