The ABA Australia is delighted to offer several pre-confernece workshops. These workshops will be held on Friday, 29 July 2022 at the Rydges World Square Hotel.

Full Day Workshop Price - $280

Full day workshop tickets include

• Morning tea, afternoon tea, and hot Buffett lunch (will cater to any dietary needs)
  
• All day coffee, tea, and water
  
• ABA Australia members tickets include free BACB CE for the workshop
  

Full Day Workshop Price - $180

Half day workshop tickets include

• Morning or afternoon tea (will cater to any dietary needs)
  
• All day coffee, tea, and water
  
• ABA Australia members tickets include free BACB CE for the workshop

Workshop registration is for ABA Australia members and non-members

To register for a workshop, make sure you have bought your 2-day conference ticket first. You will receive an access code to purchase the workshop ticket.  Then click "Workshop Registration" button. Follow the prompts to select and pay for the workshop.

Workshop Instructor: Brendon Knott, Clinical Psychologist
Time: 9am - 4pm 

Many contemporary models of psychotherapy are heavily grounded in behavior-analytic principles including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP) among others. Through the advancements of these contextual behavioural models, behavior analysts are well positioned to work with broader ranges of clinical presentations than the populations traditionally associated with ABA research and practice. In particular, the ability to ‘think functionally’ about behaviour has been increasingly emphasised as a way of organising a more individualised approach to assessment and intervention. In this workshop you will have the opportunity to practice applying the skills of functional analysis to the diversity of presenting issues commonly encountered by clinicians in day to day outpatient psychotherapy. You will also have the opportunity to learn ways of applying ‘functional thinking’ to constructing, delivering and monitoring interventions. 

In this workshop we will actively practise applying behaviour-analytic skills and concepts to working with real world clinical presentations. We will use a range of learning methods such as watching clinical case vignettes and practising skills in live role plays. 

Learning objectives of the workshop include:

• Using functional analysis to orient an individualised assessment in any clinical situation
• How to practically apply behaivour analytic principles (such as motivating operations, and functional equivalence) to case formulation
• How to ‘think functionally’ about private events such as thoughts and emotions
• How to use functional analysis to ‘micro-orient’ therapist behaviour in the therapy room
• How to intentionally use your own behaviour as antecedent and consequential context for the client in order to shape more effective repertoires

Get to Know Brendon Knott

Brendon is passionate about helping students and clinicians who wish to deepen their understanding of ACT and contextual behavioural therapies, and to ground their clinical work in the foundational building blocks of functional contextualism, behaviour-analytic principles, and relational frame theory. He has lectured undergraduate and post-graduate psychology students in ACT and CBS for over 10 years, and in recent years has run training workshops at local and international conferences. His training aims to demystify the principles underlying ACT and bring functional thinking to the forefront of the clinician’s attention, so it can be used as a guide throughout all stages of therapy.

While Brendon’s primary role is that of a clinician, he also has a deep interest in the broader applications of CBS-skills, and is currently involved in a number of research projects in this area, including co-developing a mobile phone app for medical students (BiSi) which delivers ACT skills training in a format tailored to the individual, as well as co-developing a set of virtual reality training modules for the Australian Defence Force (Performance Edge) which delivers CBS-related skills in an immersive training format.

Workshop Instructor: Janet Irvine, Manager SSI Diversity Consulting
Time: 9am - 4pm

We live in a vibrant multicultural community, with one in four Australians bornoverseas and 1 in 4 speaking a language other than English at home. Harnessing the benefits that diversity offers us and the people we work with can only occur through developing a culturally responsive and inclusive approach. This one day workshop will introduce you to key frameworks and the reflective process that supports culturally responsive practice. Through interactive activities you will gain an insight into your own cultural beliefs and values and how they drive your behaviors and practices and build your capability to be more curious, respectful and relevant in the way we work with culturally diverse individuals and families.

Content includes:

• Defining diversity and inclusion
  
• A framework for culturally responsive practice
  
• Unpacking ‘culture’ and finding the common ground to work collaboratively
  
• Managing unconscious bias
  
• Examining power and privilege
  
• Personal Identity and diversity within diversity
  
• Intersectionality and addressing disadvantage
  
• Minimising misunderstanding through examining explanatory models

Get to Know Janet Irvine

Pronouns: She/Her

Janet Irvine is the Manager of SSI Diversity Training, an initiative of Settlement Services International (SSI) who provide learning experiences that transform how people respond to diversity in ways that are thought-provoking, inspire curiosity, and build confidence to engage more effectively with cultural diversity.

Janet has extensive experience working with newly arrived families from a refugee background as a counsellor, caseworker and educator. This experience and her role providing a range of training for child protection and out-of-home care caseworkers has cultivated her passion for creating learning spaces for people to hone their skills to be more culturally responsive and trauma informed.

Workshop Instructor: Alex Brown, B Psych Assoc MAPS, BCBA
9am - 4pm
6 BACB ETHICS CEUs

The growth of the National Disability Insurance Agency and the addition of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission in 2019 has created a climate with more focus on how to ethically deliver high quality behaviour analytic services. A successful and ethical behaviour support plan (BSP) clearly connects participant goals with effective function-based interventions, especially to reduce the use of restricted practices. However, BSPs in the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) have a number of requirements to meet, making them challenging documents to create. NDIS continues to grow, which means regulations change periodically requiring consistent updating of skills. In addition to meeting the legistarted requirements of NDIS, PBS need to be person centred, comprehensive and useful to stakeholders across a variety of contexts. This workshop is created for behaviour analysts new to the NDIS or new PBS practitioners wanting to demystify the NDIS BPS process. 

Learning objectives of the workshop include:

• State the key components of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission's Positive Behaviour Support Framework.
• Describe the relationship between quality of life and behaviours of concern.
• State why restrictive practices may be needed.
• Identify regulated restrictive practices and their appropriate uses, within legislative requirements in NSW.
• Define the role of the behaviour support practitioner in the Restrictive Practice Authorisation Panel process.
• Identify components of a restrictive practice fade out plan
• Discuss the development of a behaviour support plan that is consistent with the expectations of NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, whilst remaining evidence-based.
• Discuss the ethical considerations and approaches to effectively implement behaviour support.

This workshop will NOT cover: Defining behaviour, creating operational definitions, how to create a data collection system, how to conduct functional behaviour assessments, identifying the function of a particular behaviour, or detailed descriptions of specific behaviour intervention strategies

Get to Know Alex Brown

Pronouns: She/Her

Alex is a registered psychologist with 20 years experience in the field of disability. She has worked with children and adults in a range of public and private organisations. Alex has worked with autistic children and adolescents for the majority of her career, and values the results she has seen in intensive early intervention.

In addition to the Autism Spectrum, Alex also has experience with individuals with a range of disabilities. Alex also works with children with anxiety, pervasive demand avoidance and ADHD. Alex is trained and experienced in Autism diagnosis, and also provides a range of psychometric testing.

In 2013, Alex completed a Master of Science in ABA and Autism through Sage Colleges, New York, leading to certification as a behaviour analyst in 2014.

Workshop Instructor: Guy Bruce, Ph.D., BCBA-D
9am - 4 pm
6 BACB SUPERVISION CEUs 

Do you work as a program designer, staff trainer, supervisor, or director of an agency that provides educational services to students with learning difficulties? Are you satisfied with your clients’ progress? Behavior analysis developed a powerful technology for helping people, but too many clients don't receive the benefits. Why not? The easy answer is that employees don't do what they are told. But the employees’ performance, just like their clients’ performance, is a product of their environment. Do employees have the resources, training, and management necessary to help their clients achieve their goals? What about their supervisors? What about their directors? Organizations are groups of individuals who must work together to provide their clients with the outcomes they want. The failure of clients to make adequate progress is not usually an individual employee performance problem, but a performance problem at the system process, and individual levels of the organization.

This workshop will teach you how to design and implement a pragmatic organizational performance engineering process to change how providers work together, so that every student makes efficient progress. 

The EARS process has the following steps:

1. Evaluate student progress;
2. Analyze causes of provider performance problems;
3. Recommend changes in provider resources, training, and management; and
4. Solve provider performance problems by designing and implementing recommended changes in provider resources, training, and management.

Learning objectives of the workshop include:

• Describe Skinner’s pragmatic science and engineering of behavior change.
• Diagram a school as a provider-recipient network in which each participant is both a provider of resources to other participants and a recipient of resources from other participants.
• Write useful student product and performance objectives.
• Evaluate desired student products, necessary performance and progress using sensitive measures of product and behavior change.
• Analyze provider performance problems, classifying them as Can-Do, Know-How, and Want-To problems and identifying useful causes of each type of performance problem.
• Recommend changes in provider resources, training, and management based on the analysis of provider performance problems.
• Solve provider performance problems by designing and implementing recommended solutions.

Get to Know Guy Bruce

Pronouns: He/Him

Since earning his Ed. D. in Educational Psychology from the Behavior Analysis in Human Resources program at West Virginia University, Dr. Bruce has taught behavior analysis in both undergraduate and graduate programs and consulted with variety of organizations. He is the author of Instructional Design Made Easy, a workbook for designing more efficient learning programs; Engineering Schools for Student Success, a pragmatic, organizational performance engineering process that can be used to change how providers work together, so that every client or student makes efficient progress, and ProgressCharter, an application that helps providers to “Use Their EARS.”

Workshop Instructor: Kristin Bayley
9 am - 4 pm
6 BACB SUPERVISION CEUs

The profession of behaviour analysis is undergoing a significant phase of growth in Australia.  As demand for qualified practitioners of behaviour analysis grows, so does the demand for competent and confident supervisors to provide the required supervision for fieldwork hours.  Over the past 3 years, the annual growth in the number of BCBA certified individuals in Australia has been accelerating.  In 2021, we welcomed 77 new BCBAs into our ranks.  Of the 208 BCBA certified professionals in Australia in January 2022, 56% have been certified 2 years or less. 

What does this all mean?  It means that we need more competent and confident BCBA supervisors in Australia and we need them quickly!  The provision of effective supervision is critical to the quality of services and the reputation of behaviour analysis in Australia.  Supervisor BCBAs have an ethical obligation to not only be knowledgeable about supervisory requirements, but to also provide accountable and effective supervision (BACB, 2020).  The repertoire of behaviours that must be acquired to become an effective, competent supervisor are many and they are complex.  They are also distinct from the theoretical and clinical competencies assessed by the board certification exam.

This workshop will help Australian BCBAs bridge the gap between passing the ‘Beast’ and becoming a successful supervisor.  Participants will engage in a mixture of didactic and practical group activities designed to develop two key supervisory practices: 1) development of a relationship with the supervisee, and 2) creation of a structured approach to supervision (Sellers et al., 2016).  

Learning objectives of the workshop include:

• Describe how to use values clarification to identify reinforcers for your supervisees.  
• Discuss the role of performance expectations and describe key mechanisms for establishing performance expectations for both the supervisor and supervisee.  
• Describe the role of feedback in shaping supervisee performance and how to provide feedback that fosters meaningful change in your supervisees (and leaves your supervisory relationship unscathed!)  
• Design and implement a comprehensive and structured approach to supervision.
• Create exciting and engaging activities to give supervisees frequent opportunities to practice new skills and receive feedback.  

***This will build on the knowledge and skills participants contacted during the 8-hour instruction in supervision required by the BACB, so it is expected that all participants will have completed this training prior to attending the course. ***

This workshop will be a mixture of didactic presentation by the convenor and small group activities.  Participants will work in small groups to: 1) practice skill values, performance and feedback skills, and 2) develop activities that could be included in a comprehensive, structured supervision program.  This workshop will focus primarily on repertoires related to independent fieldwork supervision, however, clinicians will also find benefit to their practices in supervising Registered Behaviour Technicians and training staff members more broadly. 

Get to Know Kristin Bayley

Pronouns: She/Her

Kristin started her career in behaviour analysis in 1998, working for New England Center for Children. After completing her Masters in Applied Behaviour Analysis, she moved to London to work as a program consultant at TreeHouse School and became certified as a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst in 2003. Whilst at TreeHouse, she also led a team which opened an ABA specialist support classroom in Belfast, Northern Ireland. After relocating to Sydney in 2007, Kristin completed a Masters in Speech and Language Pathology and is currently one of only a handful of dually certified BCBAs and Speech Pathologists in Australia. In 2019, Kristin was given an incredible opportunity to lead the development and delivery of the second graduate programs in Applied Behaviour Analysis in Australia at Griffith University.

Workshop Instructors: Brad Bloomfield, Ph.D., BCBA-D & Russ Fox, Ph.D.
9am - 12 pm
3 BACB CEUs

Australian teachers often face challenges with managing behaviour within their classrooms. Behaviour analysts are poised to support teachers address this concern given their training in effective intervention practices, and expertise in training and consultation. Experienced consultants often work across multiple settings and travel time reduces their capacity to provide effective consultation. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this concern with stay-at-home orders and public health guidelines preventing consultants from entering schools. School teleconsultation, or the use of technology to provide consultation services remotely has been demonstrated to effectively meet this need. This workshop will provide attendees with the contextual knowledge and skills to be able to adapt their current in-person practices to a technology-mediated approach to increase the access to their services.  

Beyond using a videoconferencing platform to communicate with a teacher, teleconsultation can use different hardware and software platforms to make it easier to collect data, collaborate with others, share information, and establish rapport. Additionally, there are unique professional, legal, and ethical considerations teleconsultants must consider prior to implementing this service-delivery model. Finally, approaches to establish positive working remote working relationships and teacher buy-in will be addressed.

Learning objectives of the workshop include:

• Identify hardware and software appropriate for their school teleconsultation practice within the ethical, legal, and professional guidelines in which they operate.
• Describe ways to effectively build consultee buy-in.
• Conduct behavioural skills training (BST) on a relevant intervention component with an educator over teleconsultation.
• Design and use a data-collection system that is accurate, effective, and efficient over teleconsultation.

Get to Know Brad Bloomfield

Pronouns: He/Him

Dr. Brad Bloomfield is a lecturer in applied behaviour analysis at Monash University. He is a Board Certified Behaviour Analyst-Doctoral (BCBA-D). He has been working in the field for over 15 years supporting schools and families address behaviours of concern. His research emphasizes indirect service delivery in supporting parents and teachers, evidence-based behavior interventions, and the use of technology within consultation and intervention. His publication record includes four book chapters and 20 peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr. Bloomfield is an editorial board member for three journals, and has served as a guest editor for a special-topic journal on advances in consultation.

Get to Know Russ Fox

Pronouns: He/Him

Dr. Russ Fox is a Lecturer in applied behaviour analysis at Monash University. He is a trained primary school teacher with experience teaching and working in mainstream primary schools. Much of Russ’ teaching experience has been in alternative education settings, specifically supporting primary and secondary students exhibiting behaviours of concern. He has worked extensively with teachers in a Capacity Building role delivering in-school teacher consultation to improve behaviour support in classrooms. His research interests include school-wide positive behaviour supports, multi-tiered systems of support, responsive teacher training, and the sustainability of implementation of evidence-based practices in education.

Workshop Instructor: Jenn Colechin, BCBA
1pm - 4pm
3  BACB ETHICS CEUs

It is estimated that approximately 1 in 10 children in Australia are exposed to at least one form of trauma and abuse before the age of 15. For children with a disability, the number of those exposed to some form of trauma and abuse doubles to 1 in 5. The incidence of individuals with a disability who experience some form of trauma or abuses rises as individuals age; those with disability over the age of 15 have a 1 in 2 likelihood of experiencing trauma or abuse. This over-representation means that nearly all behaviour analysts will at some stage work with a trauma-affected individual. As behaviour analysts, we are tasked with assessing and understanding the function of the behaviours of concern the people we support engage in. Exposure to traumatic events can have a significant impact on biological, neurological, and behavioural development of the individual. 

Due to the profound influence trauma can have on the individual and their behaviour it is essential that behaviour analysts have a basic understanding of trauma’s impact on adaptive and behavioural skill development in order to effective behaviour assessment and treatment. This workshop provides participants with an understanding of the biological and behavioural features of trauma along with practical and effective strategies for analysis and treatment.

Learning objectives of the workshop include:

• Have a general understanding of trauma and commonly seen effects on behavioural presentations and functions 
• Apply basic trauma-informed principles to in the development of functional behaviour assessments and behaviour support plans
• Identify pathways for expanding scope of competence in trauma-informed applied behaviour analysis

Get to Know Jenn Colechin

Pronouns: She/Her

Jenn Colechin is a Board-Certified Behaviour Analyst. She is the founder and co-director of Specialist Behaviour Support Services in Melbourne. Jenn specialises in the field of trauma-informed positive behaviour support and is a teaching associate in the School of Education (Applied Behaviour Analysis) at Monash University. She is a highly skilled and experienced training facilitator with strengths in public speaking, teaching, and engagement.