Training for Sustainability

As a new consultant, you’ve just landed a gig for an ABA company that runs a number of group homes serving individuals with disabilities.  Senior leadership has hired you to help reduce the number of restraints across the organization. You are excited because you will have the opportunity to train direct care staff in a behavior management system you developed and ran successfully within your own company before you journeyed into consulting.

Edutainment

Throughout your years as a professional, you’ve witnessed or taken part in what you’d call “edutainment” where participants seemed to enjoy the training but walked away with little knowledge and even less skills. So, you use instructional design to create a training that ensures just the right amount of instruction and modeling paired with lots of rehearsal and feedback result in actual knowledge and skill development. You’ll be damned if you’d even let one participant walk away with out the skills required to be successful.

On training day, your participants appear engaged as evidenced by lots of eye contact, note taking, thoughtful questions and responses.  Following the training, you take pride in providing the company’s senior leadership with a summary of the training. The graphs you’ve created based on assessments provided during and following the training demonstrate both skill acquisition and social validity of the participants. The data looks great! Not only did the participants love the training delivery and content, but the data suggests they are actually walking away able to independently demonstrate targeted skills. But you expect this. You aren’t a damn “edutainer”…you are a behavior analyst.

As a budding “OBMer,” you understand very well there must be a component that includes post-training feedback if the behavior management system is to work. So, you create a schedule and head off to the group homes armed with OBM, confident staff will be happy to see and receive feedback from you based on the rapport you built during the training. During your first observation you note most staff aren’t engaging in the skills you trained them in; however, a little prompting and feedback seems to go a long way. It isn’t long at all before restraints begin trending down. 

Because of the costs associated with using an outside consultant to provide feedback to staff, the project soon comes to an end. But this was expected and agreed upon during the initial contracting phase. At any rate, the restraints continue to trend down, and senior leadership are please. They thank you for your help, and you venture off to your next gig.

Fly in the Ointment

Sounds pretty good, right? Well, let’s fast forward a month. The phone rings. It’s the senior leadership from the group homes. “We have a problem. Your behavior management system isn’t working. The restraints are right back to where they were!”

Unfortunately, developing and then maintaining staff performance is a challenge experienced in many organizations across the world. Outcomes in terms of transference of skills into the natural environment following a training range from 0%-30% based on some of the investigations I’ve read. While it would take a deeper analysis to determine exactly why restraints returned to baseline in a similar situation, research by Haberlin, Beauchamp, Agnew and O'Brien (2012) provide some interesting insights as to one cause. In their study, they evaluated two methods of training staff supporting individuals with developmental disabilities. 

In the first type, pyramidal training, supervisors were trained in behavior analytic principles and on how to deliver performance feedback. Once trained, the supervisors then trained and provided ongoing performance feedback to their direct-care staff. In the other training, consultant led, direct care staff were trained directly by the consultant.  

While the consultant led training received higher scores on satisfactions surveys from participants (4.8 and 4.7 on a five-point scale compared to the 4.2 and 3.9 given to the supervisors in the pyramidal group), the outcomes below are compelling. 

FIGURE 1 This graph represents the mean percentage for correct teaching procedures for baseline, posttraining, and 3-month follow up for consultant-led and pyramidal training group. The standard deviation bars on each data point represent one standard deviation in either direction for each data point.

In summary, while both groups reportedly acquired the same amount of knowledge related to ABA principles, pyramidal training was more effective in both teaching staff to use correct teaching procedures with consumers and maintaining improvements in teaching procedures after a 3-month follow up. By comparison, the consultant-led training group's performance declined almost to baseline. The big take away is this: Whether you are a consultant, leader, trainer, or just somebody wanting to make a difference in your organization, training is insufficient for performance improvement in the post-training environment. Training is an antecedent strategy, and the job of antecedents is to get behavior going. While training in the absence of skills is often needed and might initially get the performer off on the right foot, it can’t sustain their performance. This is the job of consequences. As such, it is critical that the post-training environment be planned for to ensure adequate positive reinforcement is available and systematically provided. 

For more on this study, click here.

Reference

Alayna T. Haberlin, Ken Beauchamp, Judy Agnew & Floyd O'Brien (2012) A Comparison of Pyramidal Staff Training and Direct Staff Training in Community-Based Day Programs, Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 32:1, 65-74, DOI: 10.1080/01608061.2012.646848

BIO

Paul “Paulie” Gavoni

An expert in human performance, coaching, and organizational leadership, Dr. Paul "Paulie" Gavoni has worked in education and human services for 20 years where he served in a variety of positions including COO, Director of School Improvement, Leadership Director, Professor, Assistant Principal, School Turnaround Manager, Clinical Coordinator, Therapist, and Behavior Analyst. Beyond his direct work with students in poverty and those suffering from behavioral and mental health issues, Dr. Gavoni specializes in providing administrative teams, teachers, and staff with training, coaching, and consultation in analyzing and developing behavior and performance management systems to positively impact key performance indicators. As a behavior scientist, Dr. Gavoni is passionate about applying organizational behavior management (OBM) strategies to establish positive environments that engage and bring out the best in professionals, so they can bring out the best in the children and adults they serve. 

Dr. Gavoni is co-author of Quick Wins! Accelerating School Transformation through Science, Engagement, and Leadership  and the best seller Deliberate Coaching: A Toolbox for Accelerating Teacher Performance. In addition, he is published in academic journals on topics related to school improvement and sports,  and has published three online courses dedicated to school leadership preparation, an area he remains deeply passionate about. Click here to listen to hear more about Dr. Gavoni’s work in schools.

Beyond his work in education and human services, Dr. Gavoni is also a highly sought out and respected coach in combat sports. In 1992, he began boxing in South Florida and went on to win a Florida Golden Gloves Heavyweight Title in 1998. Since then, Coach “Paulie Gloves,” as he is known in the Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) community, has trained many champions and UFC vets using technologies rooted in the behavioral sciences. Coach Paulie has been a featured coach in the books Beast: Blood, Struggle, and Dreams a the Heart of Mixed Martial Arts, A Fighter’s Way, and the article Ring to Cage: How four former boxers help mold MMA’s finest. 

He is also an author who has written for a variety of online magazines such as Scifighting, Last Word on Sports, and Bloody Elbow where his Fight Science series continues to bring behavior science to MMA. Co-founder of MMA Science, his current project involves the development of the first International MMA Belt Ranking System, a ground breaking process bringing tradition, organization, and behavior science to mixed martial arts.