These answers draw in part from “10 Things RBTs Hate About You: Reviewing RBT Feedback to Improve Our Supervision Skills” (Do Better Collective), and extend it with peer-reviewed research from our library of 27,900+ ABA research articles. Clinical framing, BACB ethics code references, and cross-links below are synthesized by Behaviorist Book Club.
View the original presentation →RBTs experience supervisory behavior in ways that BCBAs' self-assessment cannot capture. They know which feedback practices help them implement more effectively and which leave them more confused or anxious. They know whether supervision interactions feel supportive or evaluative, respectful or condescending. They carry the consequences of supervision quality into every direct service session. Seeking their feedback gives BCBAs access to information about their supervisory effectiveness that is unavailable from any other source — and acting on that feedback demonstrates the kind of data-responsive professionalism that behavior analysts claim as a defining characteristic of the field. RBTs who see their supervisors respond constructively to feedback are also more likely to be receptive to feedback themselves.
Based on the training content, common RBT complaints cluster around several themes: feedback that is too vague to be actionable ('you need to be more professional' rather than specifying exact behavioral changes); corrective feedback delivered without acknowledgment of what is working correctly; supervision meetings that are cancelled frequently or conducted while the supervisor is visibly distracted; inconsistent guidance that gives different answers to the same clinical question across different interactions; condescending communication tone that signals the supervisor views the RBT as less competent or less valued than their actual contributions warrant; and failure to support or acknowledge RBT professional development aspirations.
Poor feedback quality affects treatment fidelity through several behavioral mechanisms. Vague feedback — 'good work' or 'that needs improvement' without specific behavioral referents — doesn't provide the discriminative stimulus information the RBT needs to change a specific behavior. Delayed feedback that is disconnected from the performance it addresses loses its instructive value because the RBT cannot connect the feedback to the specific behavior that occasioned it. Feedback delivered in a predominantly aversive context — where supervision interactions are associated with criticism, anxiety, or condescension — creates avoidance of the supervisory relationship and motivation to minimize the supervisor's exposure to performance that might occasion corrective feedback. All three patterns produce lower treatment fidelity than well-designed feedback delivered in a supportive context.
Ethics Code 4.06 requires behavior analysts to provide supervision in a safe environment. This encompasses physical safety — ensuring supervision occurs in appropriate, professional settings — but also the psychological dimensions of safety: that supervisees feel genuinely able to disclose skill gaps and clinical uncertainty, to raise concerns about client welfare or program effectiveness, and to provide honest responses to supervisor questions without fear of punitive consequences. Supervisory practices that function as punishers for honest self-disclosure — dismissing RBT concerns, responding to disclosed errors with disproportionate criticism, or withdrawing support in response to performance problems — violate the spirit of Code 4.06 even if they don't constitute explicit harassment or exploitation.
Effective corrective feedback should be specific — describing the exact behavior that needs to change, not a global evaluation of performance quality; timely — delivered as close to the performance as practical, ideally during or immediately after the observed session; behaviorally referenced — framing the feedback in terms of what the RBT should do rather than what they should not do; and embedded in a context of adequate positive feedback — corrective feedback delivered in the context of acknowledgment for what is working is processed differently than corrective feedback delivered in isolation. Use BST format for skill correction: describe the correct behavior, model it if the RBT hasn't seen it done correctly, provide a practice opportunity, give feedback on the practice. This format treats corrective feedback as training, not as evaluation.
Inconsistent clinical guidance from supervisors creates a multiple schedule problem for RBTs: different behavioral responses are reinforced in different contexts (when the supervisor is watching versus when they are not, in supervision discussions versus in observed sessions), producing variable performance that the RBT may not be able to predict or control. When a supervisor describes one procedure in supervision but models a different procedure during direct observation, the RBT receives two competing discriminative stimuli for the same performance context. The resulting performance variability is not a compliance or motivation problem — it is the predictable behavioral outcome of inconsistent stimulus control training by the supervisor. Supervisors who notice they are modeling something different from what they describe in supervision have identified a fidelity problem in their own supervisory practice.
Honest upward feedback from RBTs requires organizational conditions that protect against retaliation and signal genuine openness to the information. Anonymous survey formats remove the interpersonal risk of disclosing concerns directly. Explicit organizational commitment from clinical leadership to use upward feedback data constructively — not to identify and discipline complainers — creates the organizational establishing operation for honest participation. Structured feedback formats that ask specific questions about supervisory practices (rather than open-ended questions that require RBTs to spontaneously criticize their supervisors) reduce the social and linguistic complexity of providing feedback honestly. Visible responsiveness from supervisors who have received feedback — modifying their practices and acknowledging what they learned — reinforces the feedback behavior and makes future feedback more likely.
RBT retention research and organizational psychology literature both identify supervisory relationship quality as one of the strongest predictors of voluntary turnover. RBTs who experience their supervisors as supportive, respectful, and genuinely invested in their development are substantially less likely to leave their positions voluntarily than RBTs who experience supervision as primarily evaluative, inconsistent, or dismissive. The behavioral mechanism is straightforward: working conditions that include a positive supervisory relationship function as a conditioned reinforcer for showing up, maintaining effort, and tolerating the inherent challenges of direct service work. Working conditions where supervision is aversive create conditions where leaving the job provides negative reinforcement — relief from the aversive interaction. Improving supervision quality is therefore one of the most direct retention interventions available to ABA organizations.
Behavior analysts hold data-responsive decision-making as a core professional value: when data indicate that a current approach is not working as well as it could, the appropriate response is to examine the data honestly and modify the approach accordingly. Requesting feedback from supervisees and modifying supervisory practices based on that feedback is the direct application of this value to one's own professional behavior. BCBAs who request and respond to upward feedback are modeling the same posture they expect from their supervisees when performance data indicate need for change — and they are demonstrating that the data-responsive professional standard they articulate applies to their own behavior as much as to the behavior of the practitioners they supervise.
Many current RBTs are in various stages of completing the supervised experience hours required for BCaBA or BCBA credentialing. The supervision practices they experience as RBTs shape the supervisory repertoire they will eventually bring to their own supervisory roles. RBTs who experience precise, specific, timely, and respectfully delivered feedback become BCBAs who understand from direct experience what effective feedback delivery looks like. RBTs who experience supervision that models honest engagement with the research literature become BCBAs who bring literature engagement to their own supervision. The supervisory behaviors BCBAs model are being observed, recorded, and eventually replicated by the next generation of supervisors — making every supervisory interaction an investment in not just current RBT performance but in future supervisory quality across the field.
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10 Things RBTs Hate About You: Reviewing RBT Feedback to Improve Our Supervision Skills — Do Better Collective · 2 BACB Supervision CEUs · $50
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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.