In the Field: The ABA Podcast

Beyond Board Games: Redesigning Social Skills Groups in ABA with Lee Courrau

• Allyson Wharam • Episode 28

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Beyond Board Games: Redesigning Social Skills Groups in ABA with Lee Courrau

In this episode of In the Field: The ABA Podcast, I sit down with Lee Courrau, behavior analyst and founder of Launch Kids Academy, to explore why social skills instruction is often treated as an afterthought in ABA—and how we can do better. Lee shares his journey from RBT to curriculum developer, highlighting the missed opportunities he saw in traditional social skills groups and how that inspired him to create structured, play-based approaches that truly engage learners.

We talk about practical strategies for designing effective social skills groups, the importance of honoring self-advocacy, and how leaders can better prepare and support technicians beyond the 40-hour training.

Key Topics:

  • The Problem with “Wing It” Groups: Lee shares his early experiences with unstructured social skills groups and why they often fail to produce meaningful outcomes.
  • From Afterthought to Impact: The financial, clinical, and staff engagement costs of underdeveloped social skills programming—and the missed opportunities for generalization.
  • Assessment and Readiness: Why a lack of social skills assessments holds back progress, and what indicators suggest a learner is ready to join a group.
  • Creative, Play-Based Approaches: Examples like art, cooking, lemonade stands, and functional skills that create natural opportunities for interaction, independence, and fun.
  • Curriculum Development: How Lee’s structured social skills curriculum balances engagement, structure, and flexibility, with built-in modifications for individual learners.
  • RBT Training and Support: Why the 40-hour model isn’t enough, and how leaders can provide ongoing training, shadowing, and role-play opportunities to build staff confidence in group settings.

Key Takeaways:

  • Social skills groups should not be an afterthought—when structured well, they improve learner outcomes, staff engagement, and organizational sustainability.
  • Honoring self-advocacy and embedding choice is critical for building skills that truly generalize beyond the therapy room.
  • Leaders can strengthen staff development by training technicians in group dynamics and providing systematic support beyond initial certification.

Keywords: Social Skills Instruction, ABA Curriculum, Group Programming, RBT Training, Staff Development, Behavior Analysis, Generalization, Launch Kids Academy, Lee Courrau, Applied Behavior Analysis

Connect with Lee Courrau:

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Rethinking Social Skills Instruction in ABA: From Afterthought to Impact with Lee Courrau

Allyson Wharam: [00:00:00] Welcome to in the Field, the ABA Podcast. I'm your host, Allyson Wharam, creator of Sidekick, an online interactive curriculum and learning portal for behavior analysts. We specialize in providing a field work, supervision curriculum and continuing education for ABA professionals. In this podcast, we're going to deep dive into the world of ABA, focusing on quality supervision as the foundation of our field.

We're here for behavior analysts, business leaders, and trainees who are passionate about maximizing outcomes for their clients and improving the quality of their services with new and innovative practices. We're going to explore effective strategies and practices that not only enhance the quality of supervision, but also save time all while investing in the people who make up our field, our clients, our trainees, and your everyday behavior analysts.

So whether you're driving to your next in-home session, or taking a break from your busy schedule, let's dive right [00:01:00] in.

Hello. Welcome everyone. I am here with Lee Courrau and we are going to be talking about a number of different things particularly training and support for RBT's, but also we're gonna focus really most of our time in social skills programming and some tools and systems and curricula and ways that you can structure some of that.

So Lee, I am so excited to have you here. Thank you for being here.

Lee Courrau: Thank you for the invite. I'm excited to be here as well.

Allyson Wharam: Absolutely. Let's start with sharing a little bit about your journey in ABA and what led you to focus in on the areas that you are focused in now, particularly as it relates to social skills instruction.

Lee Courrau: Sure. Entering ABA was not in the plan. I didn't even know what ABA was eight years ago. But I do have a family member. My sister is in ABAs, but she's one of the OG BCBA's. And, overhearing conversations, you know, throughout the [00:02:00] years, little by little it started to trickle into my bloodstream.

I was in a completely different field. And then once I started to learn a little bit more about it, a little bit of positive peer pressure as well, I took the chance. I swapped career fields, dropped everything I was doing. Pursued my RBT. know, once I started actually working with kids, I knew that was it. This is where I was going to be the rest of my life. So yeah, that's where it started.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. I hear that. So I think a lot of us have a, fell into it sort of story, but how cool is that you have an OG... I like to ask people, like when they say that, what their certification number is because it's so high. It's in like the 70 thousands now. And so when you talk to someone, and the wild part about it is a lot of them...

It's relatively long, but it'll still be like less than 20 years ago. So it's like I'm an OG, but our field is so young that it's [00:03:00] still relatively new. So in terms of that journey then, after you became certified, I'd love to hear more about how you came to do the work specifically that you're doing now, and at what point did you realize that there was a bit of a gap in how ABA providers are approaching social skills instruction?

Lee Courrau: Almost immediately, I think it was about three months into becoming an RBT. The company that I was working for, the owner who obviously was also a BCBA approached me about a social skills group that they were putting together. Now, in my mind, I thought she was just giving me the heads up, we were gonna be trained on this.

No, it was a social skills group that was starting that afternoon. And she told me to get with the BCBA that was gonna be in charge of the group. Her and I had good rapport already, so I asked her. So what is this? I have no idea what this is. I just started, I didn't even know what social skills were.

And [00:04:00] she looked at me and she was like, we're just gonna wing it. So I remember it was five kids. The plan was, we had we had set up a room, there was a video game system, a table full of board games, and another table with some paper and markers. And the idea was -they were going to come in, and let's just see where they naturally gravitate towards.

Hopefully we would get some pairs and then just go from there. So as they started coming in, naturally they just went right to the video game system and I didn't know it at the time. There was only one controller set up.

Allyson Wharam: Oh, great.

Lee Courrau: Then there was one other kid that came in and didn't wanna do anything, just sat down in a chair and just started looking around.

And so immediately the volume in the room started going off. We heard the fighting, the bickering. I was here first, I'm gonna do this first. Give it to me. There was a tug of war going on [00:05:00] and the response to it was to remove the video game system from the room altogether. So now we have five kids, two hours ahead of us, activities that no one wants to do, ,and neither one of us have any experience with social skills.

That was my introduction to it. And then from that point on, any of the groups that I was a part of were like that. There were no structures. There was no real plan in place. It was always, yes, let's do board games because obviously there's natural rules attached to it. Let's try to gauge turn taking abilities and things like that.

But there was no creativity. The kids were bored to death. I was bored to death if I had fellow RBT's with me. We were bored to death and that just created an environment where nothing was really going on, there were no positive outcomes, other than just getting through it.

Allyson Wharam: That's so interesting. And that's, really, even if someone is even [00:06:00] including social skills instruction or group instruction at all, social skills are not. But that's interesting that it's an afterthought. And I'm curious. There are some obvious implications for that in terms of what that means for learners and outcomes and from a business perspective as well.

And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. You mentioned even as simple as like you were disengaged and your fellow technicians were disengaged. So yeah, talk to me about that. What does that look like? What's the kind of the cost of that?

Lee Courrau: Afterthought. The reason I label social skills groups as an afterthought is because typically the kids involved, they go to school already, so naturally there's not gonna be a lot of hours available. So if you do a side by side, I have to choose one or the other. Early intervention or social skills, naturally early intervention is prioritized and I understand why.

But then the scraps are left for the social skills groups and typically the staff members that are put in there are [00:07:00] either staff members that don't have enough clients, they don't have a large caseload, or they show interest in wanting to explore that area. But really there's no training involved and I didn't really see the positive impact financially.

For some reason, providers don't like to talk about finances in ABA. A structured fully staffed group, let's say six kids can generate revenue upwards of $70,000 a year for a company. That's huge. If you wanna look at it just from a financial perspective. But the downside is when you have kids that are disengaged typically a lot of these kids are just in that group, lingering on for years.

You don't see any type of independence built up. You don't see any of those skills that are taught, generalizing in schools, in their communities, at home. And so we're really just wasting our time.[00:08:00] 

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, and talk to me more about that in terms of those like missed opportunities. What do you see as leading to that lack of generalization or that lack of practical application or that lack of, not even generalization, but like skill progress at all?

Lee Courrau: I think it starts and I've explored deeply and this is one of my long term goals, eventually. I think it starts, there really isn't a sound, fully enveloped assessment for social skills. So when BCBAs go out there and do assessments, we're really doing it, same as we would do for early intervention kids.

And so when we get these kids in a group setting, we're not sure what to expect. And we see a lot of these skills that we didn't see. We see a lot of these behaviors that we didn't see during the assessment and the deficits start to show up. Even though we may talk to parents and they say, yeah, he has a lot of friends, but they don't know how to operate within a group.

And we didn't catch that early on. A perfect example of that, the last summer program that I [00:09:00] did, we had eight kids in the social skills group, and BCBAs ran assessments. We saw eight year olds with tantrum levels that we did not expect. We saw aggressive behaviors we did not expect or weren't equipped for, especially in the space that we were in.

And so I think that's where it starts having an assessment in place that BCBA's can use to better gauge where kids are at that moment as they arrive into your groups. And talking to BCBAs in general, a lot of them, they're not trained for social skills. There isn't a curriculum out there in place, or training in place for them to be able to lead these groups and ultimitaley train their staff to lead them and facilitate them.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, it all relates back to that scope of competence and what we're trained in. If we're only ever trained in early intervention and then we're trying to all of a sudden add on this new social skills group, but we don't [00:10:00] have the training or the assessments, or the tools, or the resources and things like that, then yeah, it's gonna fall apart.

And I'm curious from like the learner side, 'cause you're mentioning assessments and things like that. What are some readiness indicators that you would look at something like this model versus more of your typical one-to-one model? And is it really, is it a dichotomy? Is my other question, like how do you think about the structure and I know there's billing constraints and things that go into that as well, but the practicalities of all of that and the makeup of the group.

How do you think about that?

Lee Courrau: Typically it starts in a one-to-one setting. At least from my experience. All of the kids that I've worked with, I've worked with directly one-to-one. And then ultimately, they were at the point where either the BCBA struggled with programming in a one-to-one social skill setting or, once in school, we saw that there was cooperation, there was that curiosity that they would look at, groups of peers, but they just didn't know how to initiate -how to include [00:11:00] themselves within the group.

Those were indicators to us that, okay, this is a good candidate for a social skills group. But also even those kids that we may not feel are ready, they tend to thrive when they have peers around them that are a bit higher level than them. They feed off of each other. And so we see skills start to generalize a little faster within those kids because they have more exposure to peers that we're already working with.

But one of those indicators. It's funny because some of the BCBAs that I spoke with and the ones that I've worked with directly will say, I dunno what else to do. One to one we've reached the point where I can't give them anything else. We've practiced everything. Now we're at the point where we need to really test for generalization and maintenance.

So those are good indicators. That child is ready for a social skills group.

Allyson Wharam: That's interesting. It also is making me think again, back to that scope of competence. Part of it is like the [00:12:00] need for generalization, but part of it, it almost sounds is running up against kind of the constraints or the boundaries of maybe that individual BCBA's scope of competence.

Part of it is the opportunities, but part of it might also be just how do you even program, like what skills you work on and how do you work on these more complex verbal repertoires and these interpersonal relationships? You can't really control peer responses, that's part of the nature of this.

And so how do you navigate some of that? Both like maximizing the skills within the environment and also, if you are running up against those constraints, how do you broaden the scope of those BCBAs to address those skills?

Lee Courrau: And then, the danger is when you keep kids in a one-to-one setting for too long. And unfortunately I've experienced this myself. You get to the point where you no longer see those problematic behaviors, the tantrums have been extinguished.

There are no indicators of an extinction burst the longer that you wait. The likelier that we as the [00:13:00] practitioner are gonna cause those behaviors to extinguish again. For example, if I'm in a one-to-one setting and really, we're no longer doing table time, but I kind of wanna gauge where we're at just to make sure that we're still at a level where they're compliant and all that.

And I introduced an activity, but they tell me vocally, they tell me, I don't wanna do this. Our training as RBT's, and this goes back to when we do talk about training, once a demand is placed, we can no longer remove it. However, we're not looking at the fact that there was self-advocacy in place.

The learner told me exactly what they wanted. They did it in a way that you would expect an adult to do it, but we keep pushing and now all a sudden we started a tantrum. We're tracking noncompliance, we're we're tracking aggressive behaviors. And for what, because we kept pushing, because we kept a setting that no longer was valid for the learner.

Allyson Wharam: Absolutely. And even thinking about the initial point where we're [00:14:00] first working on some of those participation skills and things like that, like you mentioned, self-advocacy is a skill that you want to translate, and I think providers sometimes maybe aren't thinking about some of those things very early on when we're programming with learners and we're setting them up to not be able to maybe self-advocate if we're not honoring ascent and if we're not, incorporating some of that into what we're doing, we could maybe be creating some gaps that influence how they're able to participate with peers.

I have a 9-year-old and so much of that interaction is around advocating and making compromises and knowing when to push and, not, but self-advocacy is like the core of a lot of that and being able to make those requests and then find those solutions.

So how do you see that playing out too and some of the earlier programming and how we set learners up for success long term as well?

Lee Courrau: I think right now it's interesting because a lot of the conversations [00:15:00] being had in platforms like LinkedIn is about noncompliance and how we as a field view noncompliance and ultimately that becomes so important to us that we focus in on, and that's the thing that we're tracking. However like you mentioned, self-advocacy for some reason is not a part of our conversations in ABA.

A neurotypical kid. Like my kids. My child. My oldest is eight years old. And if she tells me, dad I don't want to take a bath right now. Can I do it in five minutes? I'm going to honor that. Not only honor, but I'm going to praise him.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah.

Lee Courrau: And so when we look at children diagnosed with autism, we have a different viewpoint. We look at that typically as non-compliance, because I presented a demand to you, I expect that demand to be met and I'm gonna sit here for two hours or however long it takes until you, you complete that demand. [00:16:00] And that, to me personally, that is just inhumane. That just doesn't make any sense. Why would we keep pushing kids to do things that they're advocating for themselves, they're not ready for. And I think ABA right now is starting to recognize that in conversations and they're very uncomfortable conversations because a lot of the responses within the field, are to defend the science first, and defend what we've been doing for so long.

But the reality is we have been missing that piece for years.

Allyson Wharam: It's certainly a widespread issue and historically has been. And like you said, I think there's more conversations being had around it, which is great. And I think to your point too, we're not waiting until all of a sudden they already have these skills that they're like an older learner because they may not ever develop them or they may not have the repertoires to be able to self-advocate if we've only ever not honored those requests and worked, pushed through those behaviors.

And to your [00:17:00] point too, even just putting students in a situation where they're even needing to necessarily push back. Because we have kept them in an environment or a setting that isn't meeting their needs for so long. And part of that, I think you were mentioning again, is the environment, the peers that they're around, the opportunities that they have games that you're playing, what are the stimuli?

Is it engaging, is it interesting? And so how, as you're setting up like a social skills group, do you think about creating something that learners want to engage with? And then by virtue, if you wanna talk about how that trickles into staff engagement and just the overall environment as well.

Lee Courrau: Yeah, I think one of the aspects and social skills that I think is missed is having parental involvement. I think one of the ways that we can learn about our learners is directly from parents. I worked for one company that did something very unique. They sent out a questionnaire to all families.

Essentially, it was like a reinforcer, but they also asked questions like, [00:18:00] what is important to you? When you think of social skills? What are the priorities? What do you think matter most for your child to learn? And so we have more information directly from parents that we can use to develop activities.

Sometimes it's just a matter of asking the kids themselves, what do you like to do? And just let them answer. Don't try to fill those gaps for them. Ask a simple question. A lot of times they're gonna tell you they like to paint, they like to go outside. And so we build our group activities based on our learners within the group. Not what other groups are doing around the country. What are your kids in those groups? What do they enjoy doing? And then figure out creative ways to implement activities based on those. For example, there's a lot of kids like to paint.

Some kids like to paint on paper. Some kids like to paint on the floor. Some kids like to paint on a rock. If the majority of your group. That same interest, you can build off of that. [00:19:00] Okay. So maybe the stimuli that you paint changes week to week. And so how do you introduce social skills?

Give each child a different color. Give one color per child. Now you're contriving a scenario where kids will ask each other for a color that they might be interested in. Typically, a kid is not gonna paint with the same color. They're gonna get bored of that color. Eventually the motivation is gonna come, is gonna come up to wanna get another color, and maybe they don't, but that gives you that introduces a learning opportunity for you as a practitioner. Another way that you could do it that we've done in the past is as we're handing out... let's say we're handing out paper, we purposely skip one child and just see what happens. Let's probe. What will they do? Will they notice that we skip them?

Will they ask for the paper? Will they at the very least say something about it? Assigned roles to the kids? Maybe one child is the one that's handing out the brushes. Another one is the one that's handing out the paint. It's just, to me, social [00:20:00] skills needs to be more play-based. And that way you can build off of the activities based on the skills that you wanna teach.

Allyson Wharam: I love that. Like you said, I think the default is often like a board game that has really structured opportunities. You don't have to think a ton about it, but that might not be motivating. There are plenty of kids that don't like board games and again, in terms of the participation and where people's skills are at, some learners may not have the sustained attention to spend 30 minutes of complete waiting for someone else or for other people to take a turn or whatever it happens to be, and so I love that some of those other opportunities you can maybe do more shaping within, or even if you're picking a board game. They're not all equal. There's not a ton of rules and things like that, that can be a good place to start. Are there any other sort of low hanging fruit? I love the art example. Are there any other sort of examples that you've seen be very effective?

Lee Courrau: Yeah, functional skills, teaching... teaching how to make a sandwich, for example, because part of [00:21:00] social skills is teaching independence, how to be independent eventually in their life. One thing that I've done before was, we had an activity where we were teaching kids how to make, how to prepare simple foods.

One was one day was a sandwich. Another day was how to safely use a microwave, so warming up mac and cheese. Another one was introducing the air fryer. Frying up some chicken nuggets. And then at the end of the week, or at some point what we did was we created like a deli.

So we practiced those skills and those food items that they practiced were the ones that were on the menu. We had other practitioners come and they were the customers. So they would order and we would assign roles.

So one child would be, manning the microwave. The other one was the one prepping the sandwiches. And then we would swap rolls. And that's a great way to test where are we at? Where are we with these skill acquisitions? And did they generalize? And in the process they had a freaking [00:22:00] blast. And at the end of the day, these kids spend so much time in school that, I feel like we have a responsibility to teach differently. Let's teach in a fun way. We're supposed to be fun, we're supposed to be individuals that they can't wait to be with, that they can't wait to learn from. We can do it differently from schools, so introducing, fun activities like that, just being creative offers a different way to teach that they typically won't be motivated to learn from.

Allyson Wharam: That's so fun. It is reminding me to talking about my older daughter again. She used to go to Montessori school and a lot of what they say about that age in elementary is the peer relationships are so important. Her classroom actually had a kitchen in it and they were baking like every single day.

And not only would they bake together, and at some point it was like the older students really leading the younger students through it, which is cool and interesting. But they would actually figure out what they were going to bake, make the list of the things that they were going to make and then go shopping together.

My [00:23:00] point is I love how you're already thinking about like the extensions of. Not just this one activity that we're gonna do this one time, but how do we create this through line of skills that we can keep working on? Make sure that they're generalizing, but also do it in a really fun and interesting way.

Lee Courrau: Yeah, one of another one that was really popular was creating a lemonade stand. Through it we taught, how to greet. We taught money skills, but the cool thing was that a lot of the kids went home literally that next day. And did their own lemonade stands at home. There was one of our learners that made 75 dollars in less than two hours just putting a lemonade, a table outside.

So that, that's what I mean. That's the opportunity that we have in social skills groups to teach in a way that sticks with them, that they then wanna apply those in their life on their own.

Allyson Wharam: So in terms of now, like we've talked about the general structure and some activities and things like that. [00:24:00] You have started to work on a curriculum around this, and I'm curious what made you think that a curriculum was part of the solution to some of the gaps that you were seeing?

And then, what are some considerations based on that, that went into your design and development of that curriculum?

Lee Courrau: Honestly, it came as a necessity. When I created the first summer program for the company that we worked for, we had five hours, five days a week to fill. And so I went out looking, doing some research for any curriculums that existed. What we wanted to create was a summer camp experience for kids.

So there weren't any curriculums out there that taught skills or activities that were gonna be fun. A lot of them were classroom based and we were trying to remove ourselves from that classroom model. So it was just a matter of piecing together some activities that we thought were gonna be fun.

We had no data behind it. We didn't have any real science other than we dissected the [00:25:00] activities and tried to figure out programming wise, we'll just apply to a social skills setting. And the first year that we did it, it was a disaster. But to be fair, a lot of the activities we noticed that the kids were very engaged in. And so those five hours started over time, they started feeling less and less like a chore, like a hurdle.

And we also noticed that staff were becoming much more comfortable engaging with the kids. And at the time we only had interns, so they had absolutely no experience. But to see their comfort level rise to the point where they were able to interact with the kids, even in that scenarios led us to believe that we were in the right direction.

So the piece that was missing was how do we structure this in a way where we take kids energies into account because we don't wanna keep the energy up for five hours. That's just not realistic. [00:26:00] So we wanted to create like a wave pattern where, you know, where we wanted to create high engaging activities.

We wanted to follow that with something a little bit more relaxing. That definitely did not exist anywhere. I the need to be honest with you, it took about two and a half years. But the second summer program that we did we introduced the bones of what the curriculum that I have now was, and we gathered really good data acquisition went up. Problematic behaviors went down and we got a lot of good feedback from not only staff, but parents that were telling us that kids were excited to come to us. They were eager in the morning to get in the car and, we had one parent tell us that one of the kids was singing in the car on the way to drop off.

So that showed me that there was a need for this, even if maybe the field didn't know it at the time.

Allyson Wharam: Some great social validity data there. In terms of that. That's awesome. So how do you [00:27:00] balance then? Let me ask one initial question in terms of, you mentioned the first summer was a disaster, which often when we're doing something new like this, it is, so much of it is trial and error.

I always tell my supervisees, we can create these beautiful plans. We don't know if anything is gonna work until we actually do it. And it's almost never going to work perfectly on the first try. That's the name of the game is the data and the changes. So what changes if you could give some like specific examples, what really changed from that first iteration over time as you added that structure?

I know you mentioned the ebbs and flows. I think that's beautiful and I can imagine even for students like. Some students just are lower energy in general. And so not only for, not keeping everyone high energy all day, but even just having some of that difference for different learners. But yeah, some any other examples of just like how that structure maybe evolved over time?

Lee Courrau: Yeah, this came from the staffing perspective. One of the things that we didn't do the first go around was have like a brief little huddle with [00:28:00] staff prior to kids coming in. And, we went through the day what the order was. Here are some things that we can troubleshoot in case anything comes up.

And so the more that I thought about it, the more I realized we should do the same for our learners. As they arrive at some point once we have them all, let's get them in a group. We're not doing circle time. By this point these kids are too old for that, but let's get them together. Let's give them a rundown of what to expect for their day, and then in that little meeting, we also introduced like a fun question to ask.

So one of the aspects of social skills that, really it's difficult to implement is pairing because there really isn't a lot of time to pair with multiple kids. So introducing like a fun question, like what's a vegetable that you think is disgusting? Get the staff involved as well. All of a sudden kids are laughing.

They're responding. When the staff responds, they point and laugh at the staff, and all of a sudden we're [00:29:00] creating a fun environment from the get go. And then we do the same thing at the end of the group. Once the day is up. Let's have a reflection period.

Ask the kids individually, what's something about the day that they really enjoyed, or what's something that they remember doing? And then ask another fun question. So those two things itself really made a difference. And then from there, we added meditation activities.

I also added fun movement activities. So we talk about like the ebbs and flows. The meditation was a way to teach self-regulation techniques for kids. So not just breathing activities, but also you know, how to calm your body, how to count, doing countdown activities because that works really well for a lot of learners.

So implementing that into the structure as well. So we would do that twice during the day at the beginning and then at the end, and then in the middle of the day introducing something. Arts and crafts because a lot of these kids didn't really enjoy doing [00:30:00] arts and crafts. So what I implemented was a directed drawing activity.

So the target would change every day. I bought them like a sketchbook that at the end of the program they had something they can look at and see visually, they could see how that skill. And they could take that home to their parents as like a surprise. But it was one of those activities that they could sit down and just relax a little bit.

But also from a social skills perspective, we could do a lot of probing like I mentioned with the with the the paint example. Maybe don't give all the kids a pencil. Purposely leave out some of the kids to see, what they would do. Would they ask to pause the video because it was going too fast? Would they ask to rewind it? Those types of things.

And then in between there, we had outdoor activities, we had more indoor activities, but all kept them within a group. Keeping them together was really the final piece because I think we had a lot of activities that divided the group into two [00:31:00] groups and that didn't work really well.

So just keeping them together as much time interacting as they can have really made a difference.

Allyson Wharam: I have a couple of questions on this thread. The first one is, how do you handle with keeping everyone on the same page? If maybe a student doesn't wanna engage in a certain activity, how do you create that sort of group atmosphere and are you embedding opportunities for choice, like within an activity, for example?

Lee Courrau: Sure. Absolutely. If we noticed that a child didn't wanna engage if they, for example, told us they didn't wanna engage. Sure. If they offered a suggestion for something else they wanted to do, we would honor that. What we might do is say, okay, let's do this for 10 minutes and then let's come back to the group and see how you feel afterwards.

That works really well for our learners that may not have that type of vocal ability. There was one instance that we had a child that really liked [00:32:00] one of those tents that we had in one of, like the common rooms. So what we did was we brought the tent into the room and put it with the group and allowed them to go in there.

So now they didn't wanna be removed from the group, but they felt more comfortable confined in that tent. So they were still getting to be a part of the group. The one thing that I share in the curriculum that. I encourage providers not to do is to remove a learner from the environment for an extended period of time.

Keep it to at most 10 minutes and then try to bring them back and see what happens after that. If they man to you that they need another five minutes, it's up to you. Sure. Maybe give it to them, but don't completely give them until you actually probe again to see if they're gonna be ready to reengage with the group.

Allyson Wharam: Those are great examples. I love the tent in particular because it is such a, an example of individualization, of how do we meet this individual learner's needs while, [00:33:00] helping them engage with the group and the content and things like that.

Lee Courrau: Yeah, sometimes it was as simple as, you have some kids that wanna take a toy with them everywhere they go, but instinctually we look to remove that toy from them. Why? I never understood. Why?

Allyson Wharam: Yeah. 📍

Lee Courrau: Why do we want to take a toy away from them?

Allyson Wharam: That's a great example. And then that kind of leads in from a programming perspective of that push and pull between individualization and group activities and goals and things like that. And so it sounds like there's a really nice infrastructure for activities and opportunities within that.

And then how do you balance, like this is the individual's actual skill acquisition goal. How do you navigate that?

Lee Courrau: Sure. So all of the activities, in the curriculum come with modification suggestions. So not all learners are gonna be at the same level. So I introduce strategies or alternatives to the [00:34:00] activity that you can introduce to the learners so that they can still participate, but do it at the level that they're currently at.

So sometimes that might be removing if an activity is competitive based, remove the competitive nature of the activity so that it's just more about completing it. A quick example of that is musical chairs. Musical chairs is one of those that for most kids is very fun, but it's very competitive and other.

Children may not understand that, or that becomes an overwhelming environment for them. So maybe introduce it to where we don't remove the chair. We just, teach the fact that once the music stops, you sit in a chair and then you do it, you repeat that. And that has worked really well.

Other BCBAs that have purchased the curriculum have told me that the game changer for them was the modification aspect of the activities.

Allyson Wharam: I love that. Yeah, that's really, I think the key is that we are, we're willing to be flexible about how things done, so that's wonderful. And [00:35:00] then, just segueing a little bit into the training and, scope and things like that of how. Someone even gets the skills to be able to make decisions about what modifications to make or use or implement.

Even for BCBAs, that can be tricky, but especially if you don't have all of the training to be assessing and making those judgements about shaping and things like that. How do you prepare technicians to be able to use a curriculum like this? I know they're not making those decisions at that level, but how do you train people to run these social skills instruction?

Lee Courrau: That's always the challenge. It's very different depending on, what is available to, for certain companies, a lot of them, can do role play, which works well. The thing is, if you're gonna role play social skills activities, have more than one person in the room, so it's not just BCBA, RBT, maybe have two or three BCBAs or have, somebody else that might be able to be a part of it, because the problem is [00:36:00] it's very different from one to one when you have one to two. The dynamic changes completely. And so when you drop an RBT into that type of environment with no training, it's difficult when you have two kids talking at the same time, or you have two different needs, two different demands.

So that's one way that you can get them comfortable in an environment like that. If you're gonna role play, make sure that you have multiple people for them to get comfortable with. Another way is, I think social skills in general is not a topic that is discussed or trained on a monthly basis. I know for me, I've spent six years being trained on verbal opera and extinction and differential reinforcement, but social skills is not something that's talked about.

And I know a lot of times it's because there may be a lack of comfort from BCBAs to be able to teach that they may not be very, aware of it. But even simple things like how do you teach in a group dynamic, you can train [00:37:00] that to your company. If there's the ability to do shadowing sessions in a social, if you have a running social skills group, bring some RBT's so that they can shadow and see what it looks like in a live setting.

Anything you can do to not just drop somebody in will help.

Allyson Wharam: Yes. Yeah, that's the antithesis of what we wanna do, but that is often what is done, unfortunately, with not even just this any sort of and you've been very vocal about that and the way that these like skills and training can impact service quality and just really paying attention to the skills that technicians have and how we're extending that beyond the 40 hour training.

Would you say that running a social skills group would be something that you, even with training, would have a brand new technician do or try to lead?

Lee Courrau: I think it depends on the, I hate to say, I think it depends on the technician's personality. I think you can teach, obviously you can teach [00:38:00] social skills. The one thing that you can't teach is an eagerness to wanna learn. If you have an RBT that is not interested in social skills groups at all, doesn't wanna work within a group, don't force it.

Really don't force it. It's just not gonna work. But I do think, talking about the 40 hours, if you're a company that has multiple social skills group or does have social skills group, I think you should include that in your initial training, even if it's not part of the certification process, but you should train it early on so that then you build that interest for that RBT.

Maybe that RBT really does become so interested in it that this is the thing that they wanna do. If you have someone like that, imagine what you can do with your social skills groups.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, I think that's interesting. Even for BCBAs, we're seen as generalists. Like they're, it's almost. Out of the norm to say, this is really my specialization. There are lots of people that do that, but we're expected [00:39:00] to be this jack of all trades that does all of the things.

But in terms of like job crafting and finding something that you love and that lights you up, like there are so many things that we can do and focus in on and become specialists. And so, I think for RBT's it's almost even worse. Like they just are expected to take whatever is handed to them. And so I imagine that this is possibly an interesting way for them to craft their jobs too. Someone might not want to run a social skills group, but for someone else they might really love and thrive in facilitating something like that. So I am sure that is actually probably a big benefit of having a model like this.

Lee Courrau: Sure. Absolutely. And sometimes you'll get former teachers that wanna become RBT's.

Allyson Wharam: Oh, yeah.

Lee Courrau: That's a great asset to have. Somebody that's already used to working in a group.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, I used to work at a natural environment preschool, and part of the readiness part of that was run by a former teacher who just was like back in her element really setting up creating the opportunities there. [00:40:00] So that's wonderful. So just a couple more things on the RBT sort of, or technician, and not even RBT's necessarily, but technicians in general, we have that initial training period and often that's okay, we're done wiping our hands of it.

We'll do supervision, but we're not necessarily thinking about systematic skill development across RBT's after that. So what are some ways that you see leaders or opportunities for leaders to continue to develop? RBT skills after that initial training?

Lee Courrau: Yeah, I think the 40 hour model does work. I think, especially somebody that's brand to the field within those 40 hours. I do think it works better if there's time constraints because the longer that you prolong it, like it just doesn't work that way. Like you learn very quickly.

But I think it's too much about the certification exam as opposed to being successful in the field after you become a certified [00:41:00] RBT. But a lot of times it comes down to what's not in that 40 hour model that I think starts to deteriorate an RBT confidence. Things like things that are very situational, how to engage with a parent, that's not something that's trained very often.

We don't teach pairing with parents, pairing with families. And BCBAs, their first interaction is with those families. So there's a lot of valuable information that can be passed on from the BCBA to the RBT's specifically about the families.

And that's not often something that's shared or trained. Like I know that in any briefing that I've ever been a part of, it's always about the child. It's never about the family. So when I go in, I go in blind. I don't know what to expect. I don't know what the environment looks like. I don't know, like personalities in terms of families.

So when I'm introducing the family and I introduce myself, [00:42:00] I'm like, okay, alright, let's see how it goes. So somebody that's not comfortable talking to parents or adults is gonna struggle from the get go. And the type of relationship that you build with a parent is so important that if you don't have the confidence in building that with them, you're going to have a very hard time.

Allyson Wharam: I can definitely see that and even just the continuity of you might be really fluent, in this one setting, but then like you said, might be different with parents or with an older learner, or if you're only used to learners who can converse back and forth, who have maybe a vocal language, and then you have a learner who's non-vocal and you're just not used to that. And how to pair with a learner with that profile what do you do? And so that is really tricky.

I think one thing we are really looking at in terms of this is, and we provide the 40 hour training, but I've said it, and I'll say it again it's a ton of content at one time, and it's also [00:43:00] the tip of the iceberg.

There's no way to give enough exemplars that, match every single thing that someone is gonna get across their it's so little in relation to what someone is going to need in their entire career as an RBT and it, you're missing the transfer piece. Like we we know that online learning works, but online learning or classroom learning, it doesn't matter if it's in person or online.

What matters most is the transfer to the natural environment. And if we're not actually seeing that skill take place with learners then we don't know if that training has generalized or if we need to provide more support. So one thing we are looking at is like systematic tracking of competencies over time and not just have you demonstrated it in this ideal setting in training.

Okay, that's great. And then maybe you do it independently. But even after that, can you generalize it across all of different kind of settings and situations that you might encounter? 'cause those are all different levels of [00:44:00] fluency ultimately.

Lee Courrau: Yeah, absolutely. And even, like most RBT's feel like we're training and studying to pass the exam. And so once we do, having, during our supervision, one of those things that really worked well for me is a BCBA, asking me if I can identify in a live setting with. With my client, did you catch that extinction burst?

Did you catch did you catch, the tantrum? What did it look like? Gimme the A, B, C of that behavior. Those types of things that I spent maybe like three weeks, four weeks really drilling down and studying to make sure that I can pass the exam. Can I recognize it in a live setting?

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, 'cause they're very different things. Which then, brings us back to the circle of programming individually for client learners is very different than programming in a less controlled group setting, which is different than hopefully that's generalizing to school. I think my big takeaway is thinking about the [00:45:00] continuity of how we can provide services and that we're not just stopping at this one sort of level of that more individualized model, but we're really supporting learners through that continuity.

So I want to ask a couple of specific questions as we wrap up here about the curriculum. You have already talked about the curriculum, but is there anything else that you wanted to add in relation to that?

Maybe in terms of some of the specific skills it addresses or the way it's structured or how someone would use it?

Lee Courrau: Yeah, so recently I launched a restructured version. The initial version was for six weeks. It's meant more for a summer program setting where you have at least like more than three hours, per day. So I restructured it now to fit more of a traditional social skills schedule is after getting some background information, most companies do a two to three hour, once a week type of model. [00:46:00] So I restructured the entire curriculum to fit that type of schedule. So what you're gonna get in the curriculum in terms of the structure, like I mentioned, you're gonna get how to implement like the opening meeting, as well as that reflection meeting.

You're always gonna have one particular social skills topic that may be teaching about anger or teaching about cooperation. It might be teaching about friendship, but really taking that topic and expanding on it. And then all of the activities for that particular day reflect the topic that you introduced for that day.

Within the curriculum, as I mentioned, you get detailed protocols, modifications, programming suggestions for BCBAs, all of those were provided by an actual BCBA that looked at all of these activities. So really everything is included. Materials are included. So you don't have to do anything other than implement for your social skills group.

Allyson Wharam: That's [00:47:00] beautiful. That's a lot. I see a lot of parallels to how we thought about our curriculum as well for supervision and just, more than anything, making sure that it's ready to go because we have enough on our plates. And what was out there, at least what I saw for supervision, for example, is there's like a skeleton or, maybe teach these skills, but not a lot of here take and run as someone who's super busy and doesn't have time to create everything from scratch. So it sounds like it's very usable as it is, which is wonderful.

And then you have also created a social skills group audit at a high level. So could you talk about that really quickly and what that would entail?

Lee Courrau: Sure. The audit itself is for any company that has a running social skills group. A lot of times we assume that a group is doing great. But this audit will allow you to not only look at the structure of your current group, but it also gives you an assessment for your staff to see what are some other skills that maybe we could teach them so that they can elevate [00:48:00] the group.

You'll look at not only your staff, your activities... is the model that you have the best that you can implement. Are you ready perhaps to maybe have a second group. It really dissects your current group so that you can evolve and make it even better and more impactful.

Allyson Wharam: That's wonderful. Yeah. Just to even know if this is even something that you can or have the capacity to do is great and really helpful.

Are there any other resources or tools or business for BCBAs or business owners who want to strengthen social skills instruction or staff development systems that you would recommend?

Lee Courrau: Not yet, to be honest with you.

Allyson Wharam: That's okay.

Lee Courrau: I think there are a lot of things that are being developed right now by experts in the field. A lot of BCBAs that have decided to take on a certain aspect of the field are developing a lot of tools. Based on their passion. So I think within the year, within the next five years, I think there's gonna be so many tools out there developed by [00:49:00] actual experts in the thing that they really love about the field.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah, I'm seeing more of that too, which is exciting and more like really democratizing how we're sharing and talking about these different things.

Alright, a last question and then I'm gonna have you share with folks how they can reach you. But, if our listeners were to take just one action after hearing this conversation, something that they could implement tomorrow, what would it be?

Lee Courrau: I really do think if you have a current group running, the one question that I would ask myself is 'why.' Why do I want this group? What do I want to get out of it? And then do your audit, do your assessment for that group, because I think a lot of times we build it outta necessity without really having a goal in mind.

And I think if you answer that one question, you're gonna see your group very differently and the way that you approach it.

Allyson Wharam: I love that and everything stems out of that. That's a great place to [00:50:00] start. And so if others wanna connect with you, where can they find you?

Lee Courrau: Definitely on LinkedIn. Just search my name Lee Courrau. Sometimes I post things that are controversial, but I do think, it's needed. It's just from my experience and a lot of the things that I've had conversations with other colleagues and peers in the group that I think should be highlighted.

So definitely open to conversations there. And then if you're interested in the curriculum, just visit my website https://www.launchkidsacademy.com/. You'll see there.

Allyson Wharam: Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. This was great.

Lee Courrau: Thank you, Allyson. I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Allyson Wharam: Yeah.

Thank you so much for listening to In the Field, the ABA Podcast. Don't forget to visit our website at www.Sidekicklearning.net for more resources, our comprehensive fieldwork supervision curriculum, and continuing education opportunities. If you enjoyed today's episode, [00:51:00] please consider subscribing to our podcast and sharing it with your colleagues and friends in the ABA community. Your support helps us to reach and empower more professionals in our field. Join me next week to continue to explore innovative practices and foster quality supervision in ABA.