standards and follow the
Guidelines for Responsible
Conduct, but you should
work with other members
of the team.”
Summarize the Negotiated Agreement Someone in the meet-ing should document what the team members agreed to do. This summary should be done verbally and provided in written form (this can be in meeting minutes or in your own notes).
Know When to Walk As a behavior analyst, you’ll strive, we hope, to be a team player. But there will be times when you are asked to do something unethical, sign off on services that are simply inadequate, or implement a program that is not going to result in effective treatment. When this happens, your best ethical course of action is to refuse to provide services. If you are work-ing for a consultwork-ing firm or you’re a graduate student in a stu-dent placement, you should always seek guidance (that’s what cell phones are for). Contact your supervisor, and discuss the situation to make sure you are on the right track.
the need FOr negOtIatIng and LOBBYIng
To further describe the behavior analyst’s need for negotiating and lobbying skills, let’s consider the situation where you’re called in on a case for a child in a public school program.
In the process of interfacing with a mediator or an individual-ized education program or habilitation team, you might suddenly discover that your diligent research and development work is about to be compromised by someone, or a group of people, usu-ally not trained in behavior analysis. For behavioral procedures to be effective, we, as a field, have evidence that certain condi-tions are necessary. For example, consistency (meaning no one is giving intermittent reinforcement for inappropriate behavior) is extremely important in behavior reduction programs. The practi-cal implications here are that it is likely to be your job to convince a team that everyone, including the parents, teachers, and other professionals, needs to follow through with the behavior plan.
So, you’ve done your best work and come to the staffing only to discover that the committee is about to veto your plan or modify
it significantly. “Scale down” is often a polite way of telling you that you are not going to get your way on this and that someone at the table does not believe the behavioral intervention is a critical part of treatment. In some cases, a “shortage of resources” may be the reason given for not allowing you to implement your pro-posed intervention. In other cases, the mediator may balk at the program because she just doesn’t want to “spend that much time”
on the training or contingency management you’ve so carefully designed. When this happens, you’ll need to draw on your negoti-ating skills to get the best services for your client.
Where Does Behavior Analysis Fit In? Why Do We Have to Negotiate?
So, why doesn’t everyone appreciate what we do? Let’s back up for a minute and look at how behavior analysis fits into the larger system of human services. First, we have to admit that we came to the table much later than the other professions. Children have been present-ing serious behavior problems in classrooms for years. For at least 30 years, there has been a documented literature on treating these problems, and that literature came out of education, not behavior analysis. Schools first responded to children who had special needs by developing “special classrooms.” The early view on children with a behavior problem in a school setting was that it was the children’s fault. To get these children out of the teacher’s hair, a school psy-chologist would be brought in to test the children and send them on their disruptive way to a “resource room” down the hall or to a portable classroom out behind the main school building.
Another misguided model for addressing behavior problems in schools involved trying to talk to the children about their inap-propriate behavior. Children who for some reason could not be tested out of the classroom (e.g., their IQs were too high) were sent to a school counselor. Often, the counseling was just watered down “talk therapy.” Again, the theory was that there is some-thing wrong with these children that needs fixing.
It is surprising that in some schools, removal to special classes and counseling are still the methods of choice for handling
children with behavior problems. Although special classes and counseling are well established in the educational system as solu-tions, these interventions don’t have a strong database to show that they actually work, except by removing the child from the original classroom, thereby immediately solving the problem for a very happy teacher. The obvious negative reinforcement effect in this model explains its popularity in school systems throughout the country. Any blame for the problem is shifted to the child, a powerless victim of a well-entrenched bureaucracy.
Now, since about 10 years ago, when there is a problem related to a child’s behavior, along comes a consulting behavior analyst.
Rather than testing the child, the behavior analyst goes into the classroom to observe what is going on and tries to find the causal variables for the child’s disruptive behavior. What the behavior analyst discovers is that this student is not well served by the teacher, the material is too difficult for him, he is required to sit for long periods paying close attention to texts he finds uninteresting, and he gets attention (“get back in your seat”) from the teacher only when he gets out up and walks around or disturbs another student. This child doesn’t need testing and placement in another class, and he doesn’t need counseling. He needs a new set of inter-esting academic tasks for which he can earn reinforcement. The reinforcement will come from a teacher who understands his need for praise. It all sounds wonderful, but be aware that this series of recommendations is not likely to make the behavior analyst very popular with teachers who are locked into the negative reinforce-ment model.
What’s a good behavior analyst to do under these circum-stances? First, you must recognize that a school is an entity with its own power structure, unwritten rules, and codes of conduct.
A school is different from almost any other institution in our culture because the teacher has total autonomy in her classroom.
She makes the rules, and she calls the shots. Even the principal, the parents, and the school board are reluctant to take any action when a long-time teacher is involved in a disagreement.
So, you’re the behavior analyst working in this school. You’ve just received a referral from the principal to work with a disrup-tive child in Ms. Baker’s class. You make the observations and draw the conclusions described earlier. What next? Tell Ms. Baker she has to change her behavior? Tell her she has to give up her yel-lowed notes and deal with the student in a completely different way from the way she has been teaching for the past 25 years? And tell her she needs to spend a lot of time reinforcing a child she has come to dislike? You can imagine how the conversation is going to go. For beginners, this might seem like an absolutely daunting task. If you successfully turn around a teacher who was not com-mitted to a behavior analysis approach, the word will spread, and you’ll have other people waiting in line for your services.
To get started, a quick course in “Negotiation and Lobbying 101” will help you make some headway on behalf of your clients.
LOBBYIng
As most people know it, the term lobbying relates to organized attempts by special interest groups to influence legislators who are considering certain bills in Congress. The key features are the organized attempts and where they take place, which is outside of the actual deliberative chamber. The term lobbying originated from special interest group representatives cornering legislators in the lobby or hallway and trying to influence them outside of an official meeting.
We use the idea of lobbying to suggest a method by which you, the newcomer to the organization, might ethically work to influ-ence the actions of others to have a positive outcome. The spe-cial interest you represent is the student who needs an advocate to improve his chances at succeeding in school. As the consult-ing behavior analyst, you aren’t simply arguconsult-ing that the teacher needs to cut the student some slack. Instead, you are recommend-ing a very specific set of changes that you believe, on the basis of your review of the literature, your direct observations in the
classroom, and your years of experience, will be the best way to help the child.
So how should you proceed? Knowing what you know about the power of the teacher to call the shots, you are going to have to do some lobbying on behalf of the child and yourself. You should do this before you ever actually sit down with the teacher at the meeting in which you present your proposal.
Establishing Yourself as a Reinforcer
Step one is to make yourself a reinforcer. Find some time that you can meet with the teacher to get acquainted. Using what you learned in Chapters 8 and 9, present yourself as a nonthreatening person who loves kids, who is awed by teachers who do the tough job with them each and every day, and who is sympathetic to their plight. This should be sincere. This will probably take two or three conversations in the teachers’ lounge, cafeteria, hallway (lobby), or anywhere else but the classroom. Watch for anything that indicates what the teach-er’s reinforcers are, and see if you can provide them. For example, if you notice she has a bulletin board with a butterfly theme, you might bring her a book about butterflies that she can borrow. If you hear the teacher likes a certain kind of music, you might leave a flyer on an upcoming concert or a clipping from the paper about her favorite musician. Or you can offer to help do something with the class such as read to the students, assist with an upcoming assignment, or pro-vide a copy of a computer program that they have been looking for.
We need to note here that in keeping with good ethics, you should not be bringing the teacher gifts or presents.
Ask Questions to Get Information
Next, after getting to know the teacher a little better, you can start asking some questions after an observation session in her class-room: “I noticed that William gets antsy when you assign math problems. Can you tell me anything about that?” No matter what her reply is, the proper response from you is, “Thank you, Ms.
Baker, that really helps me understand William. I appreciate it.”
As you interact with the teacher, you will be able to get some feel of how best to pitch your program ideas to her. At the point that you finally sit down in a meeting, it would be very helpful if the teacher likes you, trusts you, and knows that you won’t ask her to do anything she can’t do. And you will know how this particular teacher feels about changing the way she does things in the class-room and changing her behavior.
Assess the Teacher’s Response Because your program is probably going to involve some aspect of academic rearrangement (a different set of assignments, different schedule, more reinforce-ment), you need to probe Ms. Baker to determine
how she responds to these ideas. Some people in this world are rigid. When working with them, you have your work cut out for you. The lobbying effort could take a while. Don’t rush this. If you move too fast with a person who does not like change, you’ll probably get a rejection. You should know that once people have rejected an idea, it is difficult to get them to reconsider.
If you are working with a committee rather than an individual, what you need by way of lobbying is multiplied by the number of people on the committee. There is one thing that observers of the legislative scene have known for a long time and that is if you want your proposal to be received positively, it’s a good idea to get to know the members individually, chat with them prior to your presentation if possible, and bounce some ideas off them to get a sense of their positions.
In recent years, actual lobbying in Congress has gotten a bad name. This is in part due to lobbyists who have gone way beyond just getting to know the legislators and educating them about certain bills. These unethical lobbyists have also offered bribes,
“Some people in this world
are rigid. When working with
them, you have your work
cut out for you. The lobbying
effort could take a while.”
kickbacks, golf trips to Scotland, and junkets to Hawaii. Clearly, behavior analysts who are lobbying on behalf of a child should keep lobbying efforts on the right side of ethics and the law.
Understanding whom you are talking to so you can deal with any concerns ahead of time is a prudent strategy for being an effective professional.
tIps On negOtIatIOn
Negotiation is another business term that may seem out of place in the effective practice of behavior analysis. Most people who hear the term negotiation envision a mahogany table the size of Cincinnati with management representatives on one side and labor leaders on the other as they hammer out a 5-year contract for General Motors assembly-line workers. It’s a great image, but that is not what we are talking about here. The more common definition of negotiation carries the sense of what we have in mind. Negotiation is a discussion that takes place to reach an agreement. From the quote at the beginning of this chapter, you get some sense of an all too common scenario that plays out every day across the United States. A behavior analyst has presented her case for a behavior program that will greatly improve the life of a client, child, stu-dent, or group of employees. And, despite the behavior analyst’s best lobbying effort, the proposal has hit some significant resis-tance from one or more parties or even the mediator himself. She used all the tips we offered in Chapter 9 on persuasion, but heads are shaking and people are saying, “We don’t have the time to do that sort of program,” “It’s going to take resources we don’t have,”
or even “I don’t feel comfortable making all his reinforcers, what do you call it, ‘contingent.’ I think he’s going to pitch a fit right there in the grocery store, and then what am I going to do?” The smart behavior analyst (that would be you!) will have planned for this possibility and have a Plan B ready. It’s time to negotiate.
First you need to dream big on your proposal: “Ask for more than you expect to get” (Dawson, 2001, p. 13). In our field, most
behavior plans are scaleable, that is, they could involve treatment that covers most of the waking hours of the client or as little as an hour or two per day. Anything less is essentially worthless, and this establishes your nonnegotiable point. Lovaas’s original work (Lovaas, 1987) showed that in about half of the cases, 40 hours per week of one-on-one, knee-to-knee, discrete-trial train-ing with autistic children could produce amaztrain-ing results over a 2-year period. The children in Lovaas’s study seemed to have
“recovered” from autism and could be placed in regular educa-tion classes where they could not be discriminated from “normal”
students. Later research has shown that 20 hours per week of the same intensity of treatment plus some lesser intensive group work can achieve approximately the same results.
If you pitched a proposal for 30 hours of therapy per week to a child’s parents, and they bargained you down to 20 hours per week, you could live with it. If you started your proposed schedule of treatment with 20 hours per week, however, and the parents attempted to bargain you down to 10 hours, which might be below the threshold of effectiveness, you would have to make a decision as to whether you should provide the services.
Another strategy that Dawson recommended (Dawson, 2001, pp. 34–36) is the Feel, Felt, Found formula, which seems quite appropriate for the personal approach we take with parents, teach-ers, and other caregivers. In this strategy, when you are negotiat-ing, you use words to convey the concept: “I understand how you feel, other people have felt the same way, but do you know what we have found?” This method of avoiding confrontation on key issues and recognizing the other person’s concerns can diffuse a difficult moment and allow you to make headway toward provid-ing a quality behavior program.
summarY
The field of negotiation has many, many other strategies, tactics, and gambits to offer professionals who are playing hardball to win
a contract, sell their services, or complete real estate deals. Most of these other strategies are not appropriate for human services.
It is important to realize, however, that in the course of providing an extremely valuable, high-tech treatment for clients in need, the well-trained behavior analyst should be aware of contemporary lobbying and negotiation (i.e., bargaining) strategies. These skills are clearly worthwhile if they result in higher quality services for children and adults with disabilities who might otherwise be left with minimal services that have zero or a negative impact.
FOr Further readIng
Dawson, R. (2001). Secrets of power negotiating: Inside secrets from a master negotiator. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Career Press.
Greenwood, M. (2006). How to negotiate like a pro: 41 rules for resolving disputes. New York: iUniverse.
Lovaas, O. I. (1987). Behavioral treatment and normal educational and intellectual functioning in young autistic children. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 55, 3–9.
Oliver, D. (2004). How to negotiate effectively. Philadelphia: Kogan Page.