Skill Based Treatment Strategies

BCBA CEUs: 1

What this session covers

An hour-long recorded session on Skill-Based Treatment (SBT) and the Practical Functional Assessment (PFA) that precedes it, presented by a practicing ABA supervisor with 14 years working with children aged 2 to 18 across schools, homes and nurseries, who has used the approach in her own practice for five to six years and replicated it for her master's dissertation.

What you will be able to do after it

• Run the open-ended interview that opens a Practical Functional Assessment, and know what to collect: the child's age, abilities and preferences, and the specific detail of the behaviors of concern.
• Follow the SBT progression in order, and say why each step exists: a simple functional communication response, shaped into an intermediate one, shaped again into a complex one, then a tolerance response, then easy and finally harder contextually appropriate behaviors.
• Explain the constructional logic to a colleague or a parent: in SBT, behaviors of concern reduce because skills are built, not because of consequences imposed in response to them.
• Recognize what the package already specifies for you - the reinforcement schedules and teaching procedures - so you are implementing a defined protocol rather than designing one from scratch.

Who it is for

Practitioners and supervisors who already work in ABA and want the SBT sequence laid out end to end, with the acronyms explained as they arrive rather than assumed.

What it is not

Not a certification in Skill-Based Treatment, and not affiliated with the researchers whose work it describes. It is one practitioner's account of using the approach, including a replication she conducted herself.