Safety, Dignity, and Clinical Judgement in Skills Based Treatment: Session 338 with Cory Whelan

What does it look like to assess and treat severe problem behavior when safety concerns have become so significant that a student can no longer participate successfully in their typical school environment?

In this episode, Dr. Cory Whelan joins me to discuss his work at Seasons Behavioral Services, where he and Dr. Kara LaCroix have developed an intensive model for assessing and treating dangerous behavior while helping students build the skills they'll need to return to less restrictive settings.

Cory brings an unusual perspective to this work. He is dually certified as a speech-language pathologist and behavior analyst, and his career has taken him from challenging school environments in Washington, D.C., to doctoral training at Western New England University, where he worked with Dr. Greg Hanley and became involved in the development and application of practical functional assessment and skill-based treatment approaches.

We talk about how Seasons works with students who may be waiting for an out-of-district placement—or whose behavior has become too dangerous for their current educational setting—and what happens during their approximately three-month intensive treatment model.

Cory describes how his team uses a universal protocol when students first arrive, with an emphasis on minimizing evocative situations and creating conditions in which students can safely engage with staff before assessment begins. From there, we walk through their approach to caregiver interviews, practical functional assessment, and skill-based treatment.

We also spend quite a bit of time discussing something that can sometimes get lost when talking about highly technical treatment procedures: clinical judgment.

Cory explains why he trains staff not simply to follow a protocol mechanically, but to continually evaluate what is happening in front of them and make decisions that prioritize the safety and dignity of the person they're serving. We discuss what that looks like when problem behavior occurs unexpectedly, why backing off from a demand isn't necessarily a clinical failure, and how thoughtful decision-making fits within function-based treatment.

We also get into some of the nuances of conducting effective functional assessment interviews, including:

• Building rapport before jumping into questions about problem behavior.
• Identifying precursors and subtle indicators that a situation is becoming difficult.
• Asking about activities caregivers or staff may have stopped attempting altogether.
• Using clinical judgment alongside structured interview tools.
• What it means when an analysis doesn't produce the behavior you expected to see.

Finally, we discuss one of the hardest parts of intensive behavioral treatment: generalization and transition. A student may make tremendous progress in a highly trained treatment environment, but what happens when they move to a school or program with different staff, resources, and contingencies? Cory shares both the successes and limitations they've encountered when trying to support receiving programs and maintain treatment gains across settings.

If you're interested in practical functional assessment and skill-based treatment—particularly how these approaches work with severe behavior in real-world clinical and educational environments—I think you'll get a lot out of this conversation.

Resources Mentioned

• Seasons Behavioral Services (which, by the way, is an awesome place to work!)
• Practical Functional Assessment resources - we cited numerous papers in the PFA/SBT literature. Rather than link them all, you can find downloadable PDFs of all of them here.
• OG podcasts on PFA/SBT to get you up to speed. Sessions 1, 7, 20, 94, 160, 219, and 283. I could cite many more, but these will give you a great start.
• Shoutout to The Hawaii Association for Behavior Analysis.

Sponsor Shoutouts

• CEUs from Behavioral Observations. Learn from your favorite podcast guests while you're commuting, walking the dog, or whatever else you do while listening to podcasts. New events are being added all the time, so check them out here. 
• The BOP Patreon. Do you want to get the show ad-free and before everyone else? Click here to learn how!
• Safety-Care is a crisis prevention and de-escalation training program designed for professionals who support individuals with challenging behavior. More than 300,000 professionals have been trained in Safety-Care's evidence-based approach to recognizing early warning signs and responding with confidence. To learn more, visit QBS.com/podcast.
• The Behavioral Toolbox International. Check out our courses for school-based and other behavioral professionals, including our newest one, Motivational Interviewing: Getting Educator Buy-In.

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