Organizational performance engineering (OPE) represents one of the most impactful yet underutilized applications of behavior analysis in human service settings. While behavior analysts are extensively trained to analyze and modify client behavior, the performance of the staff members who deliver those interventions receives far less systematic attention.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Florida Association of Behavior Analysis
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →Do you work as a program designer, staff trainer, supervisor, or director of an agency that provides educational services to clients with learning difficulties? Are you satisfied with your clients' progress? Behavior analysis developed a powerful technology for helping people, but too many clients don't receive the benefits. Why not? The easy answer is that employees don't do what they are told. But the employees' performance, just like their clients' performance, is a product of their environment. Do employees have the resources, training, and management necessary to help their clients achieve their goals? What about their supervisors and their staff trainers? What about their directors? Organizations are groups of individuals who must work together to provide their clients with the outcomes they want. The failure of clients to make adequate progress is not usually an individual employee performance problem, but a performance problem at the system process, and individual levels of the organization. This workshop will teach you how to design and implement an ethical, pragmatic, organizational performance engineering process to change how providers work together, so that every client makes efficient progress. The EARS process has the following steps: 1) Evaluate client progress; 2) Analyze causes of provider performance problems; 3) Recommend changes in provider resources, training, and management; and 4) Solve provider performance problems by designing and implementing recommended changes in provider resources, training, and management.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 4 | Ethics |
| COA | 4 | — |
| FL MH/PSY | 3 | — |
Since earning his Ed. D. in Educational Psychology from the Behavior Analysis in Human Resources program at West Virginia University, Dr. Bruce has taught behavior analysis in both undergraduate and graduate programs and consulted with variety of organizations. He is the author of Instructional Design Made Easy—a workbook for designing more efficient learning programs, and EARS, a pragmatic, organizational performance engineering process that can be used to improve how people work together so that every client or student makes efficient progress. EARS is an acronym for 1) Evaluate student progress; Analyze causes of teacher performance problems and the performance problems of those who provide resources, training, and management to support the teacher; Recommend changes in teacher and provider resources, training, and management; and Solve provider performance problems by designing and implementing recommended solutions. In addition to conducting EARS workshops, he is writing a second book, Engineering Schools for Student Success, and designing a web-mobile application, “Progress Charter‚” that will make it easier for schools to design and implement the EARS process.
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All behavior-analytic intervention is individualized. The information on this page is for educational purposes and does not constitute clinical advice. Treatment decisions should be informed by the best available published research, individualized assessment, and obtained with the informed consent of the client or their legal guardian. Behavior analysts are responsible for practicing within the boundaries of their competence and adhering to the BACB Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts.