What’s next? Freebies! & Cheat Sheets
Transcript:
Hey there, I'm Crystal. I'm a behavior analyst and I'm here to help you uncomplicate the complicated world of behavior. We are going to get into all things behavior here. Strategies, intervention support data assessments, the good, the frustrating and especially the complicated. I'm a behavior analyst who loves to educate, be positive and most importantly, be proactive. This podcast is your place to learn more about behavior analysis and the beautiful benefits that come with being positive and proactive. This is your uninterrupted time to talk behavior with your bestie. So grab your headphones, your walking shoes or pull up that comfy chair and get ready to learn.
01:00
Crystal
Hey, everybody! Today we have our first ever guest, Ashleigh. Ashleigh has been working with me since the start and creation of both Access Behavior Solutions and Uncomplicated Behavior. Neither of these spaces would be functional without Ashleigh. She has literally helped me plan, create and publish these spaces. And I wanted to invite Ashleigh here today in this space with me to really go over and dive a bit deeper into what the past couple episodes have covered. I want to talk a little bit about what you can expect from this podcast. Why I started this podcast and what we can look forward to as we move through the different series that I want to cover. So, Ashleigh, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's dive right on it.
1:44
Ashleigh
Thank you, Crystal for that lovely intro and for inviting me to join in today. Let's start with why you chose to create this space.
1:51
Crystal
Well, I wanted to create this podcast to provide a space for families and teams that I have worked with to have a place where they can access information about behavior analysis so they can build their own set of skills and understanding about behavior. And this is really important because when we look at behavior, we wanna look at it from a functional perspective. And I think a lot of times we are thrown off by what the behavior is doing to the environment--so, the stresses that sometimes those behaviors cause. And what I want for listeners, for parents, for caregivers, teachers is to be able to look at behavior from a functional perspective and say, oh that, that's escape. I see that that's escape. And now I need to teach this new skill or I see that that's attention so, I realize I need to be a little bit more proactive when I teach that skill. There's a lot frustration when it comes to behavior, especially with challenging behaviors. And I really want a place to empower parents and caregivers with the education to look at behavior from a functional perspective, to really look at behavior like a behavior analyst does and when different behaviors occur, to know exactly what specific strategies will work based on that function. I think a lot of times when it comes to behaviors, we want to just jump really quickly into the strategy and we want the answers. So a lot of times when I present a functional behavior assessment to a team, they're like, yes, all this information is great. Can we skip right through to the recommendations and the interventions? And I'm like, no, no, no, wait, we have to understand why this is happening. So again, I think a lot of times we want to jump straight to the strategies and interventions. And if we don't recognize the functions, some of those strategies and interventions become ineffective.
3:46
Ashleigh
Right! Since listening to these episodes and just working with you over the years, I've come to understand that it's not just learning the strategies but about understanding how the strategies work and how to apply them yourself. We know that behavior is always changing and it's nice to feel equipped to handle those changes as they arise.
4:04
Crystal
Exactly. So when we understand that the behavior occurs for a reason, we can face those challenging behaviors and recognize them for what they are and they are typically a communication breakdown, or we need to recognize that as a need. And for us as caregivers or providers is to really teach that new skill. What is that new skill that we need to teach them? Or if it's a skill that they already have, how can we further reinforce that and prepare them to use that skill? So I don't want to jump straight into strategy with this space because I really want to empower caregivers to have that foundational knowledge so that they can learn how and when to apply all of these wonderful strategies.
4:50
Ashleigh
Oh Yeah. As a parent myself, as soon as there is a problem or challenging behavior, I go straight to searching for that tip or trick to get the quick fix.
5:00
Crystal
And that's not necessarily the wrong thing, right? There are a ton of great strategies and tools that can be applied, but we might not get that behavior change that we want to see because that strategy may or may not be reinforcing the behavior. So, it could be the right strategy, but it could be used at the wrong time. And, since we're using it at the wrong time, then it makes it ineffective because we might be reinforcing that attention seeking behavior by providing the attention instead of implementing that proactively. So understanding the why the behavior occurs is really critical to using the strategies correctly. In episode two, I reviewed the functions of behavior and I just am realizing and listening back to it that there's a lot of information and listening to it might not be enough. So I'm working right now on creating some cheat sheets for every episode so that the information can be at hand and it could be tangible for people to reference.
6:00
Ashleigh
Oh, I
think that's really valuable because having information on hand that teams and families can refer back to is nice. This will help keep the information handy whether that's to use it to be proactive or to problem solve the situation that happened earlier. I can see myself putting these printouts in a notebook for easy access.
6:17
Crystal
Yeah, I can definitely see you putting this in a notebook. You know, your love for notebooks and organization has really spilled over to me and I'm grateful because now I have notebooks for everything. So I have my podcasting notebook and I have my access behavior notebook, which I find funny because now I get really mad if I accidentally write in the wrong one. But you know what this does remind me of is having these--And this is kind of what led me into thinking about this when I was re listening to episode one is that I worked with a teacher in South Bay that I was doing a lot of consulting with at their site. And he asked me for a print out of everything that I was going over when I was doing this training with him and his paraprofessionals. And I'm like, Oh OK. Fine. I could write this all down and make it, you know, just adapt it for you. I was like, he's never going to use these, like nobody's ever going to use this, this template. And the next day when I showed up to his classroom, he had all of these printed out kind of like on the side partition of his desk and he used them all the time. Literally in the middle of like a challenging behavior, he would like ask one of the paras in the classroom like, hey, what is the strategy for this? Because everything was written down and it was really tangible. And that really did trigger me to like start to create a more tangible documents for the teams that I work with, for the families that I support. So they can just have, you know, kind of this set of like here, this is, I might not use it every day, I'm not gonna sit here and study it when my kids go to bed, but it's there as a reference and I need it and I think that that helped everybody in the team really stay very consistent. One of the first questions that I got from a listener was about keeping everybody on the same page. So how do we get grandma, how do we get grandpa and especially how do we get babysitter all responding in the same way because we want the reaction to be consistent right? And the reaction, what we learned in episode 4, the reaction is what we are providing as a result of the behavior. So we want that to be really consistent. But more importantly than that, we want what we're doing proactively to set the child up for success or to set that student up for success. We want everything to be really consistent. So when the parent reached out to me and asked me that question, I immediately thought like, oh my gosh, my proactive strategies document um that template would be really helpful to have as a reference for listeners because I send this template out to basically every team that I've presented to at an IEP meeting. When I talk about keeping things consistent and supporting generalization of skills, I always reference this sheet. In fact, today I was on an IEP meeting and we were talking about this and I was like, oh, I have a template, I can send you out for this. So this recording, this actually reminds me that I need to send that to the team. But I think that having everything at hand is gonna be really, really important. And just to get back to where that parent requested this information, having this, you know, these documents or these templates I realized is gonna be really important for not just the teams that I work with and the families that I support or the FBA's that I complete, but really just having this information for all of the listeners. Anybody who's interested in learning about behavior and especially that parent that reached out to me and said, hey, how do you keep everybody consistent? How do we keep, you know, the school team consistent with the grandparents with the babysitter? And you know, so having this resource for, for every listener out there is, is just really important. So I'm really excited to, to put those documents together and get them ready for everybody to access.
10:06
Ashleigh
Well, now that you've already given us a little glimpse into the upcoming cheat sheets, any chance you'll indulge us in a little sneak peek as to what else is to come?
10:15
Crystal
Absolutely. I really wanna get into everything behavior here. I'm really excited about sharing information and we touched on some of the foundation knowledge kind of what's important to go over like starting this journey. And I think right now I really want to go over reinforcement and the different ways we can use positive reinforcement in our everyday life that is purposeful and just a little bit more intentional because we reinforce our kids every day with affirmation, with love, we have that connection with our kids and we're constantly building that rapport and that relationship and that is a critical first step, right? But if we are intentional with using positive reinforcement to change behavior, we need to learn how to use it in a way that will shape the behavior. So using positive reinforcement as a consequence to behavior is when we see behavior patterns start to change. So I really want to start with some of the basics on positive and negative reinforcement and punishment because I feel there's always some confusion on what they are and, and how they work. You know, for example, the other day, I was doing an observation at a school and the team that I was, you know, kind of work, I wasn't working with them. I was doing the assessment, but the team that I was working with said, oh, we're recommending this placement um for this child and I said, well, I have a lot of concerns on their use of punishment in that placement. And the look that I got from, from that staff member was like, you know, thinking that like they used spanking or something like that, like she and I kind of explained what punishment was and then she, you know, she was able to make that connection a little bit more. But actually I've said that at a lot of placements but I think there's some confusion around that that I really want to get to. I mean, I don't know, Ashleigh, what do you think when I say punishment? I just want to get your take on that. What do you, what's your first thoughts?
12:20
Ashleigh
Off the top of my head? The first thing that comes to mind would be like a physical or something that's very negative.
12:25
Crystal
Something, Yeah, just awful like, right, like an angry expression and that's definitely not what it means. So I really want to get into that and clear that up for people. But then I also want to get into more of some of the more popular behavior analytic strategies that are commonly used but also consistently misused. So differential reinforcement. There's several ways we can implement that strategy and I really want to teach parents and caregivers, educators, how to use that system of reinforcement just really positively. I wanna go over behavioral skills training because I briefly did it in episode four, but it's definitely not enough because that's a huge concept and I love it. I use it every day. I want to get into use of the self and match and token economies because again, those are some systems that are pretty widely used in school systems, but I commonly see that they're being misused. And so I want to clear that up. I want listeners to really understand what is positive reinforcement, how to use it and how to recognize when it's not being utilized correctly because those are some of the the biggest things in reinforcement. So, reinforcement is gonna end up being a big series, probably bigger than some of this, you know, the last couple episodes we talked about. But again, I want people to use positive reinforcement as a consequence for behavior change or for behavior so that we can get that behavior because I think that positive reinforcement really gets mixed up with positive affirmations.
13:59
Ashleigh
I love that. This concept of positive reinforcement has been thrown around a lot and it's such a big buzzword right now, but it hasn't exactly been broken down in a way that I can truly have a deep enough understanding of it in order to apply it properly.
14:12
Crystal
Exactly. And I think I get the opportunity to work with so many different school teams, so many different parents, so many different families. And it's like I see this written, I see the use of positive reinforcement on a behavior intervention plan for example. And I'm like, what does that look like? What does that mean to you? Because how I see positive reinforcement is definitely different, how you see it. And so when we just have positive reinforcement listed on a Behavior Intervention Plan, I always ask teams like, what does that look like to you? And, and how is that playing out? Because a lot of the times, positive reinforcement when it's used is like "Oh, good job" or "I like the way you did that". And I'm like, yes, that is positive praise but when we use positive reinforcement that looks a little bit differently, especially when we're using tools like the token economy or we're using specific interventions like differential reinforcement or we're using a set of skills like Behavioral Skills Training. And so I'm really excited to get into this new series where we can really dive deep into what that looks like. Because my hope is that a parent or a caregiver or, you know, a paraprofessional or even a teacher in the classroom can say I use positive reinforcement and this is how I use it, these are the interventions. But then also so that if we see that written somewhere, we can advocate the correct use of it, right? Like, oh I see you're giving my child positive praise. But what are we doing in terms of the intervention? Right? Because wouldn't that be confusing for you a little bit? You're like, oh yeah, they're using positive reinforcement on my child. And I'm like, what does that look like? You'd be like um let me go back and ask them,
15:54
Ashleigh
Right?
15:55
Crystal
For example, like if the parent is reading a behavior intervention plan, we want them to say, OK, great. You're using positive reinforcement. What is that?
16:02
Ashleigh
Yeah, give me an example. Let me see what you're doing.
16:06
Crystal
Exactly. Yes. Like you want to have that power to create a meaningful conversation with your IEP team or with, you know, the babysitter that I'm sure we all desperately need, right? Like we all need our babysitters. We all need our caregivers, but it becomes a struggle when we try to keep everybody on the same page. And so having, you know, that proactive strategies template will tell the caregivers, grandma, grandpa, the babysitter, your home team, whoever is helping your child to say this is what we do proactively and this is how we respond and support behavior positively. And when people, I said this in an IEP meeting that I was in today, when people have the tools and they have the knowledge, they do it and it gets done and it gets generalized. The problem typically comes in when everybody is doing something different and they're like, well, we tried this today and that worked. But what we did yesterday didn't work. And I'm like, oh my goodness, don't go rogue. You're going rogue on the plan, everybody's trying different things. So really getting everybody together and having that solid concept of positive reinforcement is, really, really, really important. So I'm really excited to get those cheat sheets out. I'm really excited to upload those and, and send everybody there so that they can access those and, and use that just as a tool. This is especially true when we're looking at using all of these different strategies, right? So I really am excited to just get into the specific use of these strategies, how to use them and when to use them and just kind of opening that door for everyone.
17:51
Ashleigh
Well, I'm sure there will be many more concepts that will go over in the future that will be eye opening. And I'm excited to see the impact this creates in my parenting and how I will approach behaviors in my household.
18:01
Crystal
Oh, my gosh. Thank you, Ashleigh for being here, for running through all this with me. I'm really glad we got the chance to go over the significance of some of the foundational knowledge and just touch on where I'm headed with this podcast. I absolutely loved having you here and I can't wait to have you back so that we can go over the big takeaways from the next series that we're moving towards on reinforcement. See you guys next time!
18:27
Crystal
Well, you did it another step closer to uncomplicating behavior. I'm so proud of you for taking the time to learn more about behavior analysis. Still interested in learning more or have a question or topic that you'd love some answers to? Head over to uncomplicatebehaviorpodcast.com for today's show notes, submit a question or topic you would love to hear about and subscribe to my email and podcast so you never miss a new episode. I created this podcast for you and I want it to serve you well so don't be afraid to reach out to me directly.