Episode 344 - Communities of Practice (LISTENER CHOICE SPRING 2026)

Summary

ABA Inside Track Podcast: Episode 344 - Communities of Practice (Listener Choice Spring 2026)

Date: May 20, 2026
Hosts: Robert Perry Crews, Jackie McDonald, Diana Perry Crews
Theme: Communities of practice—origins, structure, research, and application for behavior analysts

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Episode Overview

This listener-chosen episode explores “Communities of Practice” (CoPs): what they are, how they originated, and their significance for behavior analysts, especially those looking for ongoing professional support without regular access to conferences or large peer networks. The hosts break down seminal and recent research articles examining CoPs in behavioral science and allied fields. They share practical insights, research-backed findings, limitations, and suggestions for both practitioners and organizations interested in developing or joining such communities.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Communities of Practice Matter

• Isolation in professional practice: Many behavior analysts, especially in rural areas or without conference access, lack direct peer support ("I live in a rural part of Texas...I might be the only BCBA in a school district." – Jackie, 03:02).
• Cost and accessibility: Conferences are expensive and time-consuming; CoPs offer an accessible alternative for knowledge-sharing and professional support.
• Organic professional support: CoPs can provide ongoing, relevant guidance that fills gaps between conferences and formal training.

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2. Communities of Practice: Origins and Definitions

Defining Features (Wenger, 2002):

• Domain: Shared topic or subject of interest driving the CoP.
• Community: A self-selected, socially connected group (horizontal, not hierarchical).
• Practice: Shared set of tools, language, documents, and storytelling; collective problem-solving.

Memorable Moment:
Jackie retells a favorite origin story—photocopier repairmen holding informal breakfast meetings at McDonald's to solve work problems, yielding significant productivity and financial savings.

"My most favorite part of it is that they were informally meeting at a McDonald's for breakfast...they were actually better at their jobs and saved over $1 million for the company."
— Jackie, 12:02

Stages of a CoP (From the Literature):

1. Potential: Individuals recognize shared interests.
2. Coalescing: Group negotiates structure, logistics.
3. Activation: Members actively meet and problem-solve.
4. Dispersal: Group’s activities decrease as needs are met.
5. Memorable: Group dissolves but its impact is remembered fondly.

"The memorable stage where the community of practice is no longer occurring because it doesn't need to, but people remember it fondly. Isn't that funny?"
— Jackie, 20:49

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3. Research Highlights: Four Key Articles Discussed

A. Bush et al. (2020): Behavior Analysts’ CoPs in Ontario, Canada

• Surveyed a long-standing ontarian CoP born of a multi-agency training
  • Diverse group (experience, certification levels)
  • Self-reports: high satisfaction, perceived growth in knowledge and professional relationships (except one outlier who strongly disagreed, 28:18)
  • Structure: Monthly meetings with actionable work (e.g., working on behavior support plans in-session)
  • Outperformed the typical conference format by integrating hands-on practice and immediate feedback
  • Small sample, limited to self-report; recommended as a supplement, not a replacement, for formal behavior skills training (BST).

"I love the idea and I want to do something with this...put it on my cotton candy board." — Jackie, 33:24

B. Hennin et al. (2022): CoPs for Community Health Workers in Uganda

• International context: CoPs among TB contact tracers with modest training
  • Weekly meetings included peer-led problem-solving, feedback from facilitators, WhatsApp groups for continuous support
  • Participants felt more respected and connected, showing increases in self-efficacy and collaboration
  • Researchers’ involvement was more pronounced (mixed evidence for full ‘organic’ CoP)
  • Limitation: Hard to isolate the effects of the CoP vs. general group interaction

C. Barwick et al. (2009): Implementing Evidence-Based Practice via CoPs

• Quasi-experimental study in Ontario mental health orgs, measuring impact of CoP vs. ‘practice as usual’ on use of the CAFAS tool.
  • CoP groups used the data system significantly more, increased satisfaction, self-reported practice change, higher knowledge scores vs. controls
  • Complex, large-scale questionnaires (hundreds of items) and noted confounds (e.g., nonrandomized org allocation)

"If you would like to compare conducting a community of practice to doing nothing…this group used [the tool] 152 times and the other group used it 65 times." — Diana, 50:43

D. Kernow (2008): Limitations of the CoP Model

• Key barriers for CoPs in capitalist, hierarchical organizations:
  • Time commitment: Organizations may resist non-billable activities.
  • Vertical hierarchy conflicts: Traditional orgs prefer ‘chain of command’ over horizontal peer groups.
  • Cultural fit: Western individualism may clash with CoP’s collaborative ideals.

"As increased work demands further constrain the time available, they will likely do so at the expense of the effectiveness of communities of practice." — (Kernow, paraphrased by Rob, 53:53) "Organizational hierarchies...are likely to impede efforts for successful community of practice integration and utilization." — (Kernow, paraphrased by Rob, 54:07)

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4. Real-World Applications & Reflections

• CoPs can supplement but not fully replace other forms of instruction (like BST).
• Practical issues: Time, voluntary attendance, sustaining engagement, and leadership without authority.
• Social validity, connection, and job satisfaction are often as important as technical efficiency.
• Facilitator roles and agenda setting are critical for success.

"You're going to need a facilitator. You're going to need someone to sort of say, who's in charge next week? What is on the agenda? You need to have people who are interested in having an agenda."
— Rob, 64:53

• Personal anecdotes: The hosts share their experiences starting or joining CoPs, challenges faced, and how purposes sometimes shift (“Our group started as learning together, now it’s more outward focused—training faculty, making resources…” – Diana, 63:42).

• Still lots of research to do, especially regarding:

  • Cost-effectiveness/efficiency
  • Sustainability and ideal group composition
  • Differential uptake based on member characteristics

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Photocopier Repairmen at McDonald's: The original CoP origin story, playful banter about fast food, and "saving $1 million," 12:02.
• "Cotton Candy on a Bulletin Board": Describing research’s ‘fluffiness’ and the desire for more data (17:13).
• "Not everything comes down to the bottom dollar": Grappling with the push for cost/efficiency research vs. softer but crucial social benefits (61:24).
• "Quagmire": Playful joke about a group of faculty (67:56).

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Important Timestamps for Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |-----------|---------------------------------------| | 01:51-03:49 | Introduction, audience context, rural isolation for BCBAs | | 10:54-13:27 | Origins of CoPs: Photocopier repairmen story | | 16:36-18:10 | Components and stages of a CoP | | 25:24-33:24 | Bush et al. (2020): CoPs for behavior analysts | | 34:16-41:18 | Hennin et al. (2022): CoPs for community health workers in Uganda | | 42:32-51:33 | Barwick et al. (2009): CoPs and evidence-based practice implementation | | 51:36-57:18 | Kernow (2008): Limitations, structural and cultural barriers | | 58:40-63:42 | Reflections, practical advice, research needs | | 69:05-71:49 | Pairings: Related episodes and snacks | | 65:01, 62:31 | Real-life CoP experiences and anecdotal closing thoughts |

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Final Thoughts

The hosts all agree CoPs are a powerful, underutilized tool for professional growth and community-building in behavior analysis—especially for practitioners with less direct access to peer networks. The research shows demonstrable benefits (knowledge, practice change, job satisfaction), but also highlights challenges in implementation, sustainability, and organizational context. They call for more, especially behavioral, research and invite listeners to share their own CoP stories.

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Further Listening (“Pairings”)

• Ep. 172 & 173: Research to practice and practice to research
• Ep. 202: Changing professional focus
• Ep. 255: Scope of comfort (Landria Seals)
• Ep. 291: Ethical scenarios roundtable with How to ABA
• Book Club 12: Street Data

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Snack Pairing (for Your Next CoP!)

Fresh fruit salad topped with chamoy (pickled apricot sauce) and Tajín (chili, lime, and salt) — as enjoyed at a recent conference, though the hosts agree it’s only a true CoP snack if you’re all cooks (71:39).

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Conclusion

If you’re considering forming or joining a CoP, “all you need is a space, some time, and people who share your problems—and you’ve got yourself a community of practice.” Listeners are encouraged to write in with their experiences as this vital topic continues to develop in the field.

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Notable Quote to Carry With You:

“It should be easy to form a community of practice…But have you found it helpful? How long did you stay? Did you last three years? Was it a two-month community of practice and then everyone broke up and you only have your memories left behind you and maybe a little evidence-based uptick, who knows?”
— Rob, 68:29

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Contact:
Share your own CoP stories: [e-mail]
Podcast homepage: abainsidetrack.com

Transcript

[Diana Perry Crews]

Foreign.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Hey, everybody. Welcome to ABA Inside Track, the podcast that's like reading in your car but safer. I'm your host, Robert Perry Crews, and with me, as always, are my fabulous co hosts.

[Jackie McDonald]

Oh, hey there, Robert Perry crews. Me, Jackie McDonald, but I think it's you.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I don't think so. I actually couldn't remember. I think me neither.

[Jackie McDonald]

I think you're going.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I think so.

[Jackie McDonald]

It's 2026, though.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yep.

[Jackie McDonald]

I think it's multiple years that I've been going first now. No, 2025. You went first. Oh, it's been a long year. It's like a long December by con and crows.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Oh, yeah. We haven't done this in a long time. Yeah, maybe. I'm not sure what's going on.

[Jackie McDonald]

We had a week off and it's getting weird.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Not take much.

[Jackie McDonald]

It's getting vibes.

[Diana Perry Crews]

It's getting vibes. It's me, Diana Perry Crews. Hi.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Oh, man. Well, we're here.

[Diana Perry Crews]

We're ready.

[Robert Perry Crews]

This is a podcast that we're getting ready, I guess. It's a podcast about behavior analysis and behavior analytic research where every week we pick a topic and discuss it at length as well as relevant research articles and who. Boy, we need this topic now because it's really hard to be a podcaster talking about behavior analysis when you get a week off. And if only we had other people who were in the same boat as usual, we could talk about our problems, talk about our solutions, maybe get an expert in audio engineering. I don't know, something to come in and just. Just make life a little bit. A little bit easier for us. Talking forever for ever for us. We not only have a topic that we'll be discussing related to that desperate need, but it was chosen by our listeners. This is our spring 2026 listener choice episode where we're going to be talking all about communities of practice.

[Jackie McDonald]

I'm going to tell the communities of our practice, all of our listeners, that I am so happy that you picked this topic. And I'm so happy that Rob picked this topic. This is a Rob topic?

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, I put it on the.

[Jackie McDonald]

It's a Rob specialty.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I know what the people want, and so do you, Jackie, because yours actually came in. It was a tie.

[Jackie McDonald]

A hot sec. A hot. A hot first.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Never mind.

[Jackie McDonald]

Diana's out of touch.

[Robert Perry Crews]

You know what?

[Diana Perry Crews]

I don't have. Have my pulse on my finger. On the pulse of the populace.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Nope.

[Jackie McDonald]

But you know what? You're smart. That's all you need.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I mean, I like what I like, and no one else likes that, and that's okay.

[Robert Perry Crews]

It must be hard.

[Jackie McDonald]

I love that for you. And. But I. I was reflecting earlier when I was reading this, all these articles, because we have a bit of articles for this topic today and how helpful this will be for BCBAs that don't get the opportunity to go to conferences. So Diane and I went to Tex ABA in April.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Recently. Recently, we just kicked our boots off. Back down.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yep.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Massachusetts soil. Oh, yes.

[Jackie McDonald]

And we were. I was talking to a lot of BCBAs there, and they're like, well, I'm. I. I live in a rural part of Texas. Right. And it's. I might be the only bcba in a school district.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And.

[Jackie McDonald]

And sometimes that's really challenging because I don't have peers to help me with, you know, if I have any challenging cases. And so. And then they were like, well, I can't really go to conferences all the time either, because we all know why. Because conferences are expensive. Right. And they take a lot of time, and you might not have that kind of resources available to you. I know I don't. So thanks, Texaba, for inviting me and

[Robert Perry Crews]

started this podcast so people would invite us to conferences, and it's a money saver.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah. And so I think that listening to this topic today could be really helpful on establishing your own community as a practice, even though that seems fairly challenging. But I think it's something that would be really helpful. Yeah. So I'm just. I was jazzed.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I'm glad. I'm glad you're happy for this topic. I'm glad it was voted on by our listeners. I'm sorry that Diana can't pick good topics because she's just not as cool as you and me, Jackie. Maybe she needs a different community practice.

[Diana Perry Crews]

She can't leave. In class the other day, I was like, guys, I'm just so lucky that I get to talk to you all the time about experimental design and visual inspection of data. And they all just stared at me and, like, blinked. And they're like, that's great for you, but it's okay.

[Robert Perry Crews]

You know what? That's.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I'll have my.

[Robert Perry Crews]

That's why you became a college professor, because, like, you're required to listen to me talk.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Everybody party by myself.

[Robert Perry Crews]

All right, well, Dinah, why don't you keep talking? What are we going to be discussing today?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Oh, you'd like to know the articles that will be included.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I mean, I don't care. I already know what they are. You already know, and I'm ready to discuss them.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Oh, well, I already know, too. But just in case I forgot, I

[Jackie McDonald]

don't, I don't know.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I'm going to remind myself what they are. They include getting to uptake Do Communities of Practice Support the Implementation of Evidence Based Practice by Barwick, Peters and Boydell, published in the Journal of Canadian Academic Child Adolescent Psychiatry. It's all abbreviated as the issue that was my best shot at that. I thought I read 2009. Oh, I look at the articles to get the info.

[Jackie McDonald]

You did write it down somewhere, but that's.

[Diana Perry Crews]

All right. Next up, the more we get together, Communities of Practice for Behavior Analysts by Bush, Zonnefeld, Sini, Chartier, Lathan and Asaro. And that was in the Canadian journal Journal of Behavioral Science in the year 2020.

[Jackie McDonald]

And I is my. That's my favorite article and I'm going to talk about it.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Okay?

[Jackie McDonald]

Full disclosure.

[Diana Perry Crews]

All right. Hey, hang on, hang on. Next up, Core Components of a Community of Practice to Improve Community Health Worker Performance, a qualitative study by Henin, Gita, Turimum, Horo, Ocham, Gupta, Kattamba, Armstrong, Huff, and Davis that was published in Implementation Science Communications in the year 2022. And finally, limitations of Communities of Practice, a consideration of unresolved issues and difficulties in the approach. Only Kernow is coming to us with this one solo author, I believe, in the year 2008 from the Journal Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Excellent.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Was it?

[Robert Perry Crews]

It was. It was excellent.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Great.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So communities of Practice is a topic that I first came upon as something that could be studied back when we were writing a book chapter for a book about dissemination of behavior analysis. And I'm trying to remember how I got on that topic. I think we were just looking in a lot of different articles around dissemination and sharing, and it just sort of popped out. It's like, this is what I want

[Diana Perry Crews]

to form from your head, so let's do.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, it didn't because I took articles because I did not know about them outside of the idea of isn't it nice when you get together with other people and discuss stuff, but that's not really enough of research for an episode. So it was nice that there definitely was some. And because listeners, if you think that we were like, oh, is this, is this why it's on the poll? Because Rob already had those articles sitting around. He just wanted to regurgitate old notes. The only article that I believe was cited, I did not double check, but believe we cited in that chapter was the Bush article. And that is because there's no way we could do an episode on communities of practice and not include the one research article about behavior and analytic communities of practice that exists. We had to do that. So that one. If you've already read the chapter, it's a great article, but we're going to be reviewing it again. If you have not read the chapter that we wrote, then this is going to be new to you. The other three articles, brand new. I got a big pile of Communities of Practice articles. Jack and Diana say three articles. That's usually our max, but I had too many. I had to do four. I'm sorry. So if anyone wants to know who loves the listeners the most, it's. It's me, everybody. You get four articles. Hooray. I just got to look. So sorry. So we got four articles that are going to cover the gamut of what is a community of practice? What do they look like in behavior analysis? Do they actually do anything? Why might they do anything if they do do something? And what if they're not so great? Those are. Those. Those are kind of the topics.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Those are the possibilities.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Those are the possible ideas we'll be discussing by looking into these articles. But definitely, Communities of practice is something that some of you may be in, many of you, unless you live in Canada, where it does seem they are incredibly popular, because, spoiler alert, I am in what I would consider two communities of practice. One's a little bit more around professional goals in the school district I work, and my two other members totally blew me off today. So I'm a little mad at my community practice right now. I also told them I was going to be 15 minutes late, so it's not like I'm without blame, but I at least showed up to the zoom that no one Elston. And then the other community of practice I'm in, I believe was originated, I think, by a number of awesome Canadian BCPAs, as well as some other folks from around the US of A. But it definitely has a big contingent of Canadian BCBAs. So there's something about Canada. You're awesome. And I think you get Communities of Practice America. We'll talk about some barriers as to why maybe you don't care about communities of practice as much. Spoiler alert. You got a lot of problems. Get over yourself also.

[Jackie McDonald]

Well, I think most of the time, communities of practice came out of a need, right?

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yep.

[Jackie McDonald]

So in Ontario, where these BCBAs work, there's actually not a lot of behavior analytic support and services. Right. And so in order for them to get to a conference, they have to fly the United States. Right?

[Robert Perry Crews]

That's not fair.

[Jackie McDonald]

I mean, they do have like a few. Right. But it's.

[Diana Perry Crews]

You have the Stone Soup conference.

[Jackie McDonald]

Right? You have the Stone Soup. But you know, in 2020 you didn't have many options. And so I think communities of practice really stemmed out of the need. And can I. Are we. We're not there yet, but I was

[Robert Perry Crews]

gonna say I thought it was cuz Canadians are like super nice people and they just naturally can get together and not fight about who's in charge.

[Jackie McDonald]

That's true. But when we talk about community of practice, how they originated. Can I tell the photocopier repairman story? Because it's my most favorite, I gotta

[Robert Perry Crews]

say, I feel like the original where did Communities of Practice come from Story. Every article had a different group that Leave and Wagner, who are the original, you know, kind of people to write on the idea back in the early 90s. It's like every article is like they were actually studying this rando group of professionals and it like changes or in

[Jackie McDonald]

1996, studied a specific group of professionals.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So there were a couple of those. But. Yeah, why don't we start. Why don't we start there? So what are the origins of communities of practice and what exactly are they? Because if you're like, oh, I have a lot of meetings with people that ain't necessarily a community of practice. So. Jaggy, if you want to start the origin story.

[Jackie McDonald]

I do. The one I know.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I mean, there's so many. It's like a mythical tale.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah. So the community. Communities of practice. The idea of communities of practice didn't actually come from behavior analysis. Surprise, surprise.

[Robert Perry Crews]

We only got one article on it.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah. So it came from outside, usually social sciences. And it was. It's an informal group. Right. Where people of the same common interest can come together and talk about their common interests and get feedback and tips. And it should be informal, so there shouldn't be someone leading it. You shouldn't have to go to it.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, we'll talk about what needs to be. It's not exactly a leader in the sense of a boss of the.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yes. Right. And so another thing that I wanted to bring up is the origin story. So the one I know or 1996 was looking at the vocational skills or abilities or how they can problem solve problem solving, vocational skills with photocopier repair men.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I have heard that. I have heard that as one of the origins.

[Jackie McDonald]

And my most favorite part of it is that they were informally meeting at a McDonald's for breakfast.

[Diana Perry Crews]

You know, you gotta get that egg McMuffin.

[Jackie McDonald]

You gotta get that egg McMuffin. And you know, if you've ever been to McDonald's in the morning, that's where they are. I see em.

[Robert Perry Crews]

The photocopier repairman.

[Jackie McDonald]

The photocopier repairman with their coffees.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah. Used to get hash browns, little pancakes.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yes.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And a styrofoam thing. I don't know if that's going to go on.

[Jackie McDonald]

French toast sticks. I used to get those in high school.

[Robert Perry Crews]

It was Burger King, I think.

[Jackie McDonald]

Oh, it might have been. I worked at Burger King. Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Jackie worked at Burger King.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Wow.

[Jackie McDonald]

So I know about Burger King.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Get a big cheese sandwich and a French toast st. And their hash browns. That's like.

[Jackie McDonald]

But. And so I just got laid off, so. Or not now it's very expensive, so. Or 1996.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah. Treat yourself. You just got laid off.

[Jackie McDonald]

Studied, I guess. Studied for time to have a heart attack. Studied photocopy impairment and noticed that when they had these communities of practice where they got together at McDonald's every morning and talked about the challenges that they were having, that they were actually better at their jobs and. And saved over $1 million for the company.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Poorly defined as to where they got the million dollars. But there was. There was a. There was a saving and a savings.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah, savings. It wasn't like they got estimated at. Right. Because like, I bet. I bet it was savings in, like, labor and like time. Right. Because if someone's like, oh, yeah, I had that problem yesterday. Here's how you fix it, then you don't have to go through the rigmarole of trying to fix it. So anyway, I just love that. And I just love that that is, you know, some guys that are just like, let's make our jobs easier.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Started a revolution and communities of practice started. In the. One of the other stories I saw, and this was in the. The Hennan article again, citing Lee and Wegner, who sort of were the first people to write up this idea of communities of practice. It definitely was trades in which communities of practice kind of first formed. They mentioned West African tailors, though. I don't know any more about that story. That that's the only place I've seen that is like their original one. And we're not talking about that original article, but it really comes back to the idea of trades and this very organic meeting of the minds. People getting together to solve meaningful problems as a group, usually with kind of a horizontal hierarchy. So all individuals who are at the same level, maybe not the same roles, but the same level of knowledge, usually, or at least similar levels of knowledge. Some people are going to be more expert in terms of length of time, but not expert in the sense of, say, like, if you all were like, telling your students, let's get together for McDonald's and have a community of practice, that wouldn't be a community of practice, because there's an inherent power dynamic in that you've ordered your students to come get Egg McMuffins with you and then listen to you probably talk about what,

[Diana Perry Crews]

you know, Visual inspection of data. Yeah, yeah.

[Robert Perry Crews]

And they're just supposed to sit there and listen to your sage on the stage. Ness of the whole thing. Not that that's how you teach. I'm just, just joking around. This community of practice idea moved from tradespeople into business organizations and into the medical field. And from there kind of jumped into behavior analysis in an article that we know of. I'm sure other groups have started communities of practice. So what makes a community of practice versus anything else? There's three elements that Wagner described in 2002. First, the community of practice has to have a domain, which means a subject in which everyone is interested in continuing to learn and discuss. It needs to have a community. Hey, you definitely need that. But that really just means it needs to be a social group. There needs to be relationship among the members that is, again, not necessarily hierarchical. It's more about, we're choosing to hang out with these people pretty much. And then there needs to be some sort of a common practice. And that's pretty broad in terms of it should have some sort of, like, idea frameworks. It should have some tools that are similar, some language and jargon that's similar, documentation or study guides that are similar. And then I love that the idea of stories that everybody could share. Like if you're telling a story about copier repair and I'm telling a story about, like, a client who's having trouble learning phonics. Those are interesting stories. And we might be having a nice time at a party, but we're not going to help each other out very much because those aren't really related. They're. They're lacking the domain. They're lacking a practice commonality.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah. And what's that called when you have two lines that never.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Lines?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah. Maybe skew. What is skew? Think skew. They eventually cross. So these are parallel lines. Parallel lines of practice.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yep.

[Diana Perry Crews]

But within a community of practice, everyone is there to learn from one another. That's basically what a community of practice is. You're learning from one another.

[Robert Perry Crews]

But you can't write a journal article unless you give three fancy sounding domains.

[Diana Perry Crews]

So within this community of practice, it'll be a community that practices some domain. Yeah, I get that. Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I mean, yeah, it does pretty much.

[Jackie McDonald]

And my. I wanted to bring in. My study described how it is created, how the stages, which I love. It's like number. I'm going to. Hold on. I'm going to get.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Before you get to the stages, though.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Well, I just want to say one other thing.

[Robert Perry Crews]

You can.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Okay. Is that I feel like this is different than a lot of the research that we review. Right. Because it's. There's a lot of fluffiness to this. So I feel like it's a little bit like a big piece of cotton candy that you have like pinned to a bulletin board with a few little push pins. And those push pins are the data.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah, we. There's so much.

[Diana Perry Crews]

It's so fluffy.

[Jackie McDonald]

This is right for data.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Robert Perry Crews]

But most of these studies are. Here's the thing we did. Here's a tiny bit of data. Here's exactly. For studies people should do.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Exactly. And my study has so much data, but most of it is not behavioral.

[Robert Perry Crews]

No, mine is a lot. But it's a lot of qualitative data.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Jackie McDonald]

Mine is group design. But what I think though is that this would be. I'm going to put this on my board. I'm now putting all my ideas on my board.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Is it a board of cotton candy?

[Jackie McDonald]

It's a board of cotton candy. And I write it with my tongue so that it's all sticky. That this is ripe for behavior analysts to discuss.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Oh yeah, no, it's highly applicable.

[Jackie McDonald]

There's so many questions that we could ask.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Jackie McDonald]

Just saying.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah. A challenge in this. And as we talk about the articles, I'm guessing everyone's gonna end this episode with like a warm fuzzy vibe of like. Yeah, I love this, but I feel like gamification hard. Was it? Well, what do you mean it's hard?

[Jackie McDonald]

It's gonna be. It's hard to establish and maintain it.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Oh, but I mean, everyone loves the idea of.

[Jackie McDonald]

Oh yes, I do.

[Robert Perry Crews]

And I think it's a little bit like gamification that everyone's like, that makes perfect sense. Of course. That's a real thing. And then everyone's like, oh, no one studied that. We just sort of assumed it sounded great and just kept doing it and hoped for the best. Whoopsie doodles. And so it is also a little bit hard to study quantitatively unlike impossible,

[Diana Perry Crews]

unlike amphication, which is very difficult to set up. I don't, I don't really see communities of practice of being that difficult to set up, nor do I see it as being that difficult to collect quantitative data.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Tell the people who love my meeting. It's not hard to set up. I'm a bad facilitator and I. I'm doing the podcast. I'm a fraud.

[Jackie McDonald]

All right, can I tell you the five stages?

[Robert Perry Crews]

I do want to say one more thing. I never got to. And it was just the idea that one of the benefits, and I think why people like communities of practice, too, is that it isn't a. It isn't the same as, say, like, I go to a lot of conferences or I read a lot of articles. The goal is really the discussion, sharing and use of the knowledge. So you're joining a community practice because you have some sort of a problem or series of problems, and you're like, I want to get better at doing jobs.

[Jackie McDonald]

Not.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I just love learning about facts in my field. So if you're getting together, it's to solve some sort of a project in relevant context. So it's all about the meaningful context. And as we'll get into, one of the reasons I think people speak so highly of them is that when you're solving problems in context, there's a better chance that you use the information, maintain the information, share the information excitedly because it's meaningful beyond just. It's fun to learn. Which we agree. But we do a podcast every week about this stuff. So of course, we just love learning for the sake of learning.

[Jackie McDonald]

All right, now can I tell you the.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Wait, I won't. No. Yes.

[Jackie McDonald]

Okay. Because I just think it's funny. So they're like, there are five stages when you're creating communities of practice. My. The last one is my most favorite. The first one is called the potential stage, where a group of people get together and they think, hey, wouldn't it be neat? We have this common interest. Should we meet and talk about it?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Number one.

[Jackie McDonald]

Number two, the coalescing. Coalescing stage.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Okay.

[Jackie McDonald]

Where you're going to negotiate what the structure of the group is going to be, what the function of the group is, the how many, how, when, when are you going to meet, where you're going to meet, all of the logistics. Then we come into the active phase, where we're actively doing things, right?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Activation.

[Jackie McDonald]

Activation phase. Then, oh, guys, we've. We've come down. We're hitting. We're hitting the lower other Side of the hill. Now we're at the dispersing stage. It's equally as important, but you don't need as much. And then we come to my most favorite, the memorial, or the. I can't say this word, memorial.

[Diana Perry Crews]

What is it?

[Jackie McDonald]

Memorable. That's what it is. I always screw that up. The memorable stage where the community of practice is no longer occurring because it doesn't need to, but people remember it fondly. Isn't that funny?

[Diana Perry Crews]

You can still be friends. That's right.

[Jackie McDonald]

You can still be friends. You just no longer need your community of practice because you solved all your problems.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

You've learned everything there is to know

[Jackie McDonald]

and you think fondly of it.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I just love that we talk about these stages. We talked about, you know, the three components of a community practice. But at the end of the day, the definition of what your community practice looks like is going to be very fuzzy. How long are each of those phases? Who is in there? Do you have a facilitator? Do they change every week? Are you bringing in invited speakers? Or are you just sort of talking about the problems? What's your agenda look like? And. And even, you know, some. Some folks would say this is not a community of practice. And I would agree by the definitions laid out, but you might even have a community of practice that your organization decided should exist and they've set it up themselves. I think most people say that doesn't count as a community of practice because there's a hierarchy there and you have to do it. You have to do it. Yeah, there's an amount of experts and apprentices they often talk about. So the idea of people who are newer in their career, people who've been in the career longer, however, there's not anyone who has authority over any other person. The facilitator, at best would just be the person who sent out the agenda based on what people wanted to talk about the next time. And if you wanted to have someone come in who's an expert to share information to everyone in the group, they would, you know, organize that. But that's about as far as, you know, leadership goes for the community of practice. So that's kind of generally what a community of practice is. Let's talk a little bit about what they look like in behavior analysis and then talk a little bit about whether they do anything of value. They do, but we'll get into some details about that. But before then, we're going to take a little community of practice break, because that's what we like to do here. In our little community. We'll be right back.

[Jackie McDonald]

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[Diana Perry Crews]

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[Jackie McDonald]

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[Diana Perry Crews]

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[Jackie McDonald]

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[Diana Perry Crews]

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[Diana Perry Crews]

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[Jackie McDonald]

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[Diana Perry Crews]

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[Jackie McDonald]

Edu Again, that's www.regiscollege.edu regiscollege.edu. one more time, www.regiscollege.edu.

[Diana Perry Crews]

see you there. Bye.

[Robert Perry Crews]

And we are back talking all about communities of practice. But before we do, I want to remind our listeners that ABA InsideTrack is ACE and Quaba approved. And by listening, you're able to earn one learning credit. All you need to do is finish listening to the show, then go to our website, abainsidetrack.com or click the link in your podcast player to be whisked away to the page for this episode. There you're going to need to. You'll have access to our transcript, a slideshow, links to the articles. But you're going to need to enter some information, if you would like, a CE and that information includes taking a little quiz. So listen closely and knowing two secret code words. The first of those code words is Texas. T, E, X, A, S. Texas. It's a giant state here in the United States of America. Do they have communities of practice? It's real big. They must have some. And they're probably bigger than yours because it's Texas.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Everything's bigger in Texas, even communities of practice.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Texas. All right, and now we're back. So when we left off, we talked about what a community of practice generally is. But let's talk about it in the microcosm of the behavior analytic field. Jackie, why don't you take the lead on Bush and friends?

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah. So Bush and colleagues. I wrote on the top of the notes, I have to love the Canadians, right? Because, number one, I love that the Canadians are writing about community of practice. And also at the bottom of this article, there's some French. There's a French paragraph.

[Robert Perry Crews]

You need your French disclaimer.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Mine has French in it too.

[Jackie McDonald]

I love that. You're like, here's a quick French. So if you can't read English, here it is. Because it's in the Canadian journal. Okay. So my study wants to look at communities of practice. Are they beneficial? Right. And so this is on in Ontario and the genesis, I love that word. The genesis of this community of practice came from a multi agency training where many people got together and they did a pyramidal training. I love that. And then after that they're like, hey, this was really helpful, let's get together as a group and we meet. And they met throughout the year for over three years, which is a long time for a community of practice to exist, which is really cool. And so these authors either were part of the communities of practice or found out about it and they're like, oh, I wonder, I'm going to do some, some preliminary work to see if this is actually effective. So they handed out a survey to 86 of the professionals that were included in the professional practice and they asked them a variety of questions such as age, their sex, their practice, years of experience, certification level, education level. They asked them if they agreed that the community of practice was effective, did it lead to improvements in their quality of practice, does it help build relationship and did it increase the knowledge of their subject matter? So that's the first thing that they did the survey. Right. So sadly, only a few people took it. The survey, I think 27 communities of practice. Yeah, 26 people took the survey. Informal responses Most of the people that took the survey were female, 20 to 40 years old, had six to 10 years of experience with 83% being credentialed by the B. 20% were undergraduates, had an undergraduate degree, 46% had a master's degree and 10% had a doctoral degree. One thing I will note about their community of practice is they do say you need a wide variety of experience levels and they have that. So that's nice, that's good. Right? For them. And so that was what they found. Everyone that was part of the community of practice generally agreed that, that they really liked the community of practice. Right. So they have this nice little graph where they survey. They surveyed everyone. Right. And overall people strongly agreed across all those things that it was helpful, that they learned a lot. Except for it looks like like one person said they strongly disagree.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Wow.

[Jackie McDonald]

And when there's all things.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Maybe they filled it out wrong.

[Jackie McDonald]

That's what I was thinking. Like, why do you come then? Because you don't have to. Right? And it's the first question, right? Is it relevant? Is it relevant? I like, strongly disagree. So I'm wondering if that was like a miss. Like a oops.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I remember they just kept throwing out topics for next time and everyone's like, we don't want to do that topic, Gerald. And he's, I hate this community.

[Jackie McDonald]

And so mostly was strongly agree and agree. There was a few indifference. But I mean, again, they don't have to come. So that was interesting. And then I think the second part of the study, which I think is more interesting is they sampled what it looked like to be part of the community of practice. So they attended four meetings throughout the year. One on publication, one on. Well, two on graphing. Because a lot of Diana was there. Diana was there. The first graphing was scheduled, and then a lot of people couldn't come, but they really wanted to come. So they made a second meeting exactly the same as the first meeting. And then the other one was behavior support plan. So how it worked in these, they establish a time and a place. The place was usually where somebody worked, and it was during work hours. In the afternoon, they would all. There was like a moderator who invited everyone. And then someone said, hey, what do you want to talk about? And then people would bring it back and then they would sign someone to provide some workshop materials. And then after that workshop material was presented, then that was time for people to talk, give their feedback, ask questions and do some work. So one thing I think when I was. Think when I was reading this and like thinking about how communities of practice are different than conferences is that there's actual work happening.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Jackie McDonald]

When you're at conference, you're just sitting and listening and being like, oh, what am I going to do when I get home?

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah, you maybe take some notes. And you're like, I'm going to do that later.

[Jackie McDonald]

Right. But here you're like, I'm going to bring like, for the behavior support plan, I'm going to bring a behavior support plan. And after they talk about that section, I'm going to get some time to fix it. And I really love that.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

It reminded me a little bit. This study, I think, does just an excellent job of laying out what could your community of practice look like in terms of actionable steps. Reminded me of when we read street data a couple of years back when the teachers would get together and do kind of that goldfish where it's like teacher gets together, says, I have a problem, and then they sit in the middle and everyone just sort of throws out ideas and thoughts and there's some back and forth there. I'm surprised there's not more discussion or research on teacher education and community practice. I found some, but it was very.

[Jackie McDonald]

Well, maybe we do that.

[Robert Perry Crews]

It was, it was a little too like, let's talk about the theories of learning in this very vague way. So I didn't think they'd be good for this episode.

[Jackie McDonald]

Well, anyway, yeah. So what they measured here, which is not necessarily behavior analytic, but that's okay, is they did pre test scores and post test scores of individuals that attended each of these meetings. They had IOA of those. They were generally good, which I love. And they measured to see whether they learned anything.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I wish this study feels like one of those studies of this could have been about two or three different studies. I don't know what good. Good for you for jamming it all into one place. But just the. What does it look like to have a community of practice feels like its own study. And then to have the pre post test based on both knowledge skill checks really like they're trying to knock it out of the park. And one.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah. And they did. I think the only thing I wish they did, which maybe we'll replicate someday, is they don't have individual scores. Right. And so that would be nice. And they didn't like go and check to see if it changed in like the natural setting, but they did report that most everyone did better on the post test and the pre test. Right. And so their recommendations are that communities of practice could be a socially valid way to gain professional development. But I love that they're like, but it shouldn't take the place of bst. But to be fair, it's almost like they were doing BST within the community of practice. Right. Because they were giving instructions, they had handout. They were like practicing.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Jackie McDonald]

So I don't how much better would

[Robert Perry Crews]

BST be if the person being trained was like, come on, I want to learn this as fast as possible. Show me what to do. Let me try again. Like, you know, you always get that one person in a training who's like gung ho to do everything. And then you get the people who are like, oh, I hope they don't call on me.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

This is bst. I hope this is based and I'm checking my phone. And the person who's like trying let me do it again and again. Like that person, you know is going to have the skill, if not to total fluency, at least some level of mastery.

[Jackie McDonald]

So I just, I like that. That was like, they were like, well, we don't, we don't want to say that BST is not good. But I could say, hey, what you could have said is BST could be incorporated in this. But I do think what they mentioned too, that it is kind of a challenge for a community practice to be set up and maintained. Right. Because you aren't getting paid for this. Right. And you aren't.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Or maybe you're getting paid for maybe, but unlikely. It's a requirement. It's not one of the four things.

[Jackie McDonald]

Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

They added a fourth must be paid.

[Jackie McDonald]

Right. And people don't have to come. Right. So making sure that you're staying consistent enough with what people really want to have them come, I think would be hard. Like time seems like the most big, big constraint. Right. Because who's got time? So. But I love the idea and I want to do something with this.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Jackie McDonald]

Put it on my blackboard. It's my candy, my cotton candy board.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So we know that at least this one community of practice did demonstrate knowledge sharing and knowledge growth through entry into the community of practice. Did it lend itself to better practice later on? We're not sure. So let's look at some more studies, because one study is never enough and see what are some of the other factors that may play into why communities of practice do, or maybe do not help with knowledge gaining and skill gaining. So we're going to talk about the, the Hennine article looking at community health workers. And I think this was a fun topic. Not because I meant to do this, but we were able to get a real international view of communities of practice. Do we have an American. I don't think we have an American community of practice. We don't in the whole episode. So.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Wow.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I know. So this study actually took place in Kampala, Uganda, with healthcare workers or community healthcare workers, because one of the challenges in a lot of developing countries is having enough staff who have been to a certain level of school, certain amount of training, specifically medical workers. So there's a real, there's a real kind of leaning on these community health workers who are people who don't have a lot of professional education and training. And when they are trained, it's sort of, you know, very specific roles that they're going to play. Specifically these community healthcare workers. We're doing a lot with contact tracing and testing around tuberculosis now one might say, just get a bunch of doctors and nurses to do that. There aren't enough doctors and nurses in the world. There certainly aren't enough in Uganda, meaning we need to count on other health care workers to pick up a lot of the slack. But those are usually going to be people who just don't get as much say in how services get done. They don't get paid a lot potentially. They're just asked to do a job and then sort of expected to do the job. So it was very exciting to see that a group that, you know, it's, it's going to come out in the results, felt very underappreciated to start and way less so when it ended to become members of a community of practice. Now, unlike the, well, I guess similar to the Ontario group, this community of practice really did start from the researchers coming to do a training, having a discussion with the community healthcare workers and saying, hey, why don't we, you know, here's some suggestions. One of them is, why don't you start a community of practice? Pretty much, they just sort of wanted to have them come together. The domain was going to be working on skills related to contact investigation for tuberculosis. The community was going to be the group of community health care workers who were going to get together weekly and the practice was getting feedback on their performance and working together and talking about things that they learned on the job that they wanted to share with the other employees. So every week they had a new leader from the participants who served as chairperson for the next one. They lead the discussion. The researchers were present. So this is a little different than some communities of practice in that the researchers who then published were there to help with delivery of feedback. So they kind of were like the expert speakers every week they would sort of share feedback on the forms that the community health care workers had taken related to tb contact investigations, procedures, you know, how many cases they'd done, that kind of information. So again, not, not important for behavior analysts to know exactly how the work they were doing is going. But it was direct feedback was always a component from the researcher in. Every time they get together, they have a. They'd have the supervision and feedback component and then the researchers would be there for any problem solving. The facilitator would help support kind of each other's discussion, brainstorming improvements in their contact investigation procedures. And that was kind of, you know, what it looked like from moment to moment. Their first meeting, they did a lot of didactic discussion. The facilitator sort of here's what a community of practice is. Here's usually best practices for engaging in the community, doing the work that you're doing. So kind of the expert speaker in that situation. But in the future, the members themselves would create the agenda other than that feedback piece and that sharing information piece that always kind of was a part of it from the researchers. And they sort of looked. One of the authors would sort of take notes during the meetings, sort of, you know, what was in the agenda, what were the interactions in tone like. And then they did some interviews with the members, you know, throughout the process to kind of do qualitative study. So again, they would do sort of like we've seen in some other qualitative studies we've discussed. They would look at kind of, you know, what were the words and phrases that the participants would share in those interviews until they sort of hit that threshold of all right, we're not hearing any new phrases. And then they would put them and kind of match the words they said to behavior kind of change technology terms that they had a big old table of, as well as kind of intervention functions. So the examples of what that kind of behavior change language would be with things like did they talk about self monitoring procedures, feedback procedures, setting goals, understanding that your goal and your current performance are different, talking about problem solving, social support, social comparison. So hey, you're doing that, but I'm not doing that kind of situations, changes in their social environment, any level of instruction. And then was there any discussion of how individuals identity changed because of the behaviors that they now could engage in. When they talked about intervention functions, they had these kind of forms. One was enablement, which pretty much is the equivalent of getting rid of barriers to skills modeling, which we all know, environmental restructuring. So setting things up in such a way to increase some of these other behaviors, allowing them to occur, training function and then an education function. Education being more about learning, you know, the ski, you know, learning specific skills versus gaining knowledge around the skills. And they saw, you know, the main components that kept coming up in their, in their discussions in the qualitative research as change agents were the feedback reports, having collaborative improvement meetings, having real time communication among the members. Some of the didactic education sessions, which again may change from group to group. This group specifically did not get a lot of training and did not necessarily have an educational background in medicine before they took control.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right?

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah, that's not, that's not a value. That's just where, where they are, there's not as much opportunity for that level of training potentially and then having the clinic wide staff meetings, which seems weird that a staff meeting would be something that they liked. But one of the reasons they really liked some of the staff meetings is because a, it gave them a chance to, you know, get all of the information that they were learning, to share feedback. But they felt it was collaborative and they got a chance to meet with like the clinic leaders and the medical doctors. So they really did have an increased sense of, I don't know if self efficacy is quite the right word, but that they were valued by other members of the medical team who had more training and background in medicine. So they felt much more appreciated in the roles they were doing. Which again, if you feel like I'm good at my job and other people appreciate me, you typically are more motivated to engage in continued practice growth rather than nobody cares what I do, so why should I care what I do? Sort of, sort of attitudes which no one wants to be in.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And maybe there are snacks.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I. They didn't mention snacks as something that. I think they mentioned sex somewhere, but I can't remember where now. But I don't think that turned out to be one of the big reasons

[Diana Perry Crews]

the, the intervention was, I don't know, they should reevaluate.

[Robert Perry Crews]

You know, we have some other articles to do it, so I won't go into, you know, all the levels of details. But again, it was nice to get. They loved getting reminders about what they should be doing and how to do it. They loved getting together with other people to talk about what was and wasn't working. They loved just being able to communicate with other people and actually learned that they could get into a WhatsApp group. So they were able to keep their communication going outside of the communities of practice meeting. They found that very helpful. They loved the chance to talk with their experienced clinical staff and they just loved having big meetings where they could get together and discuss how they were contributing to the ongoing challenges of supporting individuals with tb.

[Jackie McDonald]

You know, it'd be really interesting to look at this study and then look at just the effects of the community. Yeah, Just having a time.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yes.

[Jackie McDonald]

Right. Versus yeah. Right.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah. People just want to be together, talk to each other and be heard. Yeah.

[Robert Perry Crews]

And it doesn't necessarily. I mean, this one was pretty formal. And again, one of the limitations they bring up was we kind of made this community of practice ourselves as the researchers. So is this a true community of practice in that regard? Clearly it had a lot of benefit to the community health workers. But how much do you need someone who's sort of an authority figure sort of being present. They weren't in charge of any of the meetings outside of the role they were given of. We're going to share feedback, we're going to share this information on your performance and, and we all agree that's going to be a part of our agenda. Otherwise you're in charge of what you want to talk about, you know. However, that's not how every community practice is going to start. Most of them are going to be much more organic and there won't be some sort of researcher in the back telling you best community to practice practice. But again, a lot of factors in there that were noted to be helpful. Let's talk a little bit more though. Diana, can you. Let's talk about the Barwick. You'll kind of lead our discussion there. Because the other question is everyone felt better, everyone liked the skill. We know that at least with the behavior analysts as well. We've got one other group that said now I'm better at some of these skills and certainly the feedback they received, I think their performance on the job improved. But really the communities of practice help us learn to use evidence based practice any better or is it just nice and we feel better about ourselves?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah, so that was kind of the question that the Barwick et al article was hoping to give.

[Robert Perry Crews]

That was my why I did that segue.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I know. Yes. So they say, you know, even though we all agree that we should be doing evidence based practice, to be honest, it is harder for people to change their practices than you might think. So what we know is demonstrated as best practice in research does not always get implemented in clinical practice. And we might need to change the ways that we're teaching folks to implement evidence based practice in order to make it like more directly related to the practice environment and situated, as they said, within the community of learners. So if we're just like espousing things that we're hoping practitioners take up that really may not be doing full service to this and we may find that there are fewer practices that make fewer research based practice that makes their way into actual clinical practice than would really be recommended. So they say communities of practice might help us in this regard because they're going to assist in advancing the group's knowledge rather than just one individual person's knowledge at a time. And they applied the community of practice model to mental health professionals specifically. So this is like fairly close, I would say in terms of a population as for the behavior analysts. So this is another good model for us to look at now they just so happen to be conducting this in Ontario and the home of communities to practice. No, no, in Ontario I'm going to tell you. They all the mental health organizations have this client outcome database that they use called Child Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale or kaphas. And everyone is supposed to get training on using kaphas but they were finding that people really weren't getting as much training as they should and so therefore it wasn't getting used to the same degree that it should be. And they said, ah, this is a perfect opportunity for us to put a community of practice into place in various health organizations and then do a comparison study to see does you using a community of practice increase the use of the COFAS system.

[Jackie McDonald]

Okay, makes sense, yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

So we actually have like a super objective measure that we can then do a comparison on. But they weren't going to stop there. Oh no, they weren't just going to measure. Did people use the COFFICE tool? Oh my goodness. There are so many other things that they are going to measure and I will tell you about those as soon as I tell you about these participants. So they reached out across Ontario to children's mental health professional organizations. They invited 14 to participate, six accepted and therefore they had three organizations which had 18 participants across the three places of work that were in the communities of practice group. And then they had three organizations. This one had 19 participants who were in the practice as usual or the POW group. And those were presumably randomly assigned. I'm not exactly sure if they told us. You know, to me there is also like the factor that maybe the organization structure and makeup and culture was different across the group. So that's a teensy bit of a confound to me. But that was how they decided to do it. So the community of practice or the cop group met every two months over 11 months. So they met six times. There was a trainer there like you said, Rob, the Kophis trainer. And the this was in comparison to the practice as usual group who didn't not have meetings or a trainer but both had access to like the, the tool because it was available to everybody. Right. So when the community, community of practice group met they had a nice long discussion. It was very free flowing as far as I could tell. There was much discussion of feelings. They talked about the rationale for coming to the group. They did learn about the tool so there was some instruction included here. But they reviewed their roles as community members and why it was important to be part of the community. And then, and this was Stressed they had a productive inquiry process.

[Jackie McDonald]

Good.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Glad it was not the idea that someone was there to just give them all the answers, but rather people would bring up things that they were maybe concerned about or that had been challenging for them. And then the group discussed those issues, presumably in detail. There was much conversation that was produced. Ideas were compared, personal experiences were shared such that the members of the group felt supported and perhaps even were given some ideas on how to move forward. Okay, so that happened. And then at the beginning, before the groups in the middle. So after like four months, I think they said, or maybe six months. Sorry. And then at the end everyone was giving about a gazillion questionnaires. This included the Practice Change questionnaire which was 10 questions rating self reported change on best practice behaviors using the CAFAs, such as, has your clinical interviewing become more comprehensive? Have you used the treatment plan? Have you provided a family with a copy? Has use of CAFAS improved your confidence? Those are just examples. The actual objective measure that we discussed before, which is the number of times the COFAS was used in practice and they got that straight from the database. They didn't have to do anything for that one. They also were asked questions about the measure of their content knowledge. So the CAFES knowledge questionnaire, this was 22 true or false questions related to the CAFAS. So those were presumably pretty objective as well. Then they measured a measure of satisfaction with supports. This was the CAFAS supports questionnaire and it measured 20 questions rating their satisfaction with the info available on the CAFAS website, the trainings that were available from staff, the support from the organization, etc. They were asked about the views on the use of implementation supports. This was also the COFAS support questionnaire. But these were yes, no, 20 yes, no questions about things like booster trainings, regional meetings, training, the trainer sessions, etc. They asked them about a measure for readiness for change. This was the modified Organizational Readiness for Change scale. Here there were 115 items that they were asked about. No. Into the categories of motivation, resources, staff attributes and climate.

[Jackie McDonald]

That's too much. Yeah, that's too many questions.

[Diana Perry Crews]

So now we have so much.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah. And too many questions.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And it was all group design data.

[Jackie McDonald]

Well, of course it was.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I'm just going to tell you about what you probably want to know.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Okay. What I assume you want to know is that our communities of practice group utilize the COFAS rating system way more at outcome time than the practice as usual group. So this group used it 152 times. And the other group used it 65 times. They also asked them about their satisfaction with the implementation supports communities of practice group much higher. They rated it at 20 out of whatever the scale was and the other group rated it at 11 out of that scale.

[Jackie McDonald]

Wow. Yep.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And then what else might you want to know about the they. There were significant changes in the practice change. So they felt like they changed their practice more, far more for the communities of practice group than the practice as usual group. Their knowledge of the Kaphas afterwards was higher. 14 score of 14 compared to 10. Yeah. And that might be what you want to know from. From those outcome data. Yeah.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Oh, yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

So if you would like to compare conducting a communities of practice to doing nothing.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, nothing. They still. They had access to. They were told, you can use these in pie of information to help you learn to use the coffice.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Fine.

[Robert Perry Crews]

It wasn't like they just like, were like, you need to use the coffice. What's that? We're not telling you.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Okay, fine. Yeah, but what if the other group had just met for an hour six times? We don't know that. We don't know.

[Robert Perry Crews]

No.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

We don't know everything there is to know about communities.

[Diana Perry Crews]

We don't.

[Jackie McDonald]

We don't know. We know very little. We don't know very. We don't know.

[Robert Perry Crews]

This community of practice and the way it was run was better than just telling a bunch of people, here's a new thing you should use. Here's some resources you're more than welcome to use if you so desire. See you in a year.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And they liked it. Yeah. Okay. That's it. That's all I'm gonna say.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Okay.

[Diana Perry Crews]

You want me to try to segue into your article for you?

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

So now that we know about the application of communities of practice across a variety of different settings, it may leave you thinking that this is absolutely a slam dunk way to go. However, there could potentially be some limitations related to communities of practice and Rob's going to review those for us now.

[Robert Perry Crews]

There are some. I think we'll talk about our limitation, our ideas of what limitations might be, and I think those are going to be more in the. In the line of what makes the best communities of practice. How do we know they're working? How would you want to set yours up? Or research is left? Because that's usually where we come from. But Colonel is concerned that there's an existential crisis around.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Holy moly.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I don't know if it's existential. I'm going to say it's an existential crisis.

[Jackie McDonald]

He's going to write. Or they. Because it could be a woman. I shouldn't assume that as a man. Well, they could assume they could write.

[Diana Perry Crews]

That's true. Last name is Junior Colonel Junior.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Only a man would be so angry still.

[Jackie McDonald]

No, no, but I, I love that that he's going to write back. And like Rob, it wasn't an existential crisis.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Just so you know, facts about.

[Jackie McDonald]

And there are concerns.

[Robert Perry Crews]

How about this?

[Jackie McDonald]

No, no, there are concerns. Yeah, right.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Like we love it.

[Jackie McDonald]

And we're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if, if we don't say the limitations, we're, we're giving the readers a disservice.

[Diana Perry Crews]

But also like what is the efficiency of this model?

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah, it doesn't seem efficient. And if you don't have. Right. And if you don't have varying levels of. If you're all novices, you're not going to teach anyone anything. You're like, well, I don't know.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, I don't know. I think those are more like practice questions. Kernow's questions are more ones of can the community of practice survive the post capitalism hellscape we all find ourselves?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Oh man, I want to more along today because this is how he was in 2008.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I mean I, I hope he's not feeling great. He's got a bottle. We should check on him. Think about my communities of practice anyway. No, no. Yeah, let's check on him. So the, the problems he sees for community of practice because he's, he seems to be a big fan of them beyond sort of the more methodological ones that we're going to be talking about in dissemination station would be a real concern at the structural, ecological and cultural level of the organizations in which community of practice might be found. The first challenge he brings up is communities of practice take a lot of time and most businesses don't really care for you to use your time in any way other than one that has a direct financial outcome for the organization.

[Jackie McDonald]

He's not wrong.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So the idea of these improvements may save us $10 million or a million dollars because of our copy repairmen doing community of practice aren't as quantifiable as say, if you're sitting and doing the work that I hired you for, you're able to bill or build or whatever it might be that you're doing. So his statement here, quote, as increased work demands further constrain the time available, they will likely do so at the expense of the effectiveness of communities of practice. So the real concern that businesses, organizations will see communities of practice as like, that's a nice to have, but it ain't something that we're going to do, so deal with it. Employees. And there are times, I think, when the pendulum swings towards the employees saying things like these communities of practice are really good for our feelings of self efficacy. They are great ways for us to learn how to do the job better. There are going to be savings down the road. And then there are swings of the pendulum of I'm going to fire every single one of you if you waste your time on these communities of practice because somebody else will take your job, no problem. So maybe that's going to be a big barrier to communities of practice. The other is the idea that most communities of practice have to exist in an organization and at least in the majority of the western world organizations and well, actually this is going to be true for western and eastern world. A lot of organizations have a very vertical hierarchy where there are different organization charts about who's in charge of whom, who reports to whom, who supervises whom. Right. Whereas a community of practice is really meant to be a horizontal structure. There's not a leader so much as a facilitator. Everyone is equal, even though their knowledge and the skills they bring to the community of practice might be different based on like years of experience, situations, problems they've run into in the past. This one I get a little like, I don't know if this is as big a problem, but Kernow's quote, organizational hierarchies, given their ubiquity, durability and verticality and numerous dimensions at which they are at cross purposes with communities of practice are likely to impede efforts for successful community of practice integration and utilization. Basically, the people who are in charge of these vertical organizations are kind of jerks who like to be in charge of everything. And the idea of a horizontal equality group in part of the organization just generally will make them mad. It's kind of how I took that one. And I don't know if you look at some of the tech bros in charge of things, I might say I don't totally disagree with how some of these places are run. The final one I had a big like, I'd like to see a little bit more research on this one before I get as worried about it as the first two, but it really had to do more with sort of the culture of Western versus Eastern styles of business and in which western styles are often seen as being very individualistic, very logical, a real focus on let's Argue about who's right and only one of us can win with the best idea. Whereas Eastern styles are often seen as being more about let's think about harmony in the group. Let's think about bringing what we know together and look for everybody to be able to win. Communities of practice, you would expect, would do really, really well with that more kind of general Eastern idea of how communities should work together. Whereas in the Western ideal, community of practice could be sort of kneecapped by having somebody be. I'm in charge of this community of practice, and what I want is the thing we're all going to do when this is over. So it may be hard for those of us socialized in a more individualistic community to play nice in the community of practice.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Just shut up for a minute.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I know there's a lot Let somebody else talk on these sorts of different types of, you know, how do different societies work and what do they value? So I know that that does exist in a lot of anthropological, psychological research. However, we also have a lot of Western communities of practice in the research. I haven't seen as much sort of, you know, what. What's the business in Japan or business in China doing in terms of communities of practice. So I have no idea whether this is something that, like, it feels a little like as an undergrad who took a basic class on world cultures, this is where I assume would be a problem. Nocturnal. I like your article just fine, but it does feel a little bit. Show me the data that this is actually a problem, however.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Well, someone has to start the conversation.

[Robert Perry Crews]

You got to start the conversation. And he does by saying, quote, organizations operating in Western societies are likely to be less successful than their Eastern counterparts in capitalizing on the communities of practice approach. Again, I don't know how true that is. I could see communities of practice going better with groups that care more about harmony versus who wins the argument. But I don't know about it as like a Western versus Eastern sort of philosophy type thing. So we'll see. Again, these are all challenges that Kernow suggests. We need more research to look at how well or not well communities of practice look at. And so there's a lot of. There is still a lot we want to learn about communities of practice. So why don't we move into dissemination station and do a little summary and look ahead.

[Jackie McDonald]

We're here.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So I think we all agree, three out of three. Love you, communities practice. Want to be a member of you.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yes, yes, I think you're the best. Want to start one. Want to Join. One can see the benefits of having it.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yes. And we do have research to support that. It can be helpful with evidence based practice uptake. It can be helpful with overall, you know, sense of job improvement. There are some key factors related to sort of self efficacy, being able to get feedback in a regular way. And there's a level of, you know, their organic nature that I think just sounds very appealing to practitioners of which especially in behavior analysis. The vast majority of us are practitioners. Our job is primarily not be the boss. Our job is primarily help people. And we need to keep getting better at that job. And just going to conferences and just getting occasional trainings from the people in our training department may not solve all the problems that we face day to day. So it should be easy to form a community of practice. We have some limitations and we have some methodological questions that we don't know.

[Jackie McDonald]

Mm, we do.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Answers to, I should say. Yeah, we know what the methodological questions are. We don't know the answers to.

[Jackie McDonald]

We probably don't know all of them though.

[Robert Perry Crews]

No, that's true.

[Jackie McDonald]

To be fair, none of us have tried to start a community of practice. I mean you have kind of.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I kind of did and I am a member of a community of practice, but.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Well, we have one at work.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah, I guess you're right. And it is hard. Yeah, it's hard.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Jackie McDonald]

Because there's so many.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Because we're such take charge personalities.

[Jackie McDonald]

Right.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And supposed to like let it like everything's supposed to simmer.

[Jackie McDonald]

I'm not good at simmering.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Jackie McDonald]

And also you're right, we did start one and it's not required and we don't get paid for it. And it's also hard because there's a lot of time competing contingencies.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yes.

[Jackie McDonald]

And I think that's with everyone. Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So yeah, I mean I definitely would love to see more studies looking at the financial uptake. Not because I necessarily always care about that, but because if you're going to make a case, the communities of practice save money. It's hard enough when you actually can show people in charge. Look, look, data. This saves money for them to say I love this as opposed to I just don't like that for reasons. And I'm the boss, so who cares? So I think we need to have kind of a money saving component. Like how did the community of practice membership, the time spent on it that could have been spent just seeing clients, let's say for just a behavior analyst. How could being together for that hour every other week or whatever actually have resulted in monetary gain for the organization.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Well, not everything comes down to the bottom dollar.

[Jackie McDonald]

It shouldn't.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I'm the boss of my organization and I hate communities of practice. Ergo, it does.

[Jackie McDonald]

Yeah, I mean, it's easier to sell it if it's cost effective. Right.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I mean, then we'd also be looking at things like what are there, are there qualities of members of communities of practice that might lend themselves to working for longer periods for leading to evidence based practice uptick more readily because I think like the three of us are not great candidates for start a new community to practice because we're always starting stuff. We do this podcast like every week for 10 years. Like clearly we're very motivated to do things just for the excitement of let's do this thing and learn more about this together.

[Jackie McDonald]

Both of you are better at that than I am. I like to sit a lot. So.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, you come and you bring, you bring the energy. So that's always helpful. Do you need that in the community practice? Maybe. Maybe you don't do.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right.

[Jackie McDonald]

Study. We're just unlocking the study box because,

[Robert Perry Crews]

you know, you could do a free community of practice, but like, how long will it stay? Because the second everyone's like, I gotta pay for babysitting to come to this or like, you know, my car's in the shop, I feel like it'd be a very.

[Jackie McDonald]

Gas is $1 million.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

So I'm in a different community of practice at. At work. And we have been going for like, and we initially we're like, we're all here to kind of like learn together. And we I think did a good job of learning together.

[Jackie McDonald]

My community died.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah. And so we moved, but. But then we were supposed to move into that disbursement phase, right?

[Jackie McDonald]

You didn't.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Right, we didn't because we valued our company amongst the group so much that we really wanted to keep together. So I think that the group kind of like started to take on a different function. And we feel like our work community is so much richer because we have this group and we care about one another. So we've kept it going in that way. And then we've sort of changed like our focus from being a little more inward focused in terms of like learning together and now it's more outward focused where we think about like, what are ways that we can contribute back to our work community via the things that we've learned. And so in that way we've made a lot of resources. We've done trainings for the faculty etc. And I, you know, I like to think that we are contributing toward the almighty dollar in that way and that we're sort of enriching our environment.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Fifty bazillion dollars, Diana.

[Diana Perry Crews]

We're worth a lot.

[Robert Perry Crews]

This is probably saved, I'm sure.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Probably.

[Robert Perry Crews]

No, that sounds great. And again, it's not like, you know, Bush. Bush is. It's a great article, but it's not like you have to have a disbursement or a memory phase. It could go for many, many, many years. I think the assumption is any group that you're not like, necessarily getting paid to be together and is focused around a problem, at some point you'll run out of problems that are important enough to make it, you know, the time commitment you want. But you could go for years and years and years, like, there's no need to have an end to your community of practice. But realistically, it's going to form around a problem. As long as you have time and a problem and a group of people who have similar knowledge to you, maybe more knowledge or less knowledge, but similar kind of a basic background knowledge, you can make a community of practice happen. You're going to need a facilitator. You're going to need someone to sort of say, who's in charge next week? What is on the agenda? You need to have people who are interested in having an agenda. So you need to have those problems and topics people want to hear about. You may need access to experts to sort of come in occasionally to help with some of the educational aspects. Those do seem to be beneficial to communities of practice, but it may not be required.

[Diana Perry Crews]

You know, what's kind of cool in ours is that we read books and then we've been asking the authors to come talk to us and they've all said yes.

[Robert Perry Crews]

That's great.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah. So we've met with multiple authors, Stephen

[Robert Perry Crews]

King, Barbara King, softer, just everyone's coming.

[Diana Perry Crews]

That's pretty cool.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So any other kind of research ideas? I mean, certainly, I think I'm going to go back to we need to have a talk about either the time savings, the money savings. Time is money. So I guess they both go together. That probably needs to be a part of research, even though it is the yucky, gross. I don't care as much personally, part of the research.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I just don't think that is the benefit of the community of practice. Like, those are the, like we are as a field, very focused. Like, I already asked that question. I'm like, what's the efficiency of this like, that's not the draw here. It's not about the efficiency, it's about the community that you're creating and the social validity of that experience. So I think it, we need subjective data to like, fully capture the benefit of communities of practice, but you can learn within them too. So more, more research that shows the value of both. I don't think it is time efficient, but that's not the point.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah, I mean, I, I think the time efficiency might come from the dissemination component of the community of practice. Like, any one of us can probably learn to do a lot on our own faster than we would in a group around one problem. Just because if you're saying, I'm going to learn about this, you get the resources, you read them, you think about it, you write it, you try it yourself, you think about it, you get feedback. Now is your final product and learning better than it would have been if you'd been with the group? Maybe, maybe not. I think the, the ideal of having a community of practice is you get a chance to be getting regular feedback. And I think for a lot of clinicians out there, you're probably focusing on a lot of your work where the only data and feedback you're getting are from your client, maybe from the stakeholders. And that's not necessarily always going to be the feedback that you're looking for to improve your performance, because you may be perfectly capable of doing your discrete trial training. Your client likes you because you're fun, you're great on breaks, parents are seeing progress, so they're going to tell you, whatever you're doing, keep on doing it. But you deep down know, I am not learning to do anything new. I'm just doing what I've always done really well. And at some point that won't be enough. How do I learn more? And you can do it by yourself. But again, the feedback you get may not always be enough to motivate you to continue learning. Because if you can get enough feedback to say you're great at your job over and over again, it is hard to push yourself to continue doing more when a lot of other life's barriers get in the way of your learning journey. No knocks, do you? If you're like, I'm good at what I do and that's all I want to do, and I'm like, laser focused, that awesome. If that's where you want to be, that's fine. But when you want to do more, it can be hard to do it without other people supporting you. So, like, you know what do they say when you want to get good at exercise, go to a gym and join a group, join a club. Because then there's other people to sort of support your engaging in the skill and learning and giving you feedback. You have to give yourself feedback all the time. That can be exhausting. And you can say, I just don't want to do this anymore. So.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah, and accountability.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Group, right? Yeah. But do you know what a group of faculty is called?

[Robert Perry Crews]

Nope.

[Diana Perry Crews]

It's a quagmire. Just kidding. I made that up.

[Jackie McDonald]

I don't get it.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Well, we love communities.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Faculty take forever to.

[Jackie McDonald]

That is also.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Maybe you're just thinking of faculty college.

[Diana Perry Crews]

No, this is specific practice. This is specific specific.

[Robert Perry Crews]

They might be the slow. We should have a race of communities of practice in the business world, in the photocopy repair world, in the behavior analyst world, in the college professor world. Who will come out on top?

[Diana Perry Crews]

Ugandan Taylors.

[Jackie McDonald]

We'll have a field day. Better. We'll have like different physical and mental challenges.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So this is definitely an episode where folks, if you're listening and you are part of a community of practice, you're thinking about starting a community of practice, please do write in and tell us about those experiences. Because really all you need is a space, some time, other people who have the same problem as you have, and you got yourself a community of practice. But have you found it helpful? How long did you stay? Did you last three years? Was it a two month community of practice and then everyone broke up and you only have your memories left behind you and maybe a little evidence based uptick, who knows? There's still a lot of good research here and I think this is a topic we will come back to in the future. Well, now that we've done our dissemination station, let's move on to pairings.

[Diana Perry Crews]

All right, it's time for pairings. Pairings is the part of the show where I tell you about past episodes. You might want to check out if you thought this one was interesting.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I did. What else should I. Wow.

[Diana Perry Crews]

What do you know, Rob? It's your choice. So there we go. We've never talked about communities of practice before or virtually anything that's related to it, but I have pulled a few that I think might be relevant. In episodes 172 and 173, we talked about research to practice and practice to research.

[Jackie McDonald]

By the way, one of my favorite pictures, just so you know.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Oh yeah, we want you to go check that out so you can see what we're talking about.

[Robert Perry Crews]

So clever. I Have no community of practice for this.

[Diana Perry Crews]

I just got to do it by myself, basically. In episode 202, it was actually a. A live via Babbitt student group episode where he talked about changing professional focus. I feel like if you wanted to do that, you could start a community of practice. That's what we're going with there. Episode 255, we talked about scope of comfort with Landria Seals bringing in that

[Jackie McDonald]

one, like, blew my mind for multiple months. Yeah.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Yeah, that's a good one. And then I felt like the way that we approached episode 291, when we discussed ethical scenarios with the how to ABA ladies was kind of like a community of practice. Right. It kind of had that feel to it.

[Robert Perry Crews]

And then don't forget, they're in Canada, so they're just.

[Jackie McDonald]

Oh, my goodness.

[Diana Perry Crews]

That was a very good observation. Wow. I did not know that.

[Robert Perry Crews]

We've been going back and forth if we want to do a Canada vacation this summer, but I think. I think you do. Community practice sealed the deal. We're going to Canada. Hopefully they'll let us in because we're from America. Sorry.

[Diana Perry Crews]

All right. And then Rob referenced the book club street data, so you can read that, too. That was. Or listen to that. You can do both. It's Book Club 12. Those have all been renumbered on the new website. Don't forget to go to the new website, www.abainsidetrack.com. also, in pairings, I like to tell you about a snack that you could enjoy. This snack isn't really related to communities of practice. It's related to the conference that we just went to. But I wanted to mention it, if you guys figure out how to tie it in, you can. But for breakfast, we had this delicious snack. There was, like, a fruit salad, and then they had two delicious toppings on it. And one was called chamoy, and it was a sauce made with pickled apricot. And then the other one was tagine, which is like the seasoning, and it's like chili seasoning with lime and salt. And it. And it was so delicious. And so I've just had it on my mind, and I thought I'd bring it up to you. Sharing this information in this group.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah, but that's not a community practice.

[Diana Perry Crews]

No, not really. But I just wanted you to know.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Okay.

[Jackie McDonald]

Unless we were cooks.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah. Then it would be a good practice.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Then it would be.

[Robert Perry Crews]

But we're not, so it's not.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Okay, fine.

[Robert Perry Crews]

But it was fun. Thank you.

[Diana Perry Crews]

That was pairings. Please enjoy.

[Robert Perry Crews]

All right. Thank you. So much, Diana and all of you out there, thank you very much for listening to this latest episode of ABA Inside Track. We are podcast done. Yeah, I'm. Wow. You get that wee puff. I forget how you wrap up your own show. We want to say thanks so much for listening. We hope you don't forget to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to listen to our show if you haven't already. Like Diana said, you can go to abainsidetrack.com to get learning CES. All sorts of different, you know, supervision, ethics CES. We have our new website. It's a lot easier, I think, to navigate if you just need a certain type of ce, a certain episode. Yeah, those are there that we recommend you listen to every single episode every single week, and then your CES from there.

[Diana Perry Crews]

One other thing. If you are listening to this via an episode that you downloaded to your phone a long time ago, like more than three months ago, the link that is in there, if it's been downloaded to your phone, is going to take you to the old website that's really not functioning very well anymore. Instead of clicking that, Please go to www.abainsidetrack.com and use the search function. You can search either by number or name of the episode. It'll pop right up and you can quote, unquote, enroll in the course.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Fortunately, if you're talking about this episode, the link only goes to one place because we don't update the old website anymore.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Old episodes, People, you know, like, I have stuff downloaded on my phone from like two years ago, Right. If I were to click on the

[Robert Perry Crews]

podcast backlog, I'm going to listen to them all.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Don't worry. Yeah, get to them. But if I. If someone is doing that and they click on an old one, that's the issue. It's taking them to the old website.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Ah, yes, yes. In. In any case, the new website is just abainsidetrack.com, which is the same as the old website. This one just goes to the new website. If you want even more ABA insidetrack content, you can join us on [e-mail] abainsidetrack another website.

[Diana Perry Crews]

And why wouldn't you?

[Robert Perry Crews]

You can go to where you can subscribe at any level, but at the $5 level, you're able to get all of your learning CE. It's all. Sorry. At the $5 level, you're Able to get CES for these listener choice episodes for free. So if you're a $5 or up patron guess what? CE for you and your special fee. Just you get it a week before everyone too so you can hold it over them. If you subscribe at the $10 and up level, you're able to do the same thing for listener choice and our quarterly book club episode. So that's like three CES every season, fall, winter, spring and summer. So that again, that's patreon.com abainsidetrack and you can always email us with any questions or thoughts on your community practice at ABA. InsideTrackmail.com and speaking of CES, you probably want the second secret code word. It's beef. B E E F. What do you not bring to your community of practice? Any beef because you're all friends.

[Jackie McDonald]

Nice.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Yeah. You like that?

[Diana Perry Crews]

I like that.

[Jackie McDonald]

I was like except for jerky.

[Robert Perry Crews]

I mean, you know, if it's a long meeting, you might want something to talk.

[Diana Perry Crews]

Don't be a jerky. Don't bring your beef beef.

[Robert Perry Crews]

Some final thanks thanks to Dr. Jim Carr for recording our intro Outro music, Kyle Sturry for his interstitial music, and Dan Thabit of the podcast Doctors for his amazing editing work. Hopefully he cut out the time I said a bunch of random stuff that wasn't related to the outro. We'll be back next week with another fun filled episode, but until then, keep responding. Bye bye.