Designing Interprofessional Education Experiences to Cultivate Collaborative Repertoires in Graduate Students

Abstract Behavior analysts regularly support clients with complex needs who require consultation and direct services from professionals spanning multiple disciplines. Many of these disciplines have begun to call for a higher level of cooperation and cotreatment in the form of interprofessional collaboration. Effective interprofessional collaboration requires not only specialized expertise within one’s discipline but also skills related to relationship-building, respectful and compassionate communication, and teamwork across disciplines. These skills can be cultivated through deliberate and planful interprofessional education experiences for graduate students that teach collaboration competencies while also preventing the development of disciplinary centrism and bias. There are many possible strategies and considerations for embedding interprofessional education into Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) training programs, and such experiences may vary in size, scope, and cost, as well as other practical features related to feasibility. In this paper, higher education faculty representing multiple disciplines propose a model for creating workshop-style interprofessional educational experiences to seed graduate students’ interprofessional collaboration skills in the provision of services to future clients.