At Centria, we embrace our Foundations of Care to provide high quality clinical care for our clients, families, and stakeholders. Through our core values, we ensure client-centered and evidenced-based services prioritizing safe and dignified therapy.
Centria’s BCBA mentorship program provides our staff with the coaching, oversight, and tools necessary to implement our Foundations of Care effectively. By teaching our clinicians to prioritize and embrace effective practices, we help our clients achieve socially significant meaningful outcomes. Furthermore, our mentorship program promotes a growth environment for our clinicians to grow and develop their skills while fostering meaningful therapeutic relationships.
What is Centria’s BCBA Mentorship Program?
The first step of our BCBA mentorship program is Foundations of Care training. Clinicians are trained to create individualized foundational plans for our clients, embracing assent-based care and therapeutic alliance.
Our foundational plans act as our “behavior plans” but focus on proactive strategies and indicators of assent. Through mentorship, clinicians are trained to identify synthesized reinforcement contingencies to achieve a state of Happy, Relaxed, and Engaged (HRE) for our learners. Our foundational plans focus on creating an optimal therapeutic environment by achieving states of HRE, honoring indicators of assent, and fostering trust and cooperation.
SBT Training
After completing Foundations of Care training, clinicians begin to receive Skill-Based Treatment (SBT) training. Our Directors of Clinical Services and Clinical Excellence Team members provide training on the Practical Functional Assessment (PFA) process including the ability to conduct open-ended interviews to identify contingencies related to presentation of interfering behavior, conduct safe and effective functional analyses of precursor interfering behaviors, and to conceptualize SBT treatment for socially significant skill acquisition.
SBT procedures use shaping and reinforcement to teach essential skills such as functional communication, tolerance to delay and denial contingencies, appropriate relinquishment and transitioning skills, and shaping cooperation and endurance with learning. Over time, we practice generalization training to translate these skills to naturally occurring contingencies such as those contacted in the school or home environments.
Our clinicians are trained to independently conceptualize and implement SBT procedures across multiple clients through support of our Clinical Directors and Clinical Excellence Team.
- Weekly overlaps are conducted for ongoing coaching and support while teaching the SBT process through behavioral skills training.
- Fidelity rubrics are completed to assess performance and to provide effective feedback to shape independent practice.
- Independence in practice and generalization of procedures across multiple clients are requirements for graduation from weekly mentorship.
The terminal outcome of BCBA mentorship is to provide the tools, resources, and coaching necessary for our clinicians to be fully independent in the PFA and SBT process.
Empowering Clinicians
BCBA mentorship empowers our clinicians to make effective clinical decisions for meaningful client outcomes. By embracing our foundations of care and assent-based model, we create an enriched therapeutic environment for our clients to meet client aspirations through trust, cooperation, and respect.
After completion of the mentorship program, clinicians have access to ongoing clinical support, case consultation, and clinical overlaps from our clinical directors and clinical excellence team.
About the author
Charles J. Gibson, MS, BCBA, LBA-MI is a Director of Clinical Services at Centria Autism. With 7 years of PFA and SBT experience and 10 years of work in the field of ABA, Charles is passionate about ongoing professional development and implementation of best practices for himself and his team of BCBAs.
