Sarah Heller

Why I opened my Social Skills Groups Peer Program By Dr. Sarah Heller, Ed.D., BCBA, IBA, LBA-NY · Meaningful Metrics For years, there is a theme of conversations that has always followed me home. A parent tells me, often quietly and sometimes through tears, that their child has every therapy and every service written into the week, and still spends Saturdays alone in their room. A teacher stops me in the hallway to describe a student who follows every classroom routine without missing a beat,...

By Dr. Sarah Heller, Ed.D., IBA, BCBA, LBA-NY · Meaningful Metrics There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in somewhere around month two of your post-exam life as a BCBA. The studying is over. The acronym is behind your name. You survived, told approximately everyone you know, and updated your email signature with appropriate gravity. And then you sit down to write your first independent behavior plan and realize something quietly unsettling: you now have to know what you are...

By Dr. Sarah Heller, Ed.D., BCBA, LBA-NY · Meaningful Metrics You have a behavior plan. It was written thoughtfully, reviewed by the team, explained to the family. Maybe you even had professional development on it. And yet ... here you are, three months in, watching the exact behaviors it was supposed to address continue to occur, possibly with more enthusiasm than before. Before anyone suggests rewriting the plan from scratch, it is worth asking a different question: is the plan actually...