Essential ACTr Skills for Behavior Analysts
with Thomas Szabo, PhD, BCBA-D
Every day, acceptance and commitment training attracts more attention from the behavior analysis community. This is because it unlocks a critical aspect of working with human beings: private events.
But ACTr’s concepts can feel abstract. They’re difficult to pin down, to ground in the behavioral principles that behavior analysis relies on. Without a clear framework, it can feel like trying to fit random pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together. You can’t see the bigger picture or tap the full power of the model for fear of going outside the ABA scope of practice.
Essential ACTr Skills for Behavior Analysts offers 18 CE hours and a collaborative environment where you can truly dig into ACTr from a behavior analytic perspective and engage in practice to help you put all the puzzle pieces together.
Tom Szabo is an expert on the cutting edge of ACTr who is renowned for his engaging presentation style and innovations in behavior analysis. Over the course of 9 weeks, he’ll take you deep into the functional contextual perspective and give you solid grounding in how to integrate the entire ACTr model into the scope of applied behavior analysis.
Under his guidance, you’ll get crucial grounding in the behavioral principles underneath ACTr and how to use the model in a behavior analytic approach. You’ll also have the opportunity to practice coding tapes, identifying processes, and applying functional analysis—all from an ACTr perspective.
You will come away with a deeper understanding of how ACTr overlaps directly with behavior analytic work, better equipping you to:
- Discern the six core ACTr repertoire deficits from small bits of dialogue and do functional assessments informed by the model
- Identify competing contingencies of reinforcement, verbal delay discounting, verbally mediated under and over-matching, behavioral inertia, and other means by which client verbal behavior derails your efforts to bring behavior under relevant stimulus control
- Use ACTr processes to create intervention targets to bring client behavior under the control of appropriate contingencies of reinforcement
- Develop ACTr goals that are measurable, observable, and of social relevance
- Harness metaphors and the ACT matrix to expand flexible relational networks and undermine thorny verbal rules
The foundation you’ll gain in the course will give you conceptual clarity, discrimination skills, and sound ethical grounding. In this way, it will prepare you not just to understand ACTr, but to apply it meaningfully within your scope of practice, setting you up for mastery.
This 9-week, 18 CE hour course takes place weekly on Fridays from 1 to 3 p.m. Eastern Time, but it is open to participants in any time zone.