An open course, "Supervised Fieldwork Learning Management System (LMS)," for managing the fieldwork supervision via 2-week curriculum. Free & open source software. Creative Commons-BY-SA-NC content.
BT chose a Creative Commons 4.0 - BY - SA - NC license to empower supervisors to use, copy, share, and modify content as needed so long as they provide credit to where they obtained the information and passed the freedoms to others. The SA means "sharealike" and means users can share and modify any amount of material (all of it, none, just a sentence, etc.).
The two levels of training evaluation, knowledge and skills, are based on research in training theory. BT encountered Kirkpatrick's Four Levels framework during doctoral work and used it here.
The group meeting agenda is written with the supervisor in a facilitator role. This role contrasts an expert role. In a folksy phrase, the facilitator is "guide on the side" and not "sage on the stage." There are two reasons for this.
First, the supervisor is running the meeting as part of practical experience and not as a professor. The supervisor should therefore avoid lecturing or providing foundational or introductory material about the task list items. Students should have encountered the material elsewhere from a variety of sources prior to the group meeting (e.g., textbook, university course).
Second, the industry itself is in a time of rapid growth and this creates variation in knowledge across teams. A supervisor need not be an academic professor to succeed as a manager. There is variability in university programs. Read the reports provided by credentialing boards on percentage of students passing board exams. Since the reports began in 2013, it is public information that programs have ranged from 80+ percent to zero percent passing rates.
With online programs, a room of supervisees may attend/have attended different university programs with significant variability in their overall knowledge. In a given supervised experience group meeting, there could be one or more learners reading peer-reviewed articles and studying nightly at a research-oriented program. They could be supervised by a credentialed individual who took a five course sequence online from a developing university years ago. The supervisor have passed the board exam under an earlier, less rigorous task list edition. Remember that graduate degrees explicitly in ABA, which follow BACB ACS guidelines and state "M.S. ABA", are a recent phenomenon at master's and doctoral levels.
There are practical, organizational reasons for the supervisor to use group facilitation approach. In a productive, successful meeting, learners will experience insights and "A-ha!" moments as a result of the facilitator asking questions, presenting scenarios, and interacting with peers. It is important that the supervisor save face and maintain authority in the context of total supervised experience. Battling over which article said what, or exactly which wording reflects methodological vs. radical behaviorism, invites learners closest to the scientific literature to step into expert roles.
If the supervisor defaults to the facilitator role from the outset of group supervision meetings, learners can step into expert roles to challenge each other. The learners boost knowledge and skills. The supervisors save face, if needed, maintaining authority while having an opportunity to boost/refresh their skills. Through the course of supervision, the supervisor can read one chapter ahead of the learners. Supervisors continue practicing material through the course of reviewing the learner's submissions, including with the help of the reference manual (Vol. 1 - TrainABA Supervision Curriculum).
There is much to risk and little to gain by supervisors stepping into the alpha expert role, including obvious power dynamics within the organization. Unless learners are agreeing to wrong information or things that could be potentially dangerous, the learners and supervisor are best served by a supervisor using a group facilitator approach.
Statistically, it is worth considering that not everyone in the meeting will go on to pass the exam. All things considered, supervisors have little to gain by staying in the "expert" role but can help learners practice knowledge and skills through a "facilitator" role.
BT's doctoral work was in Industrial Organizational Psychology and there was a course on theory and practice of group facilitation. The current thinking in the facilitation industry is that facilitators do not step into the leader role, save for instances where the group is agreeing on things that are clearly wrong or perhaps dangerous.
Under the Creative Commons 4.0 - BY - SA - NC license, supervisors are free to change the contents of the meeting agenda so long as they comply with the license as indicated at this link:
The course creator is B. Theisen (BT).
BT chose a Creative Commons 4.0 - BY - SA - NC license to empower supervisors to use, copy, share, and modify content as needed so long as they provide credit to where they obtained the information and passed the freedoms to others. The SA means "sharealike" and means users can share and modify any amount of material (all of it, none, just a sentence, etc.).
The two levels of training evaluation, knowledge and skills, are based on research in training theory. BT encountered Kirkpatrick's Four Levels framework during doctoral work and used it here.
The group meeting agenda is written with the supervisor in a facilitator role. This role contrasts an expert role. In a folksy phrase, the facilitator is "guide on the side" and not "sage on the stage." There are two reasons for this.
First, the supervisor is running the meeting as part of practical experience and not as a professor. The supervisor should therefore avoid lecturing or providing foundational or introductory material about the task list items. Students should have encountered the material elsewhere from a variety of sources prior to the group meeting (e.g., textbook, university course).
Second, the industry itself is in a time of rapid growth and this creates variation in knowledge across teams. A supervisor need not be an academic professor to succeed as a manager. There is variability in university programs. Read the reports provided by credentialing boards on percentage of students passing board exams. Since the reports began in 2013, it is public information that programs have ranged from 80+ percent to zero percent passing rates.
With online programs, a room of supervisees may attend/have attended different university programs with significant variability in their overall knowledge. In a given supervised experience group meeting, there could be one or more learners reading peer-reviewed articles and studying nightly at a research-oriented program. They could be supervised by a credentialed individual who took a five course sequence online from a developing university years ago. The supervisor have passed the board exam under an earlier, less rigorous task list edition. Remember that graduate degrees explicitly in ABA, which follow BACB ACS guidelines and state "M.S. ABA", are a recent phenomenon at master's and doctoral levels.
There are practical, organizational reasons for the supervisor to use group facilitation approach. In a productive, successful meeting, learners will experience insights and "A-ha!" moments as a result of the facilitator asking questions, presenting scenarios, and interacting with peers. It is important that the supervisor save face and maintain authority in the context of total supervised experience. Battling over which article said what, or exactly which wording reflects methodological vs. radical behaviorism, invites learners closest to the scientific literature to step into expert roles.
If the supervisor defaults to the facilitator role from the outset of group supervision meetings, learners can step into expert roles to challenge each other. The learners boost knowledge and skills. The supervisors save face, if needed, maintaining authority while having an opportunity to boost/refresh their skills. Through the course of supervision, the supervisor can read one chapter ahead of the learners. Supervisors continue practicing material through the course of reviewing the learner's submissions, including with the help of the reference manual (Vol. 1 - TrainABA Supervision Curriculum).
There is much to risk and little to gain by supervisors stepping into the alpha expert role, including obvious power dynamics within the organization. Unless learners are agreeing to wrong information or things that could be potentially dangerous, the learners and supervisor are best served by a supervisor using a group facilitator approach.
Statistically, it is worth considering that not everyone in the meeting will go on to pass the exam. All things considered, supervisors have little to gain by staying in the "expert" role but can help learners practice knowledge and skills through a "facilitator" role.
BT's doctoral work was in Industrial Organizational Psychology and there was a course on theory and practice of group facilitation. The current thinking in the facilitation industry is that facilitators do not step into the leader role, save for instances where the group is agreeing on things that are clearly wrong or perhaps dangerous.
Under the Creative Commons 4.0 - BY - SA - NC license, supervisors are free to change the contents of the meeting agenda so long as they comply with the license as indicated at this link:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/