How a practice stopped starting every program from a blank page
An ABA practice that standardized its curriculum without making care generic
This is the story of an ABA practice that stopped letting the quality of a treatment plan depend on which BCBA happened to write it. We've kept them anonymous, but the problem they had is one almost every growing practice hits and almost nobody names out loud.
Quality depended on who you got
The practice had good clinicians. That was never the issue. The issue was that each one carried their own curriculum around in their own head, their own spreadsheets, their own folder of goals copied from the last kid who looked similar. Two children with nearly the same profile could end up with programs that shared almost nothing — not because anyone made a clinical decision, but because two different people had started from two different blank pages.
The owner could feel it before she could prove it. A parent would move between clinicians and notice the plan changed character. A new BCBA would take eight weeks to get to the standard the practice was actually capable of, because the standard lived nowhere except in the heads of people too busy to write it down. And when a strong clinician left, so did a chunk of the practice's clinical thinking — permanently.
Frequently asked questions
Doesn't a shared curriculum library make care cookie-cutter?
It's the opposite in practice. A library standardizes the starting point, not the child — clinicians pull a goal in a click and then spend their judgement individualizing it, instead of spending it retyping thinking the practice already had. Private libraries stay available alongside the shared one, so nobody loses their own working space.
How does Wilma know which goals fit a particular client?
She looks at the child in front of you — the assessment, the goals already running, their age and history — and surfaces the fitting candidates from your own library. Goals that aren't appropriate for that child are flagged as not a fit rather than hidden, because a clinician needs to see what was ruled out.
What stops a clinician from changing mastery criteria to make a goal look met?
Mastery criteria lock once data collection on that goal begins. Changing them afterwards is deliberate, carries a plain-language warning, and restarts the mastery clock under the new criteria — so "mastered" means the same thing across the practice and progress stays comparable.
What happens to goals we retire?
Retiring archives them rather than deleting them. They can be restored, and there's a full record of who changed what and when. Teams prune much more willingly once retiring something stops feeling permanent.