What is Behavioural Therapy?

BBBT provides a variety of behavioural management services for children experiencing behavioural challenges.  Services include functional behavioural analyses, parent/teacher consultation, development and implementation of visual supports to improve behaviour direct behavioural intervention, parent training and transfer to home and community setting. In addition, BBBT provides intensive teaching programs based on principles of ABA (Applied Behavioural Analysis).  ABA therapists collaborate extensively with other disciplines within BBHS and consider each child's unique family, sensory, environmental, and learning profile to ensure a comprehensive learning experience.

Jump to a section:

• Behavioural Management Services
• When might your child need Behavioural Therapy?
• History of Treatment Method

Social Skills

Blueballoon recognizes that children diagnosed with neuro-developmental disorders (Autism Spectrum Disorder, PDD, Asperger’s, Tourette’s Syndrome, Down Syndrome, FASD, ADD/ ADHD, Speech and Language delays, Non-Verbal Learning Disabilities and other developmental delays) are frequently challenged in the area of Social Skills development. In general, this is due to the fact that a great deal of social skills learning is acquired or reinforced through social and observational interaction.  Depending on their learning profile, many students with special needs may have difficulty learning and absorbing new information and skills in this manner. We believe that social skills are an important and critical part of a child’s overall development and therefore a targeted approach to teach social skills is often necessary.

IBI Program
At blueballoon we believe in teaching using strategies and techniques proven effective in today’s research and that are most appropriate to the child.  This may mean that for anyone child, for anyone skill we may utilize a variety of different teaching methods in order to best teach that child to his or her learning needs.  We maintain that people must be motivated by the material and curriculum in order to see true acquired skills and therefore plan to incorporate reinforcement and motivation into every task while teaching the child real life expectations.  We are a primarily Verbal Behaviour based agency however will utilize Discrete Trial Training, Relationship Development Intervention, TEACCH, Pivotal Response Training, Precision and Fluency, Floortime DIR and other methods as needed for any particular learner.

Behavioural therapy can be used to:

• Decrease behavioural problems including tantrums and attention seeking
• Increase attention, eye contact, turn taking, imitation and memory
• Assist in the development of appropriate communication and motor skills
• Facilitate appropriate social skills
• Increase self-help skills
• Develop appropriate strategies to meet the child’s sensory needs

How could a Behaviour Specialist help my child?
Behavioural therapy is beneficial for children with a variety of diagnoses who are experiencing behavioural difficulties that impact their ability to learn or be successful at home and school. An initial assessment would include meeting with the child and family to determine the behavioural challenges and skills for the behavioural program to address. After the assessment, an individualized treatment program would be developed to target specific behaviours and skills identified by the family and therapist. The therapist will collect data on the occurrence of behaviours and acquisition of new skills to determine the effectiveness of the program and to develop more challenging programming when the child is ready. Behavioural programs can be implemented at blueballoon or in the child’s natural environment.

Is Behavioural Therapy the same as Applied Behavior Analysis?
Behavioural programs may or may not include components of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). ABA programs use behavioural strategies to build new skills and generalize these skills to the child’s natural environment. ABA programs are individualized to the child’s needs and proceed as the child masters and builds upon new skills in a structured and systematic manner. There is a wealth of evidence supporting the notion that ABA has been very successful in helping children with Autism learn new skills in a systematic and structured way. However, behavioural programs do not have to include the structure of an ABA program to be successful. Behavioural strategies can be implemented in many ways and are most successful when implemented with a multi-disciplinary approach and structure suitable to the child’s needs.

Behaviourism

In 1913, John Watson identified observable behavior as the proper subject matter for psychology and stated that all behavior is controlled by environmental events. This was where Watson laid out the stimulus-response psychology that started the movement called behaviorism. B.F. Skinner later clarified the distinction between Ivan Pavlov's respondent conditioning (conditioned reflexes) and operant conditioning, in which the consequence of behavior controls the future occurrence of the behavior.  Skinner and others outlined basic principles of behavior, which include reinforcement, prompting, fading, shaping, schedules of reinforcement, etc. These principles comprise the pure science of behavior analysis, not the applied science (which is ABA).  When the principles of the pure science of behavior analysis are used to teach (or when used in any applied setting), this practice is called "Applied Behavior Analysis" (or, earlier, behavior modification). This means that the principles used to describe how behavior is lawful, observable and measurable, and has an impact on the environment have been adapted into teaching methods based on a variety of applications of those principles (Lovaas, DTT, NET, AVB, etc.)

Applied Verbal Behaviour
In addition to fleshing out operant conditioning, Skinner also analyzed the functions of language and presented his analysis in the 1957 book Verbal Behavior. This described language in terms of its functions, mainly mands, echoics, tacts, and intraverbals. People like Jack Michael, Vince Carbone, Mark Sundberg, James Partington, and others, all applied behavior analysts, studied Skinner's pure scientific analysis (Skinner's book does not outline a method for applying verbal behavior; he only describes it). They took the pure science and applied it, which describes what we refer to as applied verbal behavior. Verbal Behaviour relies on the same principles of human behaviour as in ABA however with Verbal Behaviour there is an additional emphasis on teaching language from a functional perspective. Verbal Behaviour is also identified as a errorless teaching approach that uses interspersing of trials instead of mass trialing and no no prompt as well as natural environment teaching (NET) to incorporate generalization into the program right from the start.

Teaching Using the Principles of Human Behaviour
Skinner outlined what he called the basic principles of human behaviour which included: Motivation, Punishment, Stimulus Control, Extinction and Reinforcement.  Skinner and the researchers that have since followed state that all behaviours (defined as anything a human or animal does, feels or thinks) are based on these principles and the likelihood of the behaviour occurring in the future is based upon the feedback or consequences we are given following the behaviour.


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