The field of applied behavior analysis has invested heavily in defining what effective supervision looks like in terms of clinical skill development, ethical compliance, and competency documentation. It has invested far less in examining how the health and wellness of the supervisor affects the quality of supervision — and, through that, the quality of client services and the retention of the workforce that delivers them.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Self Set Go
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →Supervision is a demanding role in which many behavior analysts quickly find themselves in having had little to no explicit training on how to manage this role successfully. Being an effective supervisor requires balancing ethical responsibilities, supporting supervisees, ensuring quality client-focused services, and maintaining personal well-being. Yet, many behavior analysts struggle to manage their own health and wellness and teach appropriate related skills to their supervisees, which may contribute to workplace stressors, burnout, and turnover. Beyond making time for preferred activities, actively managing health and wellness includes regularly self-evaluating one's own biases and scope of competence, cultivating healthy interpersonal relationships, leveraging supports, setting appropriate boundaries, managing self-imposed expectations for perfection, and creating a healthy framing of mistakes. In this talk, we will explore these 6 critical repertoires for successful supervision and review tips for developing these repertoires in supervisees. By actively focusing on their own well-being, and teaching supervisees to do the same, supervisors can create healthier, more effective supervisory relationships and work environments.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | Supervision |
| QABA | 1 | Supervision |
Tyra Sellers is the owner of TP Sellers, LLC consulting and Scholar-in-Residence at Pass the Big ABA Exam (PTB). She earned a B.A. in Philosophy and M.A. in Special Education from San Francisco State University, a J.D. from the University of San Francisco, a Ph.D. from Utah State University, and is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst®. Her professional and research interests focus on professional ethics, training and supervision, assessment and treatment of severe problem behavior, and variability. Dr. Sellers has over 30 years of clinical experience working with individuals with disabilities in a wide variety of settings. She has held positions as an Assistant Professor at Utah State University, Director of Ethics at the Behavior Analyst Certification Board®, and CEO of the Association of Professional Behavior Analysts(APBA). She carries out reviews for several joirnals, has published several journal articles, four co-authored book chapters, co-authored books focused on supervision and mentorship and applied ethics for behavior analysis, and a workbook pair for consulting and new supervisors. She's been a vegetarian for 40 years, she loves flowers, she thinks Twizzlers should be uninvented, and she hopes you know how amazing you are!
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
279 research articles with practitioner takeaways
252 research articles with practitioner takeaways
239 research articles with practitioner takeaways
You earn CEUs from a dozen different places. Upload any certificate — from here, your employer, conferences, wherever — and always know exactly where you stand. Learning, Ethics, Supervision, all handled.
No credit card required. Cancel anytime.
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.