The Wisdom of Lived Experience: Incorporating Autistic Feedback to Improve the Social Validity of ABA Services matters because it changes what a BCBA notices when decisions have to hold up in community routines and natural environments. In The Wisdom of Lived Experience: Incorporating Autistic Feedback to Improve the Social Validity of ABA Services, for this course, the practical stakes show up in feasible school-based support, stronger collaboration, and better student participation, not in abstract discussion alone.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via Tennessee Association for Behavior Analysis
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Join Free →This symposium will highlight Vanderbilt TRIAD's evolving efforts to implement community-informed and community-assessed practices with our Autistic Advisory Network (AuAN). The AuAN was created with the mission to embed the perspective and expertise of Autistic and other Neurodivergent individuals to inform and assess TRIAD's work. The AuAN helps ensure that TRIAD's work is shaped by those with the direct, lived experience of the students and families we serve. Our leadership team of Autistic and Neurodivergent self-advocates will present two recent projects in which Autistic feedback directly shaped TRIAD service delivery. In the first project, we conducted a series of three focus groups with Autistic BCBAs to collect feedback on the TADPOLE Clinic—a short-term, early intervention ABA program adapted from the Early Start Denver Model. Their feedback addressed clinical values and procedures related to assent, prompting, boundaries, and navigating adversity. In the second project, we conducted a focus group with five Autistic BCBAs to gather feedback on the Student Engagement Benchmark—a semi-structured interview conducted with school-age participants to align behavioral goals and interventions with the student's interests, values, and preferences. In this symposium, we will share the process of forming the Autistic Advisory Network, what we have learned and integrated from these pilot projects, and the value of lived experience as a form of professional and cultural expertise. We will share practical strategies for integrating Autistic perspectives into program development to help move the field of ABA toward more respectful, affirming, and collaborative models of care.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | General |
Lauren Weaver strives to create safe, accessible and inclusive opportunities for people with and without developmental disabilities and their communities. She is passionate about utilizing behavior analytic assessment and interventions that promote client agency, safety and dignity and take a skill-based approach when addressing challenging behavior. She has earned a M.S. degree in Applied Behavior Analysis in Developmental Disabilities from Auburn University and a B.S. degree in Elementary Education from the University of Alabama-Huntsville. She currently is a faculty member in the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center where she serves as an Associate Director of Behavior Analysis in Education and the Director of Community Engagement within Vanderbilt Kennedy Center’s (VKC) Treatment and Research Institute for Autism Spectrum Disorders (TRIAD).
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
258 research articles with practitioner takeaways
236 research articles with practitioner takeaways
200 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.