Developing Better Interventions through Efficiency, Assent, and Foundational Skills with Steve Ward

In this episode of In the Field: The ABA Podcast, I sit down with Steve Ward, BCBA® and co-founder of Whole Child Consulting, to explore how efficiency, assent, and foundational learning repertoires can guide more ethical and effective interventions. Known for developing the Inventory of Good Learner Repertoires (I.G.L.R.) and co-authoring 2,100+ Inexpensive Ideas for Intrinsic Motivation in Play, Steve brings decades of experience in making behavior analytic teaching both technically sound and human-centered.

We discuss what it really means to provide effective treatment under the BACB® Ethics Code, why efficiency is both a technical and ethical imperative, and how shaping, assent, and motivation intersect to support meaningful learning outcomes.

Key Topics:

Efficiency as an Ethical Imperative:
Why efficiency matters for both ethics and outcomes, and how to balance effectiveness with learner experience.

Assent and Engagement:
How to identify genuine assent and use the STEAM framework to measure motivation and participation.

Foundational Skills and the I.G.L.R.:
Using the inventory to assess “learning-to-learn” repertoires that set the stage for engagement and independence.

The Dimensions Grid:
A tool for systematically shaping conditions to build durable, generalized skills through real-world variability.

Beyond Blunt Extinction:
Why altering the relative efficiencies of behaviors often produces more sustainable and humane results.

Training RBTs® and Trainees:
Helping new practitioners think conceptually, recognize assent, and avoid rigid “rule-governed” application of strategies.

Key Takeaways:

• Efficiency is an ethical standard that ensures interventions are effective and humane.
• Foundational repertoires enable assent, flexibility, and learner autonomy.
• True assent reflects motivation and engagement across time, not mere compliance.
• Fun and flexibility in teaching promote lasting learning and rapport.
• Supervisors should model empiricism, guiding RBTs® and trainees to think critically, not mechanically.

Keywords:

Efficiency, Assent, Foundational Skills, Effective Treatment, Matching Law, Instructional Design, Ethics Code 2.0, Dimensions Grid, DRA, Blunt Extinction, Behavior Efficiency, Steve Ward, Whole Child Consulting, Inventory of Good Learner Repertoires, ABA Ethics, BCBA® Supervision

Connect with Steve Ward and Whole Child Consulting:

Website: Whole Child Consulting
Inventory of Good Learner Repertoires: Download Resources
Book: 2,100+ Inexpensive Ideas for Intrinsic Motivation in Play
Article: 50 Practical Ways to Alter the Relative Efficiencies of Behaviors
Webinar: What Comes Before Series
GOOD LEARNER REPERTOIRES: Linktree

Disclaimer:

BCBA®, BACB® [or any other BACB® trademark used] is/are registered to the Behavior Analytic Certification Board® BACB®. This website and products are not in any way sponsored by the BACB®.

All information and products are for educational purposes only. 

Transcript

Developing Better Interventions through Efficiency, Assent, and Foundational Skills with Steve Ward

Allyson Wharam: [00:00:00] Welcome to In the Field, the ABA Podcast. I'm your host, Allyson Wharam, creator of Sidekick, an online interactive curriculum and learning portal for behavior analysts. We specialize in providing a field work supervision curriculum and continuing education for ABA professionals. In this podcast, we're going to deep dive into the world of ABA, focusing on quality supervision as the foundation of our field.

We're here for behavior analysts, business leaders, and trainees who are passionate about maximizing outcomes for their clients and improving the quality of their services with new and innovative practices. We're going to explore effective strategies and practices that not only enhance the quality of supervision, but also save time all while investing in the people who make up our field, our clients, our trainees, and your everyday behavior analysts.

So whether you're driving to your next in-home session or taking a break from your busy schedule, let's dive right [00:01:00] in.

Hello. Welcome everyone to another episode of In The Field. I am joined here today by Steve Ward of Whole Child Consulting. I will let him introduce and talk about his journey into some of the work that he's done. But you are, I'm sure, familiar with some of his work, whether that be the inventory of good learner repertoires and teaching good learner repertoires, some of his CEU events, but I just am, Steve, a very big fan of your work, as I've already expressed and am just excited to dig into this today. What we're really gonna be focusing on is the technical side, but more of the ethics of the technical side of things. These decisions that you're making, they're intricately related to ethics and specifically effective treatment. But I won't get too hard far ahead of us. I would love to have you go ahead and just give me a quick overview of the work you've done over the years and what really led you to focus in on this area of effective instruction.

Steve Ward: Thank you for that so much Allyson, and thanks for having me on. [00:02:00] I appreciate that. As I was starting to gain experience in the field, I was able to... I won't name drop everyone, but I've name dropped in other episodes with other people before... I was able to, get around and learn from a variety of well established people.

And as I was seeing lots of really good things from all of the people that I learned from, I also saw applications down in the teams that we were working with that I felt were shortsighted, I guess to to put it politely. It's very easy, in a lot of fields, and ours is we're not exempt from this...

it's very easy for us to have, okay, I've got my target behavior defined, and let's say, that we're not talking about decreased behavior. My target behavior is going to be writing a name.

Okay. So let's just say that's important enough to do. How hard is it to do it? How much coaxing or cajoling is going on to do it? How many tiers are there as we're trying to do it?

So I came up with a concept of STEAM that was simply just the metaphor, like the little engine that could, [00:03:00] needed steam to get up the hill.

And this started especially with play. The play examples I think are, funnier, funnier in a, not a funny haha, funny sad kind of way in contrast with writing one's name. So we'll see kids being prompted to play because we've defined, or our team has defined, they will play this game for this long with this many partners.

They will take this many turns for this long. And then we'll have some kind of shorthanded, little additive there, maybe that says oh, with a lot of support or with moderate support. And if you look back through IEPs and treatment plans, you'll see that same goal there still with moderate support three years later.

And the learner is basically being puppeted by an aid that's behind them to get through it. So there's, there is not true assent, right? They might be sitting there, they might not be crying. They might move their hand when the teacher bumps their elbow, but if they really wanted to play the game and they've been playing it for three years.

They wouldn't need a teacher to bump their elbow to, to get them to do it. [00:04:00] So there's, I think there's a difference between how our field talks about assent, which I do think is important versus like effort, like quality effort to the point where our learner is recruiting their own SD's. I need to stop my answer pretty soon before I just talk for the whole 50 minutes...

Allyson Wharam: No. This is great. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve Ward: That's a big hallmark. That's a foundational thing where we can tell that we're doing something well when our learner is actually spontaneously recruiting their own SD's, rather than having us try to feed them every target SD.

Allyson Wharam: Yes. And so much of what you're saying, again, without getting too ahead of where we're going to be going deals with teaching those underlying foundational skills too, so they can meaningfully do those things in the context of what you're teaching and what you're working towards. But yeah, I, you have also written about the efficiency of behaviors as a key to effective teaching.

And so I'm curious, because that's gonna be one of the overarching things that we talk about. How would you explain this to someone new to this [00:05:00] concept?

Steve Ward: I would always use at least one example, like an adult example with someone that is new. So at your station in life, if I was offering you 20 bucks for something. I don't think that, that's probably not a whole lot to you at this station in your life. So if I was offering you...

Allyson Wharam: Or in this economy...

Steve Ward: Yeah, that's right.

Or in this economy. If I was offering you 20 bucks to, I don't know email someone for me to introduce me, which I wouldn't do because colleagues don't really do that with each. Let's just say that was it though. And you had no reason not to. You were friends with them, you're friends with me. It doesn't seem like there's any risk.

They'd be like, sure. I'll send out, Hey Steve, this is Tammy. Tammy, this is Steve. Hello. But if what I needed was you to edit a 500 page book they'd be like, huh, that's a task I'd like to help. I want to be your friend. But if it's just about the $20, that wouldn't make any sense to you.

We'd be talking a thousand.

Allyson Wharam: I'd rather do it for free. 

Steve Ward: Right? Friendly colleagues do that stuff for free on the regular. But to make our examples easy we take out [00:06:00] the richer maintaining variables that exist in our social culture. And then I say which one would you choose?

And with our, when we get down to our learners, I wanna introduce the matching law to a new RBT on day one. It'll be about day three that I get into it eventually. But you have choices between things, which one is the easiest and has the most payoff? And those are the ones that you just tend to do those more often.

Allyson Wharam: And we'll get into sort of the nitty gritty of matching law and what that actually looks like in practice with some additional examples. But just to frame this whole discussion as well, we're going to be talking about effective teaching really in relation to four different ethics codes.

The first one is 2.01, providing effective treatment. The next one is 2.11, obtaining informed consent, which also has assent bundled in there, 2.14, selecting, designing and implementing behavior change interventions. And then 2.15, minimizing risk of behavior change interventions. And so with all of that being said, why [00:07:00] is efficiency not just a technical concept, but an ethical concept as well?

Steve Ward: Efficiency has our understanding of the levels of variety of behaviors we're seeing from particular learner. The way that we can make sense of them is strongest when we are able to consider the efficiency. So if child A is doing this thing, it must at some level be efficient for him.

It probably is in some way, and that's part of the root of our functional assessment. Why is that efficient for him? Now if we identify the function and let's just say it's attention, okay it's attention and they're getting attention for whining and we'd we don't want them really whining that much.

Sometimes when they whine and they don't get attention right away, worse things happen, right? So we'd rather not have all the whining. If they're still doing it, it's probably more efficient than something else. If we want to change the behavior, we can't just write the DRA, the differential reinforcement of alternative behavior.

We can't just say, they're gonna [00:08:00] say, Mr. Steve, they're gonna raise your hand and say, Mr. Steve, and I'm gonna give attention. And then when they whine, I'm just gonna ignore and see what happens. If we do that and we think about that as. Really simple. The way you teach newer behaved analysts, what a DRA is, you keep it simple.

It's just like that, right? But then when you send them into Ms. Johnson's class and they try it, they're like, Hey, that didn't work. And it's that's right. Now we're gonna talk about why it's more advanced than that.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah.

Steve Ward: How strong is the hand raising? How easy is it to say, Hey, Mr. Steve how strong is the whining right now?

How can we actually ignore it? How much of it can we ignore? All of those things impact the relative efficiencies and our treatment plan can't assume. As we're trying to intervene, we can't assume that an increased behavior. And usually we'd look for more than one, but I'm keeping it simple -that an increased behavior is all of a sudden that's maximum efficiency day one, and now everything's fixed.

There's nuance in there.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, absolutely. And I'm excited to unpack some of [00:09:00] that with, examples and looking at, again so much of what you talk about in the paper and even in this, we're thinking about things like schedules of reinforcement and matching law, but underneath all of that is the skills that are in strength for that learner.

What makes something more efficient or less efficient is about all of those things, reinforcement and all of that. But it also is around the response effort required to engage in that behavior, which is related to the more general scale repertoires. And so before we get into your more recent paper about the efficiencies of behaviors, I'd love to take a second to talk about the I.G.L.R. or the, do you call it the I.G.L.R?

Steve Ward: I usually do. 

Allyson Wharam: When you abbreviate it?

Steve Ward: Yeah, most people that I talk to do. My girlfriend hates that term, so if she's in the room, I don't use that term. Otherwise, yeah, I'm fine. I don't wanna be tedious.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. But for those that aren't familiar the "Inventory of Good Learner Repertoires", and I'd rather you explain it than me explain it, but could you [00:10:00] gimme a quick rundown of, when this assessment would be most useful and what it's really looking at?

Steve Ward: It, it can be useful at various stages in a learner's career, I'll call it. I think that the most profound benefit is for helping to get a foot in the door with learners where we're having a hard time getting started. And this can be true whether there's, unsafe behaviors going on or whether they're just really not very active, right?

There's the very little things they're interested in and it's hard to figure out how could we start to show them that engaging with me is a beneficial thing to do. How can we build a little history of success? What would that look like? And it might end up being some of the things that the inventory would be helping us assess is, oh, if we give them close ended sort of visual performance things with some assistance and an edible reinforcer after five responses for this close ended activity, they do pretty well.

[00:11:00] But if we try to ask them to do this and do that and do this, they don't do pretty well. Okay. So we've learned something. So the more we practice, the more imitation responses, the more we might be practicing failure until we figure out a new way to come at it. But the more we're practicing the visual performance, the more we might be practicing a success.

And that is our foot in the door, finding a way to get some successful interactions.

Allyson Wharam: I almost think of it too as like a really... the barriers assessment in the VB map is probably an oversimplified comparison, but like a really drilled down version that lets you really assess some of the specifics so that you can get at some of those underlying repertoires that then enabled the rest of the teaching.

And we actually used it in a sort of interesting way. We were having a lot of trouble with preschool to kindergarten transitions because the expectations in both settings were very different. The communication and the like, figuring out. Where a [00:12:00] child would go from that transition was really difficult because of a lack of understanding on both sides.

And so we took actually a couple of different resources, the I.G.L.R being one of them, to pull together some like transitions. Not criteria for placement or anything like that, but really just like looking at the density of reinforcement needed or the number of teaching trials needed to establish a new behavior.

Those things that really speak to this is how much support this person is probably gonna need regardless of the physical setting if they're in the gen ed classroom or resource room or whatever. But what sort of teaching infrastructure do they need? And then how can we think about the supports that they need to start to even begin to make progress?

When we think about like a skills assessment that's one piece of it, but then you have the underlying learning to learn repertoires, which I think it really gets at.

Steve Ward: That we can't directly teach everything and have useful functional repertoires for your young adulthood. 

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, for sure. We're segueing then into this discussion of efficiency and just in [00:13:00] general related to the ethics code. How does the I.G.L.R. relate to that responsibility to teach effectively and to design interventions that really are supporting this underlying readiness based on individualization?

Steve Ward: Sure. I'll talk a little bit about the readiness domain in the inventory. The majority of the items that were the repertoires that we're assessing in the inventory are, we're looking more carefully at the quality of participation than most assessments do; I think than any assessment does that I know of.

We're really interested in if we want to try to use errorless teaching, right? Let's say some of the time, I'm not an all-the-time-anything guy but let's say we're in charge of four classrooms somewhere, and so we need to train 14 paraprofessionals and three teachers and so we need something we're recommending.

So say, okay, you're starting with new learners try or elist teaching. That's a pretty good, safe recommendation, except if the [00:14:00] inventory notes that they usually resist prompts. Then that's not actually helpful. That's hurtful. So as we're individualizing this for a learner, we might, one, not be able to use earliest teaching yet.

Two, there's things that we can do, there's interventions that we can use to help them become more responsive to prompts, more tolerant of them, actually appreciate them. There's some things that, that we can do very briefly. I'll get into an example of one I call it "rubber band training".

I heard the term from someone that I never met. And relating, I believe, to young adults, tendency to stick near their caretakers when they're in public, versus their caretakers having to be super hypervigilant, making sure that they keep them inside and bring them along, right?

There's not much autonomy or dignity in the caretaker doing all of that. So at an earlier level I'll like to set up something where I'll hide some preferred materials. Maybe they're Disney characters. And I'll hide them across a distance of maybe [00:15:00] 12 feet, maybe 200 feet. And I will silently go looking for them so that my learner will follow me.

And when I see one, then I'll finally speak. I'll say, oh, I see Mickey over there, and I'll point where Mickey is. So I'm teaching my learner. If he wants Mickey. And we're not traveling too far, so we're getting into dimensions, grids a little bit already. We're not traveling too far. And you really like Mickey and you know you're looking for Mickey, so you're not confused because you've got your little bin that you always put all your characters in with you already.

So you're going to collect the characters. And all I'm doing is walking seven feet and pointing to my right. So you probably follow that. And you're probably not that mad that I pointed at where Mickey is. So a point is, if we're teaching listening skills or visual performance, a point would be a gestural prompt.

And in the context of, oh, we're trying to get you to identify a shoe versus bubbles, you might not be so invested in following my gestural prompt 'cause you'd rather not be there in the first place. But if we're looking for Mickey, we took that prompt, put it in a more favorable context, strengthen [00:16:00] that.

Build a little bit more of our relationship around, I'm your guy, I'm your hookup with things. Hopefully I'm also fun to you as a person, but even if I'm not fun to you yet I can at least help you access things that you already appreciate.

Allyson Wharam: That's a great example and a great example of the dimensions grid, which I think would make sense to get into next. And just making the interaction itself more playful and reinforcing, you're not sitting there doing mass trials for this specific underlying repertoire.

You're looking at how do I embed this in a more playful context, but also in a really naturalistic way. It's still very contrived, but it's still very naturalistic in terms of that is a context in which someone would follow a point in the real world of look, look at this thing, or, I found this thing rather than just in the context of like flashcards or, some sort of instructional materials.

And yeah, I think that's a really great example. And since we've mentioned the dimensions grid I think that is, one of my favorite ways to think about it or think about. I'm teaching a student analyst or [00:17:00] even a technician about shaping, thinking about what are the things that we can do to make this task easier or harder?

To give folks who might not be familiar with the dimensions grid, a quick rundown. Could you explain just what that looks like, what that is?

Steve Ward: The vast majority of the time I simplify it as just an easier column and a harder column. But in each column I can list as many dimensions or variables as I think are really relevant, and I try not to make it overwhelming, and I might think 12 things are relevant. I try not to put 12 things very often, but if we're doing a listening skill, let's just say as an example, and we wanted it to be functional, there might be some travel involved.

And also since it's meant to be functional, there might be some real scanning involved. If you're meant to find a whisk, a whisk isn't sitting on a clear tabletop next to a shoe for you to find the whisk versus the shoe. A whisk is in a drawer that you have to open. It's got spatulas and serving spoons and everything in there.

So a complex natural array [00:18:00] would be harder. That's on the harder side of the dimension. And if we're just getting started and we need things to be easier, a contrived oversimplified array might be called for. If we're traveling the further we travel, the more time we have to quote unquote "forget."

So short travel will be easier most of the time, and longer travel will tend to be harder. Plus it takes longer. The more relevant the thing is, right? The more my learner's really interested in the activity, and that's the reason that we need the thing that would make it more on the easier side, the harder the content.

I think one of my kids knows what a whisk is and cares what a whisk is. So I like that it shows that example. So for most kids, having a whisk in an array is not gonna be the most intriguing thing for them. If we're introducing this and we need to build some success, get high quality participation, I'm gonna do most of the easier dimensions.

But notably, the easier dimensions aren't the real world. So once we master the easy dimensions and we have a little bit of [00:19:00] endurance and good assent pretty consistently. Then I need to start thinking about which dimensions I can make harder. So we're more resembling the real world so that this skill that I'm building up doesn't fall apart when it's exposed to the real world challenges.

Allyson Wharam: With a general case analysis, you have to have a really good understanding of the variables someone is going to encounter in the real world. Like how do they need to use it? What are the response variations? What are the SD's that are gonna recruit the behavior?

What are the other stimulus conditions? All of that comes into play when we're thinking about how does this person need to use it in the real world? And then you can think backwards in terms of, okay now, but how do I make this task easier versus harder? As we shape to that based again, then also you need to know as it relates to shaping what are the entry level repertoires of this learner in terms of where we start? And then we can gradually introduce more complexity.

But often I think teaching shaping, for example, to student analyst, it's it's similar to the DRA, where you teach this very contrived , what's this next step? Let's [00:20:00] write out how you would shape from this behavior to this behavior.

That's not what shaping looks like in the real world and in the messiness of yeah, it's more of that dance of let's add in this variable or, push this piece of it based on your responding in the moment. But in order to teach, here's how you get this learner from this point to this point.

Really thinking out all of those things and making it more of a stair step is that first step almost.

Steve Ward: Short of doing that analysis or having a mentor to help us do that analysis. Right? Short of that, it's too easy to stumble into shooting at something the learner's not ready for. Any of 20 possible reasons that they're not ready for that. And then either over prompting which I don't find useful. The words over is right in the word overprompting, is not useful. Or we start to deal with like, how do we deal with low steam or assent withdrawal? And do we just end the activity because we can see they don't want to do it, or are we trying to follow through with it? And there's problems I think on. Maybe this wasn't where you saw the conversation [00:21:00] going right now, but that's there's problems on either side of that.

Continuing it, it's fairly well documented if we're like, no, we're doing this thing and we follow through. It's pretty well documented some of the flaws that we can have if we just consistently follow through. There's also some shortcomings to being too eager to reinforce assent withdrawal too consistently.

And if that comes in everything we're doing, let's just say 90% of what we're working on is, it's not really time for it. They needed to go through the, I need to put a plug in here, my "What comes before a ____" webinar series that I'm working on, if you want to teach RD, think about all these things first.

If we haven't gotten that and we have quick withdrawal on the regular and we honor the withdrawal immediately, and we don't have a way to back up what we're teaching, to revise or modify the way that we're teaching it, then we're stuck with a learner that we just don't have a way to engage.

'Cause everything we try to engage with is a loser for them. So they keep not wanting to do it. And then they're spending how many hours in a day [00:22:00] just hanging out in a corner because we haven't figured out how to earn a cent because we don't know how to introduce the instruction. And at the later levels, you're talking about kids that have escape motivated behaviors and some of those can be very unsafe.

And then we're very much in the ethics of it. But I would make the case and then I'll finally shut up and turn it back. Like I said, extra cup of coffee today.

Allyson Wharam: No, no, no, it's great.

Steve Ward: I would make the case that, you know it, it's not nipping it's planning ahead that the learner who is withdrawing assent regularly and engaged very little today is gonna be what are they gonna be doing a year from now if we don't figure out how we're going to engage them in some kind of way, where's that gonna end up?

Allyson Wharam: I think what's hard about this as well is... it's one thing for an analyst to work through some of those nuances. It's another thing to be programming for a technician who needs to be able to respond to some of those contingencies when the supervisor isn't there. And then how do you as the supervisor prepare your [00:23:00] technician to respond to some of those things in the real world?

Because what I hear you saying, just to like recap, is, assent is something very real that we should be paying attention to. And if we are too quick to pull back every time that assent is withdrawn, at what point are we able to adjust the conditions and make decisions that obtain assent and then continue to move that learner forward. Because assent is not just, oh, you didn't love this and now we're not doing any of it, it's really making those modifications in the moment to say, okay, what can we do to, assent is not, we never do hard things. assent is not, you get to do whatever you want whenever you want.

And we can, as the instructors modify, which is where efficiencies come in, where flexibility comes in, where fun that we're gonna talk about as well comes in. All of those things are related to then how do we modify the task itself? Or even what we're teaching for now. Maybe we don't have those foundational what comes before, like you said that [00:24:00] your webinar that you're doing. There are things that may come before if you start to do something and you're like, oh, hold on.

Actually this is too far ahead. Then again the problem comes in. I would venture to say that not even every analyst has the skills to be able to do that in the moment, much less, how do you teach a brand new technician? Especially when we're thinking about turnover and things like that.

Have you grappled with that at all in terms of how do we help the people who are doing the work often, if that's not an analyst to make those decisions?

Steve Ward: Yes. Yes.

Allyson Wharam: Or maybe make decisions not the right word?

Steve Ward: Yeah. That was the part that tripped me up for the second there, the, "to make the decisions." We don't want our frontline, especially newer RBT, the ones who aren't our leads, the team leads, like the head RBT at a clinic. We don't want them making too many decisions in the moment reactive to unsafe behaviors, right? That's, I'll put a pin in that part of it. That's when you call the analyst and you need support to help make those kinds of decisions. If we're talking about, lemme put a [00:25:00] pin in the other side of the continuum.

A lot of the focus that we use at Chicago Autism Behavior Specialists, the cabs, I do a lot of work with them. A lot of our focus is just on play. So it's just the intrinsic motivation in the first place. And then we have our learners, our RBT's scoring the steam, just using a simple sheet that's not hard to use, just a liker to one for really no steam at all, and a five for the steam is super high.

And we encourage them then as we're narrating for them. I think that's about a three, I think that's about a four. What do you think that was? Eventually it turns into, why do you think that was? But also since we're dealing with play, where in play I'm very much there's zero escape extinction in play.

None. None. Because the purpose of it is to have the fun. So it's not a skill to be mastered, it's play. So if we don't have a degree of motivation sufficient to earn the assent, then we're not playing to turn the initi [00:26:00] initiations. So that is a much safer topic area for us to be working on the decision making of RBT's and getting that loop.

So I added to the sheet, okay, your steam was like a two on this, comments as why, and then what are you gonna do differently if you try something like this again? How are you gonna change it? 

Allyson Wharam: I love that.

Steve Ward: And if it's a four or a five, what else can you do with it?

So we wanna not just be like we're not always trying to fix broken steam. We're also, maybe more importantly, finding the good steam and saying, great, they like baking? Wow, we can go nuts. There's a million things you can bake and there's shows about it. And there's all these things. So we can get more variety and those will give us contexts where we're more likely to have interest.

And then the listening skills and the invitation and the requesting and all that can be built into that.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah I think that is fabulous. And thank you for operationalizing when I said " making decisions," there's a difference. Just to be like super clear, I think you did a nice job of explaining that between making programmatic level decisions and making decisions about [00:27:00] how am I going to engage this learner in the moment, to get their buy-in.

Or what is the play context gonna look like? Or, how can I embed their interest in this thing? Or do I need to like add a prompt to get them going? Or, how am I presenting this basically without making those like really high level decisions. But what I wanted to point out about what you just described as well, from like an instructional perspective is the amount of modeling self-reflection and critical, like problem solving, essentially, that goes into the self-reflection because you're not just saying, okay, here's how you do X, Y, and Z. You're having them really think about, okay, what did you do? What was the learner's response to that thing that you did?

And, based on that, basically what decisions would you make based on that? Or what responses . And, the flip side of what you said in terms of putting a pin in the other side. When is it something that is like bigger that you need to bring back to your supervisor?

One thing [00:28:00] we reiterate in terms of we have an RBT training. And a big piece of that is communicating with your supervisor and bringing things up when there is a problem. And in the crisis section, for example, if you are having crises with any frequency or even at all, that is something that needs to come to your supervisor so that you can come up with some more proactive strategies and make sure that you're handling it the right way.

When they do arise, it's not like it's never gonna happen, but part of that is also for that technician to be able to know what the line is in terms of those modifications they can make in the moment. And what is something that needs to be more strict to the plan for everybody's safety?

Steve Ward: Yep. Agree. Totally.

Allyson Wharam: Thank you for that example, because I do think that is one of the trickier things in terms of training. And even just, supervising, we can't be there all the time. And a lot goes into making those decisions. And so it's not just, here's what this content is.

And how do you when we're thinking about assent, we've talked [00:29:00] about what it is how do you define assent? Because assent, we've already talked about, it's not just like they, they're happy or, they do wanna do it or they don't wanna do it.

What does that look like behaviorally as you're teaching? If you wanna bring steam back in there and talk about what that really looks like, that'd be great too.

Steve Ward: Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to bring the steam into it. I think there's a, there's an article I like in 2023 by Bro and Smith in Ascend. I can't remember the exact title now, but that's the year in the authors. And they do a nice job describing topography that represent assent and also withdrawal of assent.

And they have a flexible approach to some of the things you might do following the withdrawal of assent. That's one good place to look for it. I look at it topographically for a learner. In terms of if I'm training a team, it's hard to talk about how everything's empirical with our day one RBT.

But that's what I wanna get to here in a moment. I will describe some topographically for a learner. If we, let's just say it's work. 'cause that's something that's maybe a little bit less likely to be automatically assented to, and we pull out the [00:30:00] work and we say, oh, it's time.

And, they come readily I will call that assent, right? Now, there are some people, maybe a lot, I'm not sure what percentage to put it at, that assume that choice is always a part of the invitation. And that it's explicitly provided. And I think that invites more problems with assent than we need to have, honestly.

To say would you like to come over? It's pretty fair much of the time. 'cause maybe they wouldn't like to some of the time, but sometimes they say, that's great. Do you wanna work on this first or that first? Sure. Some choice do you wanna work on this one or not? When we get to the point of explicitly offering the choice and the answer is 100% of the time not, then again, we have to reassess.

Maybe we should just say I'm ready for you to do this, but I'm gonna make sure in my head that it's painless, it's quick. I'm a fan of the DNRA "differential negative reinforcement of alternative behavior", which is basically I want to spend [00:31:00] more time figuring out how to have them successfully get through that expectation and have it be like, that's a win for both of us.

Even if it was only two responses and you're free again, and we're gonna make sure that we're still getting along. I would spend more time on that. And less time on offering explicit choices every time and making sure that every time they were slow to respond or they turn their head away or they said no, that they're released every time.

I wanna know why they don't want to be here and what it would take to make that worth their while. I think that you could certainly make the case that if half the time we just say, Hey, it's time for blank, and they come over in a pretty timely fashion, they might be pretty clearly happy and relaxed as they're doing it.

We should be able to see that topographically pretty well. And that's wonderful. They might be, seemingly in business mode doing fine, but we find out later that they were [00:32:00] working beyond the level that they were willing to do it 'cause they felt like it was a rule and they had to get it over with and they didn't have a choice.

The proof in the pudding there will come in the moments after they're done. Do they get as far away from us as they can? Are they, loosely in a bad mood after that and in the following days and weeks, do they maybe become less likely to come over when we're calling them, when it's time to come over?

I'll still put it on a continuum. I put almost everything I can think of on a continuum. It's not like this is a whole bunch of work that they're not gonna be gleeful as they engage in it. And they don't really have to be gleeful about it. But the need to at some level be like, okay, I wasn't just suffering through this torment that Mr. Steve made me do. And that'll come in the trends and the trends of how well they're going along with us and initiating to us outside of work.

Allyson Wharam: I like the inclusion of trends there, that it's not just a single data point in terms of your interactions, it's how are things looking across time and across your interactions and to that point, even within an [00:33:00] instructional session where you mentioned it's not just, are they coming over and are they doing the work?

I like the visual of really thinking about empirically are they, are you a CMOR? And are they looking to get away from you as quickly as possible? And vice versa, are you just head down collecting data when they're not engaged with you in instruction? Are you only the SD for work and not the SD for anything else that is pleasant or enjoyable.

And I think this gets to the point too that I'd love to talk about of making the task itself more reinforcing. When I say the SD for work can be fun. You know, it exists on a continuum as well. Like you can be productive, you can be learning, and it can be fun even though it is, work in air quotes.

So when we think about making the task more reinforcing and incorporating that from the aspect of assent with the aspect of efficiency, all of that, how do you think about that and the task as a reinforcer?

Steve Ward: I'll give an example. [00:34:00] I'll start with I guess an easy one where with some of our learners, a lot of our learners have a lot of room for growth in play. So like the play itself is the target. It's not tacting or, FFC's or And when play itself is the target, then again, if we haven't found a way to make it fun, we're not doing it.

But there could be a wide variety of ways to make it fun. As simple as some old verbal behavior tricks for, the little slit in the top of the shoebox and whatever language building card we process, it goes in the mail. That's cool. These things all go in the bin. And when the bin is full, we're gonna stand up on the chair and dump it out.

Assuming we use the appropriate materials, sometimes just going fast and for a short time makes it fun. And then that's really nice when that's the case because that's pretty pivotal. We can do a lot of different things quickly, if that's enough to make it fun, what a huge win that is.

Plus then we're building fluency which is an extra win. I'll give one other example handwriting as an example, and then actually I will go to one of my co-authors in the most recent book, [00:35:00] one of her examples as well, that I really liked a lot. With handwriting, if I started with small levels I can have them just using a utensil to mark the activity they want to do.

So maybe they like some social play with me. The old Baron Von Roski, The Claw, these are before your time. But he was a Allstar wrestler who had squeeze someone's head and they would submit. Plenty of our kids like that. Obviously we're not squeezing so hard. But if that was one of the things that they have the option to select, all they have to do is touch it with a pen.

We have a foot in the door for writing and it's in the fun context we're writing. And then eventually we're tracing some of the letters.

Madeline Vickery one of the authors and April Dial is the third author on the book. 2,100+ Inexpensive Ideas for Intrinsic Motivation in Play. Madeline is, I think is the queen of arranging selection opportunities for activities where the selection opportunity itself is what makes it fun and the learners buy [00:36:00] in based on that. So it's like one that I always remember I was really impressed by was writing different activities and it could be a mundane, like the kids willing but doesn't love it.

Writing some of those on a piece of paper and slipping them into balloons and having the learner pop one of the balloons and then expose the piece of paper. Wow. It looks like I'm gonna be filling in missing numbers on a number line. Great. But I did it with a balloon, which is pretty cool, so I'm happy to do it.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great great example. And I think that 2100 ideas is impressive first off. But I think you're point to about, like a lot of our learners don't necessarily have the play skills. There's a curriculum that we use in the public school system where I've worked and it, it's fabulous.

It very much starts at the, learning to learn skills and starts with teaching in play. But one barrier that we've encountered is that a lot of our learners don't have this, the play skills to teach in play. It's simultaneously trying to work on things like them orienting to you and staying in your proximity and things [00:37:00] like that.

And if they don't have, once we start to embed instruction, embedding instruction in play is really difficult when even though you're trying to get those other, foundational skills, you still don't have a play repertoire. At what point do you start to, to embed any sort of like more I don't know the word, but like the skill acquisition that's more concrete.

Less of those learning to learn skills and more of acquiring specific discrimination or something like that. I think it is really important to think about how we can embed even when we are like doing that more traditional work, we can still make it fun.

Like it doesn't need to be a dichotomy again. I think the continuum example is a really great one. Something as simple as something I do with a lot of learners is just like having them. They like to check off. Like I'll say, okay, we're gonna do three things and like checking the things off.

Again, it's a, negative reinforcement, but it's fun 'cause you're like, celebrating they're giving themselves the points, things like that. And it, I guess it could be considered a form of a token reinforcement [00:38:00] system if they're, then getting a backup reinforcer afterwards and things like that.

But at the same time, it doesn't need to be this like, contrived thing where we're sitting at the table, we're doing a drill, I'm giving you a star token, and then, you're getting up it, it can look different than that.

Steve Ward: April dial is very good at a number, a lot of things, but one of those is the high energy movement, athletic kinds of things mixed in with the work. And like we say, there's, they're on the continuum sometimes, the work in the play, we're working both ways. Another thing I'd like to talk about is just ways of embellishing either the presentation of the SD or the target SD or embellishing the reinforcement delivery.

Lemme start with the latter this time. If a learner is really working, mostly 'cause they like the gummy bears and they're happy, they'll do eight. Simple enough responses for half a gummy bear. That's. Not bad. That's good. But I don't, I might not necessarily always just hand the half a gummy bear.

There you go. Well done, commendable. The gummy bear might fly. It might come there, drive there on a car or something like [00:39:00] that. So that delivery helps me build its anticipation. Maybe they don't care about vehicles yet, but now these vehicles are just used for delivering treats. So maybe the vehicles become more interesting because of that.

I think a lot of the time, as long as there is enough steam, enough assent that they're not , I'll loosely use the term masking, like just doing it to just get it over with and holding it together. That we can get several different benefits from the same interaction.

Allyson Wharam: You're really conditioning that enjoyment of the play interaction. You're not just like deliverer of the thing, you're making the thing more enriching by, the things that you're doing. That again, I feel like we're I'm almost like framing these things as separate concepts, but they're so interrelated that I feel like we're just weaving around, which is great because that is the reality of where they are.

But I do wanna make sure we take a second to, to talk about in your paper you talk about minimizing blunt extinction and focusing on Yeah. Making the desirable behaviors more efficient. Talk to me a little bit about [00:40:00] that as we're thinking about, that's obviously related to assent in a lot of ways but just thinking about it on its own. What does that look like? Could you explain that? When we think about minimizing blunt extinction and making more desirable behaviors more efficient, what does that look like?

Steve Ward: Sure. And this one obviously is very easy to connect to the ethics for us in terms of selecting strategies that we use. So as we're learning ABA once again, learning our DRA's and our, I forget what other example you had for that. We're just learning the ABA, so we're gonna start with simple examples.

They're actually overly simple. We are taught about what I now call blunt extinction. So someone's doing something for attention. So we flat out ignore and then, we are advised along the way that we're ignoring a behavior, not a child. That takes a lot of coaching, a lot of supervision to actually really do that well as well.

So a child might be engaging in eight different kinds of behaviors in a five or 10 minute period. Some might be, let's say, maybe unsafe if we're [00:41:00] ignoring all of them and it's attention maintained behavior. And then, we're stuck. Do we now we need to intervene because it's unsafe and now there is attention, that gets messy.

But what if, the, there was a wider range of behaviors that we're able to attend to, right? A wider range that we're not waiting for totally calm. We're waiting for not screaming. And once you maybe don't scream for two seconds, I sort of avert my gaze a little bit and I pointed at a chair as an invitation to sit.

And what we know is that sitting in that chair is I'm gonna help you move forward. Now we're gonna be whatever that looks like. I don't wanna write a whole bip here for someone we're talking about theoretically. But whatever that looks like, it can be, it could be a nice relief to someone who was in a ignoring condition and probably somewhat emotional about that and probably somewhat confused about that.

A lot of the time confused about it. When you add the clarity and the path forward, we can actually use that as a condition reinforcer. Here we are, like the opportunity to sit in the chair. So I selected your deescalation by saying, you can sit in the chair [00:42:00] now and then we're gonna do a simple thing and we're gonna get back to whatever we were doing.

That was fun. Of course, if we're looking at and now I'm regretting that I went with attention because I used the same example earlier, but I'll go with a little bit anyway. How often do they have our attention when they're doing. How easy is it for them to get our attention? Are we really available that much?

This becomes a logistical consideration in some contexts. If we have, say a single parent with four kids and we say, oh, this kid really needs attention bad, so he needs attention every 90 seconds. We're like you can't really write that plan, can you? Not without having a extra helper come in and join.

You can't really in, in good conscience give the single parent that plan to do. If it's not available, we can't compete with that. Now the easier, the stronger a response class is about attention seeking the more efficient it is. We may also have had maybe our criteria for when it's time.

Sometimes my attention's available and sometimes it's not. Maybe our [00:43:00] criteria was a little bit unrealistic and maybe our attention does need to be available more often.

Final point, I'll tie this back to the learner repertoires, and I'll think about the home with the five kids and the single parent and how we can't say they need attention every 90 seconds.

If my learner currently, basically depends upon lots and lots of attention, I will also be targeting over the weeks and months that he won't need quite as much attention because I don't wanna set up that at him to stay dependent upon other people for the attention all the time. We're gonna be, it's going to be to the extent we make some progress, it's gonna be very tenuous progress when new people come through that don't know what to attend to and what not to attend to.

I won't get into the how on that, but there's a variety of things I do to help bolster my learners' capacity for some independence and bolster even just their patients before they're able to get attention.

Allyson Wharam: Talk to me [00:44:00] more about that because everything that you've talked about here relates really nicely to matching law, which we alluded to earlier. And so how does matching law come into play there as you're thinking about these things and making these decisions? We talked about the response effort of the behaviors themselves.

We've talked a little bit about, the antecedent strategy. If you're doing some non-contingent reinforcement, is that even possible? But when we're thinking about the consequence side of things, where does matching law come into play and how do you incorporate that into how you think about these efficiencies?

Steve Ward: Okay, great. Yeah so matching law in terms of consequences and behaviors that we prefer to decrease is part of why that's still a big reason that we're called into teams to come and help. What is the maintaining what is what, how efficient is the behavior we're trying to decrease now compared with how efficient are behaviors that that, that could serve the same purpose or maybe competing purposes.

If we can't do a DRA, we might need like a DRI. Just build some other skills. Whenever we're building other skills we're doing well, generally [00:45:00] speaking. Coming back, I'm thinking about a kid I will call him Jake, who had the capacity to ask for cars and trains and bubbles and lion King stuff and treats and stuff like that.

But, most of his history of asking for those things was when he could see them. And very little of it was when he couldn't see them. And he also had some appreciation for negative attention from teachers. So that sort of exacerbated this, but I'm gonna go back to the simpler explanation as though that wasn't part of it.

One of the things that challenge within the clinic that he was in was that he would elope pretty regularly. Several times a day he would elope and the teachers would be saying, don't do that. And he liked it, that they said not to do it. And he went and did his thing and he would just go through the whole clinic and one of the places he would end up was the office where he is really supposed to be a black and white.

Unless you're coming to show off something awesome you did because your teacher said it's okay. You really don't go in the office. We need to have a boundary somewhere. He went in the office on the regular and tended to get [00:46:00] some attention while he is in the office and people would tend to, as they're, as he's ignoring their pleas for him to leave the office, he's scanning for things that he wants. And eventually, they get the bright idea that if we get him to ask for the thing that he wants, then we can leave because it'll have the thing that he wants.

So they eventually he sees whatever, there's a firetruck somewhere. Oh, and the firetruck. Okay. Yeah. You can have the firetruck now can we go? And so basically he's shaping them, right? He's raising the bar on them. If we thought about that whole thing, the elopement to the office and the finding the firetruck, the whole thing we could look at as a chain, right?

And where's the inception point of the chain? So one thing on the reactive side for the behavior we wanna decrease, he was very capable of surviving a reset and a correction. Say we don't ask for things while we're in the office. You're not in the office now. And, we can nudge and stand in the way of things and say.

Jake could go all the way back to his classroom and he could wait for 20 seconds and he could ask for the thing there, making it less [00:47:00] efficient for him that he had to go all the way back to there and then wait, and then ask, and then come all the way back and get it.

So we're not saying there's no firetruck, right? That would be more of a blunt extinction. And we're not saying you can never leave the room without, I'm gonna physically block you. That invites challenges as well. But we are saying when you do that we're gonna make it inefficient in this way.

The other thing that we recognized was that there was a deficit in manding things that were not in sight and that the overall number of things that he was getting in a day, let's say that throughout a seven hour day, he's gaining access to things, hundreds of times in a day.

Some of his cars and marbles and whatever. He's gaining access to them hundreds of times in a day. Looking at that on a molar level. Recognize that, say he's accessing things 500 times in a day. 465 of those were based on scanning and reaching and sometimes eloping and scanning and reaching.

And 35 of those were based upon requesting. So we wanted to change the strength of the solution, right? So we [00:48:00] introduced extra training with those little, those tiny little yummy packs that have 12 gummies in them. And we cut those into half and we had them just barely out of his reach, where if he wanted to try to really be a stinker, which he liked, he would've reached out and tried to take it.

But the point was I was shining a really bright light, a bright focus on, you're going to use your mouth to ask for the gummy and you're gonna get it immediately every time. And if your hand goes to the gummy before your mouth says gummy, or before we say, okay then we're moving the gummy away. So it's a level at which I felt like we could have that conversation of this behavior works and this one doesn't.

'cause there's no travel involved. It's super clear the MO is pretty strong. And we can really practice that, establish a greater inclination to use his mouth instead of his hands and his feet.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, that's such a great example. There's actually a really similar example of a student that I work with that the classroom teacher and the parents came up with this all on their own. And I'm like, my, I feel like my work here is done. I don't, you don't need me anymore.

They [00:49:00] had a student who was eloping going to different areas of the school and just trying to access whatever he wanted to access. He would go to the office, he would go to, wherever. And the proactive approach that they, rather than just, response blocking or trying to physically manage him back into the classroom.

They came up with the intervention that they have. They already had these feet, basically that you line up at the door before you exit the room. And so before he left the classroom they were basically having him go stand on the feet. Say where he wants to go. They printed out a paper with the different areas in the school that he could then request and then they could go visit that place.

But rather than running outta the classroom and getting whatever they're starting to add some of those response requirements. It's not an either or. And I think, the last piece I'd like to touch on really quickly, as it relates to supervision and things like that.

So often we're focused on the interventions. We're focused on, okay, here's what extinction is, here's what differential reinforcement is, and maybe that really oversimplified you're reinforcing behavior and you're not reinforcing this other [00:50:00] behavior description of differential reinforcement, not what we just described here.

How do you see these basic concepts coming into play during supervision of student analysts? Why do you think it is important for trainees to develop this like deep conceptual understanding and not just an understanding of the different interventions that we might use?

Steve Ward: Yeah. Great question. I'll try to be more brief than usual. If we get right to the interventions that we might use, like these tactics are good tactics. Then people start to think that's the list of good tactics. I used it with Jake, so I can use it with Jill and I can use it.

That's a tactic. It's on the winning list. Do that one and don't do the other one. Without understanding the underpinnings of the why. If they can't generate their own ideas as, let's say, as effectively people have ideas, but not in the way that, that we would tend to encourage them to generate their ideas and we understand the matching law.

Is, so many applications to it. When we actually have a pretty good [00:51:00] understanding of that we have, it's like teaching a man to fish, right? Okay, now you can, yeah, okay. You can come up with your own things and they might be, it might be a tactic you use with someone else. We all have this one work.

Then sometimes you're gonna be great with someone else, but you're not limited to things you've done before and you don't blame the kid when he doesn't respond well to something that worked for another kid.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. And you don't have to just then, okay, we're gonna try this other intervention. How do we modify the intervention if it is appropriate for this learner it again is that continuum and you can alter the dimensions of what you're doing rather than just saying, okay, DRA didn't work, let's try this other totally different intervention. Yeah.

So I know we're at time. Thank you so much for being here. I wanna tie a quick bow on some of the things that we said, and I, this is a real oversimplification of what we talked about, but a few ways that I think the big kind of buckets of things that we talked about in terms of efficient and effective instruction are really looking at that efficiency of behaviors and [00:52:00] thinking about things like matching law and schedules of reinforcement and response effort can be a way to deliver interventions that are more learner specific without needing to result to interventions like blunt extinction that may run a higher risk of those side effects and things like that. And we can still get great results from doing that and not maybe even better results.

The other things are teaching foundational skills first. Programming for those emergent skills can be another really important way to ensure that our treatment is effective and human-centered.

And then looking at the tasks themselves and how we can make them more engaging, fun and motivating. So those are the three buckets of things. And then Steve, I'll give you a second here if there's anything that you wanna add.

But I also wanted to plug I will put in the show notes. You have a link tree with links out to a number of the different things that you have done. The I.G.L.R. The... what is it? 2,100+ Inexpensive Ideas for Intrinsic Motivation in Play. Your article that you wrote, the 50 Practical Ways to Alter the Relative Efficiencies of B [00:53:00] ehaviors and then your webinar series on what comes before.

But with all of that being said, is there anything else that you wanted to add that we didn't touch on today?

Steve Ward: That's pretty good. That's a pretty good synopsis. Make sure that our consultation policies and our supervision policies, as we...

Allyson Wharam: Oh, yes.

Steve Ward: ...Train our mentors, make sure that we are not exacerbating the natural tendency for people to become rule governed about things like these are the do's and those are the don'ts, and I always this, or I never that. Make sure that we model and encourage empiricism in its purest form.

Allyson Wharam: I love that. That's a great note to end on. Thank you so much for being here. This was really fun. I appreciate you taking the time.

Steve Ward: Thank you so much for having me.

Allyson Wharam: Thank you so much for listening to In the Field, the ABA Podcast. Don't forget to visit our website at www.Sidekicklearning.net [00:54:00] for more resources, our comprehensive fieldwork supervision curriculum, and continuing education opportunities. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider subscribing to our podcast and sharing it with your colleagues and friends in the ABA community. Your support helps us to reach and empower more professionals in our field. Join me next week to continue to explore innovative practices and foster quality supervision in ABA.