Click here to listen to the podcast version. If you follow me on social media then you might hear me frequently talk about supervision or my work towards becoming a BCBA. I myself get confused so I’m sure from an outsider’s perspective you might have no idea what’s going on so that’s what this blog post is for. I’m going to break down exactly what I’m doing, why I am doing it and my plan for 2021!
There are several pathways to becoming a BCBA. The pathway I’m following has you earn a degree from an accredited university and complete supervised fieldwork. Once you do both things you can sit for the exam and once you pass you’ll be board-certified. A lot of people don’t realize this but I already completed the course work. I earned a graduate certificate in Applied Behavior Analysis from George Mason University in Virginia. I am now simply working on the supervised fieldwork component that I need before I can sit for the exam.
I need to accrue 1500 hours of supervised fieldwork before I can test. Once you start accruing fieldwork you have to work at least 20 hours a month but you cannot log more than 130 hours a month. If you were to log the maximum amount of hours each month it will take just under 12 months to complete fieldwork supervision. When I signed on to work towards BCBA in March 2020 I completely expected to follow that timeline and be testing in March 2021. Unfortunately, the pandemic hit the United States hard exactly one week after I signed on. I ended up taking three months off from my center and then my hours were really slow to come back when I return to work in June. I finally started hitting the pace I wanted to be at again in October.
It’s a little bit more complicated than just getting 130 hours in a month. Half of your total hours have to be restricted. This means working with clients. That’s essentially what I go to work to do so those hours already are built into my schedule. In order to meet 130 hours a month, 65 of them need to be with clients. When it’s not a pandemic that is very easy to meet but with the pandemic, I wasn’t always getting 65 hours a month, which is why it moved a little bit slower. I’m finally getting back on track now.
The other half of my time is unrestricted hours. I’m trying to achieve roughly 65 unrestricted hours in a month. Unrestricted hours are not as easy because they are not built into my schedule. This is the time in which I’m kind of like a student teacher. My unrestricted hours can be accumulated by writing protocols, graphing data, training staff, making program materials, doing research, things like that. It’s a lot harder to find these hours for a very simple reason. You might collect data five times but only graph at once. You don’t need as many indirect hours naturally as you do direct hours so I have to work to find them. They’re also not scheduled so I have to find time to work them in. That’s where my weekly schedule comes in.
At the time I write this blog post I work with clients Monday morning, all day on Tuesday, and for about 2/3 of the day on Thursdays and Fridays. This is where all of my direct hours are coming from. I attend a virtual ABA session on Monday and Friday afternoons as well as Saturday mornings. During that time I occasionally lead and get feedback from my BCBA. I occasionally observe and take data. When I’m observing and taking data I can count that as indirect hours. I also create all of the materials for virtual therapy which is where a lot of my indirect hours come from.
Wednesday is not a scheduled day at the Center for me but I go anyways. I attend a social skills group for two hours in which I again log as observing, taking data, and providing staff training. I also plan activities for the social skills group which gives me more unrestricted hours. I’m also doing a two-hour block with a coworker who was working towards her BCBA and we’re calling it Research Wednesdays. I’ll be researching different principles and figuring out how to apply them to our clients. The rest of the time on Wednesdays will be spent doing other things. Some of the other things I’ve done for unrestricted hours include making a visual schedule for a client as well as token boards, creating a parent training, writing a token board protocol, and creating a communication device support for staff.
So what does this all mean? Every month I’m trying to get a maximum of 130 hours to put on my log. That breaks down to working 65 hours directly with kids and doing another 65 hours of unrestricted activities like paperwork. To break that down even more, I try and achieve 18 hours in both categories each week.
I am scheduled to work 25 hours a week so reaching the goal of 18 hours with kids is manageable. In the summer and early fall I was not reaching that, which made it a little bit more difficult, but working with my supervisor I was able to pick up a couple of evening shifts and squeeze in hours elsewhere so I have padding. This way if a student is out sick or a session gets canceled I don’t have to worry because I have padding to still meet my goal of 18 hours a week.
I am also trying to achieve 18 hours a week of unrestricted activities. I automatically get four hours a week from my research Wednesdays and social skills group done under the supervision of my BCBA. I also get an additional six hours a week for the virtual therapy that I attend. That puts me at 10 hours a week. I have to work really hard to find the extra eight hours. My BCBAs are super helpful. I can go to them and ask for the opportunity to graph data, write a protocol, create token board and reinforcement systems things like that. Like I said one of my BCBAs lets me create materials for virtual therapy which gets me more hours and I’m now working on staff training which will help even more.
At the time I write this I have accrued roughly 950 hours. That leaves me with roughly 550 hours to go until I reach 1500. If I follow my goal of logging 130 hours each month with the 65 of them being unrestricted then I will be on target to finish my hours in June. The board exam is difficult to pass and I want to give myself a buffer to take it twice if I need to, even three times if I am struggling. To add another slight layer of stress, I need to get this done before January 2022.
The board operates on task lists. The task list encompasses everything that the BCBA needs to know how to do. We are currently on the fourth task list. The classes I took align to the fourth task list and everything I’m doing now aligns to the fourth task list. In January 2022 they will be putting their fifth task list into practice. What that means is you’ll need to have courses that align to the fifth task list and their new requirement will be accumulating 2000 hours instead of 1500.
If I am unable to take and pass the test before January 2022 it is not the end of the world. I might need to take a class over again, I might need to spend a couple of more months accruing hours, and I might need to do some extra steps with my BCBA. I’m trying to remind myself that even the worst-case scenario is not that bad, but if I could simply pass before the end of this year it would take that element away and that would be ideal. Of course, the pandemic has taught me that even the best-laid plans can get changed so my vision might be different in March or April but I’m just going to keep working to that ultimate goal.
I know this podcast was full of jargon and probably wasn’t relevant for a lot of you. But I know I have a good number of readers who are interested in pursuing their board certification as well as people who just want to understand what I’m talking about when I share about my supervision journey. Here’s to hoping that everything goes as planned and by 2021 I’ll be able to say I’m a BCBA!