REFRAME Dinner Party
with Meg Solomon, Jen Farris, & Dr. Mari-Luci Cerda
Behavior Bites Podcast - Ep57February 26, 2025Have you ever thought about writing a book?
How great would it be to have a book that combined compassionate care and science into one treatment plan?
During today’s meal— I speak with three behavior analysts and authors of a new book releasing in March. We discuss what the writing process was like, key takeaways from the book, and what they learned from writing it.
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Amuse-Bouche
Introduce yourselves. Where are you located? What’s your role?
Appetizer
How did you meet?
What was the initial reason for writing THIS book?
How did you decide who would write what?
Palate Cleanser
Describe your go-to potluck dish.
Entree
What was one of the most surprising things you learned in creating your book?
Did you experience challenges? How did you handle them?
Why did you use food, cooking, and restaurant metaphors in REFRAME?
Dessert
How long did it take to finish the book?
If you could pick one lesson for readers to walk away with, what would it be?
What advice would you give to anyone who wants to write a book?
Excerpts from the Episode
(*Paraphrased highlights)-
(Meg) Practitioners talk about compassionate care and they talk about neuro-affirming practices, but then when it comes to doing it, they seem to be struggling quite a bit.
That was one of the things that the three of us found as agency owners who live all across the country, and from speaking with other agency owners.
At the end of the day, what we found is that this book needed to happen to give some sort of guidance. People in academia have been saying what we're supposed to be doing, and it's still just theoretical papers. There is no data and research really to back it up.
What Jen, Mari, and I were trying to accomplish here was just presenting how we do it from start to finish— recognizing there is no finish.
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(Jen) I'm very good at following recipes, and so as our field is growing, a lot of people are becoming very good at following recipes because they're pulling curricula off of a shelf.
We didn't have any of those, so if we wanted programming developed, we needed to know how to build it and how to create it and do it ourselves.
When you think about that under the framework of cooking, everyone can relate to that, right?
Whether it's because you're somebody like me that's really good at following a recipe and will pull that book off the shelf and read the things, or whether it's because you're really good like the other three of you where you can make your own soup and you know how to get translucent onions, right?
As our field grows, that's the art of analysis and application that for me, I feel like we're losing.
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(Mari) We've gotten to this point where we create these plans and we create these programs that don't encourage our BCBA's or our techs or our teachers or professionals how to think, but just what to think.
When things go off the rails and the plan doesn't work, people don't know what to do and they don't know how to do it because that really important critical thinking skill set has not been built.
This book is really about us encouraging the courage to develop that skill repertoire of critical thinking and how to think about it— Not you do A, then B, then C, but what do you do when B doesn't work and C does, but A doesn't?
How do you maneuver through those situations?
You're working with another real human being. They don't follow this nice little set of rules that we expect them to follow, and neither does the environment.
Life is messy and I think that is one of the biggest goals, at least for me with this book.
ABOUT REFRAME
Margaret Thomas Solomon, MS Ed, BCBA, LBA, IBA
Jennifer Farris, MA, LABA, LBA, BCBA, IBA
Mari-Luci Cerda, PhD, BCBA, LBA
REFRAME ABA is a book designed to bring the idea of compassionate care into practice. With clinic-based case studies and contextual examples, REFRAME is not so much a curriculum as it is a guide.
The book begins with assessing behavior, but not just assessing the skills of the learner but those of the implementer. It continues with addressing the environment, goal-development as guided by both behavior analytic research and the long-standing evidence provided by related fields such as human development and neuroscience.
REFRAME’s aim is to radically address the behaviors that will lead the field of Applied Behavior Analysis through the paradigm shift it has needed since first recognizing the harm caused by the behaviors of our field’s past.
CONNECT with REFRAME
Instagram: @reframe.aba
Meg: @acrossenvironments
Jen: @my_behavior_brain
Mari: @autie.analyst
Website: reframeaba.comPlease support our podcast by leaving a rating or review!
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