Recording of the speaker can be viewed here
Our first speaker was Amanda Borosh. She is a board-certified Behavioral Analyst and a current graduate student at Purdue University working towards her PhD in Special Education. She worked as a special education teacher before becoming a behavior analyst for the Chicago Public schools, where she developed an interest in learning about the disconnect between what research says and what schools actually implement. I had to watch the recorded presentation as I was not available for the live presentation, but as I watched I immediately was interested in her focus on the research-to-practice gap in K-12 schools. I fully agreed with what she had to say about how the research-to-practice gap forms, especially her quote of “Train and hope”. Especially when she mentioned how teacher training normally happens, as a one-hour training with no follow-up, I felt in myself that all-too-familiar feeling of frustration. I’ve worked many an odd job where a supervisor or manager didn’t follow through to make sure things were being learned.
This first speaker had me deeply interested right at the beginning, when she was identifying all the problems I frequently see. However, as she went through the implementation science and the organizational behavior management portions of her presentation, I realized that this field she is in would not quite be the right fit for me. I am deeply interested in the problems she is tackling, but I don’t enjoy the thorough behavior systems analyses that she must conduct. I enjoy conducting program analyses wherein I evaluate the effectiveness of a program that is provided to schools (such as in-school assemblies, after school events, and the like), and for those I focus on the program being run. I don’t have to perform an in-depth analysis of how the school runs or how well the students are learning in their classes to understand the impact of a program I brought to the school, as I am only interested in measuring what students may remember from my program. This still uses some behavioral analysis techniques, but nothing to the scale that the speaker does. On a similar vein, I do have to work on some performance management with my volunteers to ensure the programs run as they should, but nothing like the scale of trying to improve the scores for an entire school.