ABA on Tap is proud to sit down with Lupe Castañeda (Part 2 of 2):

You can have the best behavior plan in the world and still fail if the classroom doesn’t trust you. Mike and Dan pick up part two with Lupe Castaneda, and get practical about school-based ABA, BCBA leadership in schools, and the messy middle where collaboration meets real-world constraints. We talk through what it looks like when we’re “not the experts” in the family system or the classroom environment, yet we’re brought in because something is already going wrong, and the people in the room may not want change.

From there, we get into the hard stuff most people won’t say out loud: school politics, predetermined placement decisions, and how to protect your staff when they’re doing great work but still getting nitpicked. Lupe shares how he approaches teacher buy-in by building rapport, talking with paraprofessionals, and living the principle of “show me, don’t tell me” rather than being the BCBA in the corner with a laptop. We also explore supervision and mentorship strategies that improve retention, including bi-directional feedback, coaching, and shaping performance instead of punishing mistakes.

We then zoom into tactics for bridging 1:1 ABA into group instruction: small-group DTT, instructional pacing, short learning sprints, contextual fit, and preparing students for natural environments. Along the way we unpack clinical judgment, crisis prevention, and why it matters to teach teams how to think on the fly, especially when the difference between an extinction burst and failed treatment is not obvious to educators. We wrap with burnout prevention, skill diversification, and why staying curious might be the most underrated career strategy in behavior analysis.

If this helped you, subscribe, share it with a school-based BCBA or teacher, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What’s the biggest obstacle you hit when trying to collaborate in schools?

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