PUBLICATIONS
November 2020
Teachers as Behavior Professionals: Understanding the Experiences of Teachers as BCBAs
(Published in Special Education Research, Policy & Practice)
Despite knowing the basic demographic information about behavior analysts (including employment status, type and areas of work, etc.), little work has examined the actual experiences of dedicated behavior professionals. This article presents in-depth, systematic qualitative data on the experience of teachers who returned to school for their certification, including their introduction to the field, training program experiences, supervision experiences, and actualized professional gains as a result of obtaining their BCBA. This work reports the experiences of behavior analysts and provides an initial behavior professional experience model.
April 2019
Your Student Is Hungry, Tired, Angry—Now What? Addressing Distal Setting Events in the Classroom
(Published in TEACHING Exceptional Children)
All students, including those with a Behavior Support Plan, sometimes start their school day after experiencing an event or circumstance that makes challenging behavior more likely to happen, such as not eating breakfast, getting into an argument, or not getting a good night’s sleep. Because these distal setting events occur outside of school, teachers may feel incapable of addressing them. This article describes the concept of distal setting events and provides a step-by-step guide for assessing and intervening upon challenging student behavior impacted by out-of-school setting events.
October 2020
Using Classroom Observations to Describe and Model the Impact of Positive and Negative Teaching Behaviors on Classroom Disruptive Behavior
(PhD Dissertation)
Positive, proactive classroom management strategies support academic and behavioral student outcomes while fostering positive teacher-student relationships. However, teachers often cite struggles with classroom management and challenging student behavior as key reasons they ultimately leave the field. Experiments within the present study sought to better understand the foundational role of teachers’ positive and negative verbal interactions with students. Experiment 1 utilized descriptive and inferential statistics to better understand the current rate of teachers’ positive and negative verbal interactions regarding student behavior, as well as the influence of specific teacher behaviors on classroom disruptive behavior. Experiment 2 evaluated the effectiveness of a low-intensity treatment package (training, performance feedback, and reflective goal-setting) to adjust teachers’ verbal interactions with students. Results from Experiment 1 show teachers used nearly five times as many negative interactions as positive, with significant differences across teachers and specific behaviors. Teachers’ negative statements were also two times longer than their positives, on average. Teachers appeared to rely on unique negative ‘crutches’ – individual collections of specific negative behaviors. Both criticisms and attention to junk statements significantly influenced the rate of classroom disruptive behaviors. Experiment 2 findings indicate the treatment package helped one participant make significant changes over baseline (increased positive interactions and reduced negative interactions).
March 2018
Noncontingent Reinforcement: Enriching the Classroom Environment to Reduce Problem Behaviors
(Published in TEACHING Exceptional Children)
Noncontingent reinforcement (NCR) is an evidence-based behavior change tactic that effectively reduces problem behaviors in classrooms and clinical settings. NCR includes providing a known reinforcer on a fixed schedule, independent of the students’ behavior. Although NCR has effectively reduced challenging behavior in a variety of settings and a range of participant characteristics (age, gender, disability, etc.), it has received little attention within practitioner literature. The current article describes foundational components of NCR and provides a five-step practitioner’s guide for implementing NCR within the classroom.