When clients fail to make progress despite competent individual providers, the problem is often systemic rather than clinical. A technician implementing a well-designed behavior intervention plan may produce excellent session data, yet the client's overall trajectory stagnates because the technician's efforts are not coordinated with the speech therapist's goals, the parent training program contradicts the clinic procedures, and supervision occurs too infrequently to detect and correct implementation drift.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Tennessee Association for Behavior Analysis
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Join Free →When providers don't work together, clients fail to make efficient progress towards mastery of the knowledge and skills they need for successful lives. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" (Yeats, 1989). Ethical leaders do what it takes so that providers will act in each client's long-term best interest. "If you pit a good performer against a bad system, the system wins almost every time" (Rummler & Brache, 1995). We can use behavior analysis to engineer provider and recipient behavior change at the system, process, and individual levels of a school, center, or tutoring program, to solve its organizational performance problems so that every client will make efficient progress towards mastery of the knowledge and skills needed for a successful life. "We contend that the leader's role is to establish the conditions under which all performers will execute the mission, vision, and values of the organization" (Daniels and Daniels, 2005). I will tell the story of a preschool for children with autism that was losing clients and staff because it lacked a pragmatic organizational performance engineering process to ensure provider, parent, and client success. We designed and implemented the EARS process of organizational performance engineering to solve this problem. The EARS process has the following steps: 1) Evaluate client progress using frequent, accurate, and sensitive measures, to identify as soon as possible when a client is not making efficient progress. 2) Analyze the causes of provider performance problems using direct, accurate measures. 3) Recommend changes in provider resources, training, and management based on the analysis. 4) Solve provider performance problems by designing and implementing changes in provider resources, training, and management.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1.5 | Ethics |
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.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 research articles with practitioner takeaways
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
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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.