"It's just not practice." Why your speech therapist and your ABA team should be talking, and how you can help.

A free article for families, derived from Special Learning's course "SLP & ABA Collaboration: Using Collaboration to Generate Best Outcomes... Quicker" (a panel hosted by Karen Chung with Melanie Olson Giles, Jennifer Rumfola and Noor Syed).

Maybe your child sees a speech therapist on Tuesdays and has an ABA team the rest of the week. Both are working on communication. Both write goals. Both send you home with things to practice. And you may have noticed that they rarely, if ever, talk to each other.

You're not imagining it. This session brought two professionals trained in both speech-language pathology and behavior analysis, and a behavior analyst, onto one panel to talk about exactly that gap. It was recorded for professionals, but almost everything in it helps the parent who sits between the two teams.

Both fields say they should work together. Most don't.

The panel starts with something that surprised the host. The ethics codes of both professions speak to the importance of collaboration. Both fields say, on paper, that working together matters.

Then one panelist names the problem plainly. Both fields think it's really important, "but in terms of matter of practice it's just not practice." Another describes "that kind of territorial piece" she feels both professions are struggling with.

Nobody on the panel blames the other side. They say it's hard to know how to collaborate when you were trained differently, speak differently and measure differently. The rest of the session takes those differences apart, one at a time. Each one is something you can see from where you sit.

They're looking at the same moment from two sides

Here's the difference at the heart of it, in the panel's own framing.

A speech-language pathologist is trained in form. One panelist says her field is "so trained in form." That means the shape of the language itself: the sounds, the words, the grammar. Speech therapists are good at knowing which targets to pick next, because their training is deep in how language is built.

A behavior analyst starts somewhere else. "Our main goal is at first to think of the function of the behavior," says another panelist. Function means the why. What does this word, cry or push get the child? Once the team knows why a behavior happens, they can teach a better way to get the same thing.

Neither view is wrong. The panel's point is that they fit together. One field knows a great deal about what the words should sound like. The other knows a great deal about why a child uses them, or doesn't. A child needs both.

Different words for the same things

Some of what keeps the two teams apart is plain vocabulary. The session has a slide for it, and the heading says it best: "terminology often seems to get in the way."

When you sit in a meeting with both teams, you may hear two words for one skill. Here's a translation you can keep:

- Requesting (speech) and manding (ABA): asking for something they want. - Labeling (speech) and tacting (ABA): naming what they see. - Conversation (speech) and intraverbal (ABA): answering or talking about something that isn't in front of them.

A speech therapist will also talk about pragmatics. One panelist explains that it means "how we use language" in social situations. That's the same ground a behavior analyst covers when they look at how a child uses language with other people.

The overlap is there, one panelist says, but the words are "quite distinct at times."

This is where you can help. If one team says manding and the other says requesting, you can say out loud that they're talking about the same goal. A parent who can translate is often the first person in the room to notice that two teams are working on one thing.

Look at what happens after

The panel walks through one example in detail. A teacher hands a student a worksheet, and the student acts out.

It's natural to focus on what set it off: the worksheet, the task, the classmate. One panelist asks the team to look somewhere else. "We really need to focus on what happens after the behavior," she says. What happens next is usually what keeps the behavior going. If acting out gets the worksheet taken away, the child has learned that it works.

She adds something every parent will recognize. It's much easier to see this as an outside observer than when you're the person in the moment with the child. The adult in the middle of it often can't say afterward exactly what happened, because they were in it.

So the team teaches the student another way to get the same result. The panel's examples are short and plain: "I'm not ready yet," "I need a break," or "No thank you." That's the short-term fix. Then the team looks underneath it. Is the real problem a skill the child doesn't have yet, like the math concept on the page? That becomes the next thing to teach.

The cookie on the shelf

Another panelist gives a home example that both fields understand. A child cries to get a cookie. How do you get him to use words instead?

You put the thing he really likes "in sight but maybe out of reach," maybe in a clear cabinet next to you. He goes over to it. Now you can teach him to point to it, or to say "cookie." If he can't say the whole word yet, you might accept part of it, even just "c." Asking with words, or part of a word, gets him the cookie. Crying doesn't.

A speech therapist on the panel says her field does the same thing and calls it "sabotaging the environment." They have their own term for it, but it's the same approach to teaching language.

This is exactly where the two teams can help each other. The behavior analyst may start by accepting any sound that works for the child. The speech therapist knows how to shape that sound, step by step, toward the real word. Together, one panelist says, they can "skip ahead in that idea of shaping," because the goal is for learning to happen as fast as possible.

One field graphs. The other often doesn't.

Both fields collect data, but not the same way. One panelist, speaking as a speech therapist, says it directly: "we don't typically graph our data." Her graduate students ask her why they would ever need to.

Behavior analysts look at graphs because a trend shows up quickly. Is this going up, going down or standing still? And what should change if it isn't working?

The same panelist describes what she does about it. She asks the speech therapists she works with: "how can we take data on that together?" That question works for a parent too. If both teams are working on requesting, ask whether they can measure it the same way and share what they see. Then you have one picture of your child's progress instead of two.

It isn't a turf battle

The panel ends where it began, but with more hope. One panelist says plainly that she doesn't think this is "a turf battle." Both professions have a lot of overlapping areas that could benefit from each other. Speech therapists can learn from behavior analysts, and behavior analysts can learn from speech therapists, including how to shape the sounds a child is starting to make.

Her picture of good collaboration is simple: working together, showing mutual respect, and working as a team for the child.

You don't have to wait for the two teams to find each other. Here are some things you can do this week:

- Put both teams on one page. Ask each to share the communication goals they're working on, then line them up side by side. - Translate. Keep the list above. When the words differ, say that the goal is the same. - Ask about what happens after. When a behavior worries you, ask what happens right after it, not only what set it off. - Ask for shared data. If both teams work on the same skill, ask whether they can measure it the same way. - Invite one into the other's session. Even one visit can show each side what the other is doing.

If you are reading this outside the United States

The session was recorded in the United States, and the credentials the panel names are American ones. Where you live, the professionals may have different titles, training and rules.

What transfers isn't the credential. It's the questions. Does everyone working with your child know what the others are working on? Are they using different words for the same goal? Is anyone looking at what happens after a behavior, not only before it? Can they measure progress the same way? None of those depends on any country's system, and you can ask every one of them at your next meeting.

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This article is drawn from a recorded Special Learning course. It is general information for families, not clinical advice, and not a treatment recommendation for any individual. It does not describe the rules of any particular school district or country.

Special Learning is a BACB Authorized Continuing Education (ACE) Provider (OP-14-2437). Authorization as an ACE Provider does not imply endorsement or approval of the ACE event content by the BACB.