Trauma: The Invisible Elephant Underlying Challenging Behavior is the kind of topic that looks straightforward until it collides with the speed, ambiguity, and competing demands of classrooms, school meetings, data review, and staff consultation. In The Invisible Elephant Underlying Challenging Behavior, 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 Florida Association of Behavior Analysis
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →Behavior analysts and educators are often charged with the responsibility of dealing with challenging behaviors and may be unaware of the impact of underlying trauma on these behaviors. These challenging behaviors are frequently not amenable to traditional functional behavioral assessments (FBAs) and positive behavioral interventions (PBIs). This may be because behavior analysts are reluctant to incorporate distal setting events, discriminative stimuli, and motivating operations into their FBAs, which is essential to the incorporation of trauma into these analyses. One of the key impacts of trauma is on challenging behaviors which often leads to disciplinary referrals, suspensions, alternative placements, and inaccurate diagnoses disproportionately for students of color. Additionally, racial trauma is a form of trauma which has devastating consequences and is often overlooked. Further, it is necessary to acknowledge the impact of verbal behavior in implementing effective interventions, as covert thoughts and feelings often are the establishing operations that motivate challenging behaviors. This workshop will familiarize participants with FBAs that incorporate trauma as well as with strategies that use verbal behavior in conducting interventions. Participants will see role-play demonstrations of these strategies and practice these strategies with feedback and correction.
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 4 | General |
| COA | 4 | — |
| FL MH/PSY | 3 | — |
Dr. Jeannie A. Golden is a Licensed Psychologist who received her Ph.D. in School Psychology from Florida State University in 1981. Dr. Golden has taught in the Psychology Department at East Carolina University for 43 years and became the first nationally Board Certified Behavior Analyst in North Carolina in 2000. Dr. Golden received ECU teaching awards in 2001 and 2009, the FABA Honorary Lifetime Membership Award in 1994, the NCABA Fred S. Keller Excellence in Behavior Analysis Award in 2005, the ECU Scholarship of Engagement Award in 2012, the NCABA Do Things Award for Outstanding and Sustained Contributions in 2013, the ECU Psychology Department Award for Distinguished Service in 2015 and 2023, and the ECU Psychology Department Faculty Appreciation Award for Mentoring in 2017. Dr. Golden and colleagues received grants from Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust (2008-2011) and the Department of Health and Human Services (2011-2016) to provide school-based mental health services in two rural, impoverished counties in North Carolina. In March of 2018, Dr. Golden and colleagues were awarded the Creating New Economies Fund Grant by Resourceful Communities for the Greene County Community Advancement Project. Recently, Dr. Golden and Sarah Hayes won the Scholarly Paper Competition from the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee of the Association for Behavior Analysis International.
Dig into the research behind this topic — plain-English summaries written for BCBAs.
280 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.