Navigate ABA and Autism Blog

Spotlight on Early Intervention Resources

This month for the #dobetter movement, we focused on early intervention and how to intervene early better. We started the month with a video review of a typically developing 2 year old interacting with his mom with during intervention styles. A voice over explaining that video can be found on our YouTube page

Our webinar for this month focused on topics not covered in behavior analytic graduate programs relating to early intervention and typical development. We discussed the importance of focusing on the social components for autism and making sure skills are broken down far enough. This webinar will be available on our website by June of 2018.

If you would like to watch it for free in the meantime, check out our Facebook page where a post with the link can be found!

For our blog this month, we are discussing resources related to early intervention that all behavior analysts should be familiar with. There are many helpful websites and books and also decision trees that can be used when working with such a young population. It is our duty as behavior analysts not only to become experts in the science of behavior analysis but also the literature and resources related to the populations we serve.


Book recommendations

The following books are must haves if you are providing early intervention:
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Train Parents Better

The #dobetter movement covered training parents better for the month of March. We started the month with a discussion of a video of an example parent training session. Check out the video here and add your thoughts! The Parent is Always Right webinar was well received and provided members with access to different resources and guidelines for providing effective and supported parent training. The webinar will be available for free until April 14^th. Lisa Ozowara and Bethany Patterson conducted a Facebook Live resource share relating to parent training. The video can be viewed here


For our blog post this month, we are going to discuss different Parent Training materials that we have found improve our effectiveness in conducting parent training. We will start with some general parent training recommendations to consider for the work you do as a behavior analyst and then provide a brief discussion for how each resource can be used to improve your parent training process!

General Guidelines for Training Parents Better
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Assess Better – Put down the Cookie (Cutter). Individualizing the assessment process
By Dr. Megan Miller, BCBA-D


The Feb theme for the 2018 Do Better Movement is Assess Better. We started this month with a video activity related to identifying skills to assess with an early learner. The Do Better community identified quite a few skills they would assess further. However, there was a general theme of relying on commercially available assessments for this process. In our webinar for Assess Better, we discuss in more detail the next steps we took in the assessment process for this learner.

The professional development activity for this month was a 3-hour webinar covering the topic of Assessment for learners diagnosed with autism. The webinar focused on describing a multitude of commercially available assessments for learners with autism, providing examples of ways these assessments can be used together to develop appropriate intervention, discussion of assessment in general and different resources to use for assessing skills that do not related to commercially available assessments, and reviewing some video examples. Currently, behavior analytic training programs both at universities and through supervised fieldwork seem to focus too much on training individuals to complete 1 or 2 specific assessments instead of training on the assessment process. Behavior analysts successfully developed very effective interventions for learners well before the existence of any commercially available assessments and it is critical to our field that we continue to develop skills related to this process. This webinar is available for FREE until March 13^th, 2018 and can be accessed in our Slack Group #assessbetter channel and/or on Navigation Behavioral Consulting’s Facebook page found here. After the 13^th, the Webinar will be available on our website: www.navigateaba.com/ce-courses


For our assess better blog, we are talking about how to put down the Cookie Cutter and develop individualized assessments for our learners. I could probably write a whole book on this topic but for the sake of time, I have narrowed down the focus to a few key areas: observation, learn your population, familiarize yourself with resources available to you based on this population, and an example document of how we make use of the resources available to us.


Observation
When conducting assessments, it is critical that observation occurs PRIOR to determining which formalized assessments will be used with the learner and to help you pinpoint what may need to be assessed further. It is near impossible to know that the proper assessment process is being conducted with a learner if you have never seen the skillset of that learner. Observation can be done by viewing a few quick video clips of the learner when feasible or by observing the learner’s natural interactions when conducting the intake. During the observation, it is important to look for:
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This was originally posted on our old website a few years ago: Read More

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