When staff performance falls short of clinical standards in ABA organizations, the instinctive response is often to increase monitoring, intensify feedback, or consider staffing changes. These reactions may address the symptom while missing the underlying cause entirely.
Provider: BehaviorLive — via RethinkBH
Take This Course →Including ethics, supervision, and topics like this one. New live CEU every Wednesday.
Join Free →Supervision, in the profession of Applied Behavior Analysis-based service delivery includes teaching, maintaining, and overseeing the skills of their supervisees and trainees. This process necessarily requires that supervisor engage in ongoing performance monitoring and actively addressing any areas needed for improvement. Research indicates that the best approach is to engage in a functional behavior assessment of staff performance needs. Luck for us, there is an evidence-based tool, the Performance Diagnostic Checklist - Human Services (PDC-HS), that supervisors can use. The PDC-SH (1.1) is a structured assessment designed to identify the environmental variables contributing to employee performance concerns in human-service settings to drive a function-matched intervention. So, whether you are currently providing supervision to technicians, trainees, or other behavior analysts, or if you are a trainee who will soon be providing supervision, the PDC-HS (1.1) is an invaluable tool you can use to up your supervisory game and positively impact those you supervise:
| Certification Body | Credits | Type |
|---|---|---|
| BACB® | 1 | Supervision |
| COA | 0 | — |
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!
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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.