What is “Today’s ABA”?

“Today’s ABA” refers to an exceptional approach in applied behavior analysis that addresses challenging behavior, developed by Dr. Gregory Hanley and colleagues and described in a moving blog post available on his website.

This approach is characterized by strong, positive, and trusting client-therapist relationships, compassionate care, assent-based treatment, and trauma assumed practices. The three core values of Today’s ABA are:

• Safety- treatment is designed and implemented to keep everyone safe.
• Televisibility- televisibility is enhanced transparency; it moves beyond simple transparency in procedures to proud ownership of everything we do throughout treatment. We would happily invite the world to watch us work with our clients (in our clinic one of the doors to our treatment room has a two-way mirror so parents/caregivers at any time can watch us work with their child).
• Rapport- trusting relationships we carefully build with our clients trump procedures.

Today’s ABA combines common ABA practices such as functional communication training, task analysis, prompting, shaping, and differential reinforcement; however, Today’s ABA diverges from conventional ABA in a few very important ways:

• Program values are prioritized over procedures.
• The treatment process is performance based. Clinical decisions are made during sessions based on the client’s performance.
• We do not rely on strategies that are ethically questionable (e.g., punishment, extinction, seclusion, restraint, planned ignoring).

‍