Conducting In-Person Supervision
You've just landed your first BCBA job, and you don't know where to begin when it comes to supervision!
Conducting supervision for your clients and technicians is going to take up a majority of your time as a BCBA. This time is spent observing current progress, adjusting behavior plans and skill acquisition programs, and providing direction ongoing training to your behavior technicians.
How Do I Supervise?
Supervision is an essential part of what we do as BCBAs, and it's important to know a few things before you conduct your first supervision session:
1. Pair with the therapist.
Just like how we would pair with our clients during the first day of therapy, it's incredibly important and essential to pair with your therapists. They are the ones conducting the direct work, and there will be a point in time, sooner or later, where you will have to provide them feedback. You want to ensure that you have a positive relationship with your therapist before you get to the point where you're having to correct their own behavior for the benefit of your client.
An easy, quick way to pair with therapists is to start your supervision sessions with asking them how they're doing and what's happened since you've last visited.
Some therapists may want to talk about what's happening in their personal life, and that's okay! To a certain degree, making small talk can help you figure out who they are as a person and give you ideas on what to talk about with them in the future.
An important thing to keep in mind, however, is the amount of time you engage in small talk. Don't let your desire to chat all about yesterday's game or the newest episode of The Bachelor get in the way of your therapist's continuing to deliver services and conduct therapy in the session. If your therapist is with a client, their priority should be the client.
Your therapist may want to talk to you about what's been happening in regards to your client. Open up the floor for discussion, and allow your therapist to take the lead. Encourage them to talk all about the barriers they're experiencing or the successes they've seen since you've last done supervision. Help them feel heard by offering solutions or ongoing training if they express feeling lost with their client's behaviors and programming.
2. Pair with the client.
Dedicate some time during your supervision sessions to pair with your client. After all, you're there BCBA!
Developing instructional control with your client is important because there may be times where you need to model a program or jump in during an intervention to help your therapist. You do not want to be the BCBA that is not able to implement their own programs and interventions with their client.
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3. Stay flexible.
Like we mentioned before, when your therapist is with the client, your client comes first. If you're in the middle of discussing something with your therapist and your client engages in challenging behaviors, pause the conversation and allow your therapist to do their thing.
This also gives you a chance to see how your therapist behaves when challenges arise, and sudden and senses of challenging behaviors can show you areas in which your therapists need ongoing training.
3. Take detailed session notes.
When you provide supervision to a client when a therapist is present, you will most likely be billing their insurance company for direct supervision. Anytime you're billing insurance for supervision, you will need to provide a service note detailing everything you did during supervision.
A common practice among some BCBAs is to wait until the very end of a supervision session to write their notes. This can make it difficult to recall key aspects of the session, and leaving your session note till that very ends increases the chance that you're going to forget to write something important down.
Have a blank word document open on your computer and take notes continuously throughout the supervision session. You may even want to create and save a template of all the information your service notes require.
Set yourself up to take notes on everything that's happening, and then at the end of the session you can copy and paste your template into your company's data collection software.
Having a separate document saved on your computer with a copy of your service notes also protects you in case the data collection software your company is using to collect service notes fizzles out and accidentally deletes your service notes. It's happened before, and no data collection software is perfect.
