Preparing direct service staff to teach people with severe disabilities: A comprehensive evalution of an effective and acceptable training program

Abstract

In light of the continuing need for residential, direct service staff to be able to teach people with severe disabilities, we comprehensively evaluated a program to train staff in behavioral teaching strategies. The program was developed and evaluated with attention given to recent concerns in the staff management literature regarding shortcomings with staff training research. The training program, involving a maximum of four, 2-hr classroom instruction sessions and three in vivo observation and feedback sessions, was evaluated in four studies. In Study 1, the program was shown to improve verbal skills of 13 direct service staff regarding behavioral teaching principles and terminology. In Study 2, the program was demonstrated to improve performancebased teaching skills of nine staff and four staff supervisors. In Study 3, the program was shown to result in improvements in adaptive skills of three clients with severe disabilities when direct care staff used their newly acquired teaching skills with the clients. In Study 4, the training program was shown to be well received among 17 staff trainees, although the trainees were more accepting of some program components than others. Results of the studies are discussed in regard to the importance of agencies providing effective and acceptable staff training programs. Future research areas also are noted, focusing on the need to determine, and minimize where possible, the amount of time required to conduct successful staff training.An area of concern historically in residential settings for people with severe disabilities is training direct service personnel in behavioral methods of teaching clients. Following early demonstrations of the effectiveness of behavioral teaching strategies with people who have severe disabilities in the 1960s and '70s (see Whitman, Scibak, & Reid, 1983, chap. 1, for an overview), it became apparent the developing technology of teaching would benefit few people living in congregate care facilities unless their direct service providers could apply the technology (Frazier, 1972;Quilitch, Miller, McConnell, & Bryant, 1975). Consequently, a number of programs for training paraprofessional, direct service personnel in the use of behavioral teaching strategies were developed and disseminated (see Gardner, 1973, for a descriptive summary).Although the experimental methodology of the early staff training research

Training Residential Supervisors to Provide Feedback for Maintaining Staff Teaching Skills With People Who Have Severe Disabilities

“…A practical implication of this finding is that staff members who are promoted (supervisor, staff, and client) in one investigation represents a labor-intensive research strategy; this may be one reason for the relative lack of research on supervisor behavior. The alternative research model used here was to document the effectiveness of staff implementation of target procedures on measures of client welfare before conducting research on supervision of those procedures; our previous research showed that when staff members implemented the teaching procedures targeted in this study with at least 80% proficiency, concomitant gains in clients' skills occurred (Parsons et al, 1993).…”

“…Nevertheless, lack of proficiency in the use of teaching procedures by direct-service staff has been well documented (Parsons, Reid, & Green, 1993 Goncalves, Iwata, & Chiang, 1983;Page, Iwata, & Reid, 1982 All new direct-service staff at the facility received training in how to teach clients through the Teaching-Skills Training Program (Parsons et al, 1993). Once a staff member had met a performance criterion (80% correct teaching behavior with two client programs), supervisors were expected to monitor his or her teaching at least monthly.…”

“…The target skills of the teaching-skills program consisted of four performance areas: order of teaching steps in a task analysis, least-to-most assistive prompting, reinforcement, and error correction (Parsons et al, 1993). Feedback provided to staff following an observation of a teaching session with a client involved eight components.…”

“…All supervisors completed the classroom portion of the teachingskills program even if they met criterion during baseline to insure that supervisors were aware of the training received by new staff and to encourage supervisors to use the same terminology to describe teaching procedures. The teachingskills program for supervisors involved 4 hr of classroom training followed by observations of supervisors' teaching skills with clients (Parsons et al, 1993). Observations were conducted as in baseline, except that supervisors were given immediate feedback regarding their teaching skills, with the same format supervisors would be taught to use when providing feedback to their staff.…”

Feedback for improving staff training and performance in behavioral treatment programs

“…Increasingly, researchers see on-the-job feedback as a critical component of staff training, and many studies now supplement analog training with on-the-job feedback (e.g., Cooper & Browder, 2001;Fleming & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1989;Jones, Menditto, Geeson, Larson, & Sadewhite, 2001;Parsons & Reid, 1995;Parsons, Reid, & Green, 1993, 1996Spreat et al, 1985;Stevens et al, 1998). One study in particular sought to isolate the component effects of on-the-job feedback.…”