OBM in Educational and Human Service Settings

by Beth Sulzer-Azaroff, Ph.D., BCBA
Professor Emeritus University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In the year 2000, a team of behavior analysts affiliated with The Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center of the University of Massachusetts Medical School was awarded federal funds from the U. S. Department of Education, Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, under a program entitled “Learning Anytime, Anywhere Partnership (LAAP).” As a way of addressing the major need for personnel skilled in applied behavior analysis in the autism education field, we undertook to design, develop, and field-test a four-course undergraduate level internet-based series entitled Behavioral Intervention in Autism (BIA). An early step involved using a Delphi process to identify what knowledge and skills key leaders in the field agreed our students would need to master. Among the 40 plus topics that were endorsed, Working with staff was one considered important, and we agreed. Consequently, we included material on Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) within the curriculum and applied those principles in conducting the program as well. Now, after field-testing our instructional modules, we are revamping this material to include an expanded version of the major points. Below I discuss the general need for managerial and supervisory personnel in early intervention, public education, and human service organizations, to be skilled not only in ABA but also in OBM; also some ways managers and supervisors of autism educational programs’ can use OBM methods to address their programmatic needs. The ways we ourselves used OBM in the design and implementation of our curriculum are described for illustrative purposes.

Identifying Personnel Skilled ABA
Across the OBM community in general, managers of organizations providing behavior analytic educational and training services recognize how essential it is for their personnel to be thoroughly schooled in ABA concepts and practices. To assure those qualifications, they typically examine the credentials of candidates for positions, including letters of recommendation, transcripts, personal statements, interviews, and so on. Beyond that, some may observe samples of the applicant’s performance on the job. However, as any manager knows, that kind of information, while essential, cannot convey the whole story. Will the individual retain the same level of enthusiasm, remain patient, transform knowledge into skill, and apply ABA procedures consistently? How about loyalty to the program, conviviality among colleagues, parents and supervisors? Do managers hire and hope for the best, or do they need to recognize their own and supervisors’ obligation to take an active part in the process?

Addressing the Need via OBM/ABA
Educational and service managers schooled in the principles of ABA and acquainted with the steadily accumulating evidence of its positive results realize how rigorously they need to participate in the process to advance the success of their programs. Beyond essential administrative functions, including hiring of promising personnel, they recognize the need for incorporating ABA practices within their programs. Included in that responsibility is assuring that personnel:

• are thoroughly informed about the entire array of critical job performances expected of them
• know (can say) exactly how to do their jobs: how they are supposed to perform on a daily, hourly, even momentary basis and are capable of actually following through accordingly
• demonstrate they have mastered and can perform fluently (can do) all the requirements their jobs
• are witness to objective, quantitative evidence of how closely their performance matches explicit performance measures and goals
• and receive a dense schedule of reinforcement for their worthy performance.
  Easier said than done! Let us examine each of these responsibilities a bit more closely:

Articulating Optimal Job Performance Skills. As federally mandated in the U.S., we specify individual objectives for students and clients with special educational needs. In the same way, we need to articulate common and individual goals and objectives for employees. Only then can they be aware of what the organization considers worthy performance. Naturally, as behavior analysts we know to specify those job skills as a set of operations, detailing the actions (behaviors) the person is to take, under which specific antecedent conditions (contextual and discriminative stimuli), with what results (consequences). Instances in the case of our courses are being able to define reinforcement (i.e., say, write) including its essential parameters (e.g., immediacy of timing, appropriateness of stimulus choice etc.) and to be able to do or demonstrate in video recordings of their teaching that they have mastered the skills of applying those parameters correctly.

Demonstrating Performance Mastery: Saying. Just as we “experts” in ABA/OBM are (heaven forbid!) capable of imperfection in our daily performance - on the job, at home or out in the community- so are the personnel in our employ. Within our BIA program, we recognized the need to present and test for mastery concepts specific to the field of autism education, such as the rules for conducting discrete trial training, or for teaching pivotal communication or social skills. Naturally, we also attempted to apply an extensive array of behavioral instructional methods, including most of the elements of the

Personalized System of Instruction (Keller, 1968). Nevertheless, even if our trainees have passed a verbal examination on the application of behavior analytic concepts, that only shows how well they can “talk the talk” of ABA in general or specifically in their field. Flawlessly “walking the ABA walk” is something different.

Demonstrating Performance Mastery: Doing. If saying does not necessarily equal doing, the manager needs to determine what conceptual and applied skills the employee has mastered, then teach the remainder. In BIA, for instance, we used modeling, shaping, differential reinforcement, and so on, within a precise series of performance exercises. And we asked for and/or gathered evidence of progress in the form of permanent products or video tape records.

Viewing Evidence of Progress. The precision of ABA technology enables OBM practitioners readily to design valid and reliable measurement tools. Often these are in the form of objectives mastered, skills displayed on a checklist, steps achieved on a task analysis, time blocks during which the clearly defined behaviors of interest were or were not expressed, and so on. The ability to measure enables us to quantify and even graph progress. If a goal is set in advance, graphic representations of the measured results can be matched against progress toward that goal.

We put this feature into place for our BIA students by taking a list of each of their assignments and placing them on the ordinate of a graph, in ascending order. Dates were placed along the abscissa. We outlined the box to the right of each assignment corresponding to the due date for that assignment. This permitted students to document the date on which they completed each assignment. (Figure 1, displays a portion of the graph.) Being able to “get ahead of the curve” demarcated by the boxes (highlighted here by the grey area) undoubtedly was gratifying to students.

Actually over 40 assignments were spread across 17 weeks. The darkened area highlights the suggested rate line to be described by students. The vertical dashed line shows where a number of columns were eliminated to simplify the present display.

Continue reading this article (page 2)...