Nurture
&
Nature
Seeds for Growth
Planting Seeds
In looking at improving collaboration across all levels and empowering employees to express their ideas, I took baseline measures across the following actions:
— How often do I seek out feedback about our clinical programs and my performance? Baseline: 0 occurrences per week
— How often do I seek out ideas from others when engaging in clinical programming? Baseline: 0 occurrences per week
Although I have a strong clinical vision for most cases that the practice takes on, I was a little shocked at the 0.
This is step two of our experiment in using OBM and the principles of the book The 5 Scientific Laws of Life & Leadership to heighten Nurture & Nature’s profile and further develop my leadership skills.
View the previous post in this series, “Checking In with the Stakeholders.”
In looking at improving collaboration across all levels and empowering employees to express their ideas, I took baseline measures across the following actions:
— How often do I seek out feedback about our clinical programs and my performance? Baseline: 0 occurrences per week
— How often do I seek out ideas from others when engaging in clinical programming? Baseline: 0 occurrences per week
Although I have a strong clinical vision for most cases that the practice takes on, I was a little shocked at the 0. Was I really not seeking out valuable information that may be useful in improving clinical performance and clinical outcomes? I found myself too wrapped up in taking data, making observations, directing protocols, and making sure the clinical documentation was on point. There was an immediate realization that these are the goals I want to focus on:
1) Increase the number of occurrences over the course of a week that I seek out feedback about our clinical programs and my performance from the therapists.
2) Increase the number of occurrences over the course of a week that I seek out ideas about clinical programing from the therapists.
For each goal, my target is to reach 7 occurrences or more per week.
I started taking data and made myself a visual that I put on my desk as a reminder. This week I was able to ask for feedback for 4 occurrences and ask for ideas for 3 occurrences.
So, not tremendous growth, but seeds were planted… now I need to nurture the seeds by attending to them, and, most importantly, enjoying the intrinsic rewards of incremental growth and success for the company. My long term and ultimate goal is to boost the score of the staff survey by at least by .5 on average.
A simple, but doable process: Measure where I am at, set the bar where I envisioned myself to be, use a visual reminder, measure and take data, and try to improve upon my performance from one day to the next. I am asking of myself the same thing I ask of my clients: Try your very best every day!
More importantly, I realize that my truly favorite thing in the entire world is watching things grow… and grow as quickly as possible. That is why I love being a behavior analyst... and sneaking off into the garden tor inspiration.
Checking in with the Stakeholders
Step one of our experiment in using OBM and the principles of the book The 5 Scientific Laws of Life & Leadership to heighten Nurture & Nature’s profile and further develop my leadership skills.
This is step one of our experiment in using OBM and the principles of the book The 5 Scientific Laws of Life & Leadership to heighten Nurture & Nature’s profile and further develop my leadership skills.
View the first post in this series, “A New Mission.”
Who in a company is effected by company culture? Everyone, of course, from clients/customers to staff.
As our client relations are strong, we decided to focus primarily on our team. We sent out an anonymous survey asking all staff members to rate their current experiences with various aspects of Nurture & Nature’s culture and leadership on a scale of 1-5 (with “5” equaling “Strongly Agree” and “1” equaling “Strongly Disagree”).
The survey yielded some interesting results, results that will serve as our baseline measures and help us further pinpoint where we are and how we can improve.
After calculating the average rating we received for each question, Denice (Nurture & Nature’s co-owner), conducted an IOA to validate the data. Here are the results:
“The Company is dedicated to diversity and inclusion.” Average Score: 4.6
“I feel safe in my work environment.” Average Score: 4.3
“At my Company, we treat each other with respect.” Average Score: 4.3
“I feel respected by my team.” Average Score: 4.2
“I receive regular kind and constructive feedback from management.” Average Score: 4.1
“I would like to work here as long as possible.” Average Score: 4.1
“The Company leaders are approachable and engaged.” Average Score: 4.1
“I often feel recognized for my work performance.” Average Score: 4.0
“I feel like my voice is heard at this company.” Average Score: 4.0
“I would highly recommend the Company to a friend/family member.” Average Score: 4.0
“I have the resources and training I need to succeed.” Average Score: 3.8
“I feel listened to and am able to contribute ideas to the company.” Average Score: 3.6
So, we have room for improvement, for sure.
What was most informative for me was that there was only one “Strong Disagree” in the survey results, and that was in the category, “I feel listened to and am able to contribute ideas to the company.” This truly made me stop in my tracks and reflect upon what this employee may be feeling, and what we can do to better support, and, more importantly, to hear him or her. It also made me realize that we could be thwarting innovation, and that these ideas that may be revolutionary and unheard.
Next, we are on to Goal Setting and taking action for improvement.
A New Mission
Anyone who knows me knows I am passionate and can be fiery about things that I care about deeply. This fire both fuels and burns, and I admit giving and getting feedback is hard. When employees are careless with things that I care about — the impact our actions have on our clients, lawful compliance, honesty, safety, ethics, to name a few — I can tend to express my feedback to them quite passionately, never name calling or discriminatory, but impassioned, consumed and intense.
With feedback, hopefully comes change, and I am on a mission to improve our company’s culture by utilizing the science of Applied Behavior Analysis, specifically OBM (Organizational Business Management), in which I received my certification in 2020 from FIT.
Anyone who knows me knows I am passionate and can be fiery about things that I care about deeply. This fire both fuels and burns, and I admit giving and getting feedback is hard. When employees are careless with things that I care about — the impact our actions have on our clients, lawful compliance, honesty, safety, ethics, to name a few — I can tend to express my feedback to them quite passionately, never name calling or discriminatory, but impassioned, consumed and intense. These are some of the same qualities that have led to Nurture & Nature’s success. Regardless, I’m writing this blog to document my journey as I test whether, by using OBM and the principles of the book The 5 Scientific Laws of Life & Leadership, I can both heighten my company’s profile and further develop my leadership skills. Step 1 is called “Pinpointing,” which, in short, means asking yourself, “What is it I want to change?”
Instead of relying solely on my own ideas of what I may need to change, today I am sending out an anonymous survey to see what our teams think of Nurture & Nature's leadership. Being CEO is rewarding, yet challenging. I am proud of everything Team Phenomenal has achieved over the last seven years, but there are still new heights to reach, new refinements to make, new systems, and new perspectives that can help us all grow.
I always enjoy rising to face challenges, but I’m not always so good at sharing my innermost thoughts and experiences. So, for this one, I’ve decided to face my fears and share this journey publicly. It is my greatest hope that, as I learn to improve myself and Nurture & Nature, my journey will inspire you to strive to reach your own greatest self.
View step one in our our experiment, Checking in with the Stakeholders.
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Your Brain on Improv
Using complex jazz improv, professional musicians, functional MRI technology, a 35-note keyboard, Limb sets out to examine the neurological process of musical improvisation.
Charles Limb and Allen Braun
Charles Limb, a hearing specialist and surgeon at Johns Hopkins, has been working with Allen Braun to investigate music and the act of improvisation. He did a series of experiments utilizing functional MRI technology to see what happens in the brain when we create.
The Science of Creativity
As Limb states, “The science of innovation is at its infancy. . . truly we know very little about how we are able to be creative”. When you think about how every part of our modern civilization has been created by man, and the fact that we, according to Limb, are just now beginning to attempt to study the act of creation, one can only think that behavioral science needs to stop being bias towards the arts and begin seeing creativity as an innate need of our species. However, Limb’s philosophy and experiments with improv/creation are another step forward towards understanding the neurological processes that humans undergo when engaging in the act of creating music. As he states, “You can study creativity by using science. Artistic creativity is a neurologic product that can be examined using rigorous scientific methods.”
Charles Limb and Allen Braun’s Jazz Paradigm
Using complex jazz improv, professional musicians, functional MRI technology, a 35-note keyboard, Limb sets out to examine the neurological process of musical improvisation. The featured experiment essentially examined what would happen in the brain when professional jazz musicians played a memorized and overly learnt jazz solo, and then what would happen when the musicians spontaneously improvised in a way that is matched in terms of lower level sensory motor features.
Limb and Braun first examined the amount of notes played to see if the musicians were just playing more notes during the improvisation. However, that was not the case. Limb and Braun’s findings, through the use of MRI technology and contrast mapping, actually found that brain activity was noticeable different during the two conditions. For instance, when the musicians were playing the memorized solo, the prefrontal cortex was activated; however, when the musicians were improvising, Limb and Braun saw the medial prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain thought to be self-expression and the autobiographical area – become intensified and activated, and the lateral prefrontal cortex (known to be a part of self-monitoring) become deactivated. Utilizing this data, Limb and Braun hypothesized that to be creative you need to have a disassociation in your frontal lobe, so that you’re not inhibited to the new creative nerve impulses.
Music as Language
In another experiment, Limb and Braun recorded the contrast mapping through MRI technology of a jazz duet, in which two musicians were improvising back and forth through musical interplay. The subject’s Broca area lit up, which is thought to be associated through self-expression and language. Limb and Brown make the correlation between jazz improv interplay and freestyle rap. The experiment is phenomenal in that Brown and Limb make a fascinating comparison using MRI technology. They reported that language areas again lit up, and a noted level of heightened brain activity, during improv in comparison to rote memorization.
This makes perfect sense, because language is our main source of self-expression. When you add music to spontaneous language it seems logically that you would see a heightened level of activity in the brain. Adding the element of unknown word cues or demands to this task would further increase the difficulty level causing more neurons to fire.
2016 CalABA Conference
Presenters at the 2016 Calaba Conference, Symposium: Behavioral Parent Training and In-home Consultation: Looking back, looking forward
Denice Renteria-Gonzalez, Jose D. Rios, Kristine D. Dickson, Marisela Alvarado, Francine Holguin and Michele Wallace
We Don't Learn Our ABC's by Saying Them... We Sing!
Music is universal. Its origins are known in every culture, as there has yet to be discovered a culture that does not integrate music into their society (Worth, 1997). Music containing lyrics is a powerful form of expression that dates back to ancient Sanskrit Dramas of India and the Greek Dramas of Classical Antiquity. Music offers us as a species an entire new vocabulary for self-expression. As Plato declared, “Music is moral law. It gives the soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything” (Paquette & Rieg, 2008).
Music is universal. Its origins are known in every culture, as there has yet to be discovered a culture that does not integrate music into their society (Worth, 1997). Music containing lyrics is a powerful form of expression that dates back to ancient Sanskrit Dramas of India and the Greek Dramas of Classical Antiquity. Music offers us as a species an entire new vocabulary for self-expression. As Plato declared, “Music is moral law. It gives the soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything” (Paquette & Rieg, 2008).
In the field of psychology, music is known to evoke feelings, emotions, memories, and thoughts. Millions of studies have been conducted on the power of music, however in recent years the topic of music has emerged in experiments regarding language acquisition. “Comparing language and music is a tradition inherited from Aristotle and Darwin” (Williamson, 2009). However, psychologists are just presently beginning to understand why music affects the way we learn, how music is processed in the brain, and the similarities and differences between these two universal forms of communication (Williamson, 2009). Such similarities between music and language are that they both involve the perception of sound, highly structured systems with syntax, discrete and measurable elements, belong to a hierarchically organization of sequences, acquire implicit knowledge and are interpreted through the lens of perception (Jentschke, Koelsch, Sallat, and Friederici, 2008).
Overlap in Neural Structural Processing
A recent experiment, conducted by Fedorenko, Patel, Casasanto, Winawer, Gibson, found evidence to support the idea that language and music share an overlap in online processing and some aspects of structural integration; in addition, to successfully being the first to demonstrate an “interaction between linguistic and musical structural complexity for well-formed (grammatical) sentences” (2009). This experiment gives credibility to Patel’s Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis, which states that although the linguistic and musical knowledge systems may be independent; the system for online structural integration may be shared between music and language (Fedorenko, Patel, Casasanto, Winawer, & Gibson, 2009).
Neuropsychological experiments have utilized magneto-encephalography, event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging to support the idea that structural manipulations in music activate the Broca Area’s surrounding cortical regions (Stromswold, Caplan, Alpert & Rauch, 1996), which have a proven history in relation to the structural processing of speech and language (Patel, Gibson, Ratner, Besson & Holocomb, 1998; Besson & Faita, 1995; Janata, 1995; Fedorenko, Patel, Casasanto, Winawer, & Gibson, 2009). In addition, experiments have been conducted to further develop the localization of music and speech to the right-hemisphere homologue (Koelsch, 2000; Koelsch, 2002; Levitin & Menon, 2003).
Music Therapy and Joint Collaboration Treatments
Musical therapy has been included in multiple treatment modules and has found to be beneficial in collaboration with speech-language pathologist’s treatment modules for language acquisition (Hobson, 2006). To further this point, in 2000 Pellitteri claimed that children in a musical environment felt at ease, allowing natural language to emerge (McCarthy, Geist, Zojwala & Schock, 2008). Although there is a lack of knowledge regarding the profession surrounding music therapy and their work with speech pathologist; McCarthy, Geist, Zojwala and Schock conducted an internet-based survey with 1675 Board Certified Music Therapists and their work with speech-language pathologists to better explore music’s affect on language, academics, gross/fine motor and behavioral interventions (2008).
The survey projected that 3 out of 4 musical therapists will work with speech-language pathologists in joint collaboration, and that the list of benefits included client’s progress in the areas of expressive communication (rating 5.86 out of 7), receptive communication (rating 5.19 out of 7), fine/gross motor (rating 4.62 out of 7), socialization (rating 5.15 out of 7), emotional/behavioral (rating 4.76 out of 7), and academic (rating 4.24 out of 7) (McCarthy, Geist, Zojwala & Schock, 2008).
I found these results interesting because my work as a behavior analyst not only includes music, but centers around the writing of treatment plans for the exact same skill areas to which this study found a reported benefit. In addition, I too hold joint collaborative session with a music therapist and have found it to be beneficial to my clients. One substantial difference between the treatments modules is that a behavior analysts breaks down the skill subgroups into components, operationally defined responses and systematically reinforces skills while collecting daily data on every attempt made by the child. Pivotal Response Training, within the science of applied behavior analysis, relies can involve music as a component for the treatment of language delay, specifically for children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorders.
Promoting Language in Children with Communication Impairments
Other studies have focused on utilizing music therapy in a co-treatment modules for children with severe language delay; such as Bruchia’s 1982 research experiment in which he treated a 14 year old male with mental retardation for language impairment of echolia in a successful single-subject research design which decreased 95% of the total echolia utterances to the level of 10% (Geist, McCarthy, Rodgers-Smith and Jessica Porter, 2008).
Another preliminary successful single-subject experiment was completed using a classroom-based collaborative speech-language pathology/music therapy module in which a 4-year-old child diagnosed with bronchopulmonary dysphasia increased skills in language comprehension, language expression and gesturing, in addition to social interaction, increased levels of engagement, play skills and use of his voice output device (Geist, McCarthy, Rodgers-Smith and Jessica Porter, 2008).
Conclusion
A precise and detailed relationship between music and language acquisition is yet to be declared in the empirical scientific realm. However, very interesting studies are being conducted in terms of how music could possible influence or enhance language acquisition. This research question is socially valid, as it would truly enhance the current treatment modules for teaching language and treating language delay. Regarding perception, language is vital to the way that we communicate and understand the world. As language is a contrived construct, it needs to be taught. As perception is an active process of the individual, one can truly come to appreciate the role of speech and language in how it shapes our perception. Without the understanding of language and our ability to communicate with others, we would be isolated in our perception. Without music, life would just be dull. Music is more powerful than we currently understand it to be. As
Aristotle wrote, "Music has a power of forming the character, and should therefore be introduced into the education of the young."
Bibliography
Aristotle. (1447ad.). Great-Quotes.com. Retrieved December 14, 2011, from Great-Quotes.com Web site
Fedorenko, E., Patel, A., Casasanto, D., Winawer, J., & Gibson, E. (2009). Structural integration in language and music: Evidence for a shared system. Memory & Cognition. 37(1), 1-9.
Geist, K., McCarthy, J., Rodgers-Smith, A., & Porter, J. (2008). Integrating music therapy services and speech-language therapy services for children with severe communication impairments: A co-treatment model. Journal of Instructional Psychology. 35(4), 311-316.
Jentschke, S., Koelsch, S., Sallat, S., & Friederici, A. D. (2008). Children with specific language impairment also show impairment of music-syntactic processing. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 20(11), 1940-1951.
Lim, H. A. (2009). Use of music to improve speech production in children with autism spectrum disorders. Theoretical orientation. Music Therapy Perspectives. 27(2), 103-114. Retrieved from EBSCO host.
Patel, A. D. (2008). Music, language, and the brain. New York, NY US: Oxford University Press. Retrieved from EBSCO host.
Schön, D., Boyer, M., Moreno, S., Besson, M., Peretz, I., & Kolinsky, R. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition. 106(2), 975-983.
Weiss, M. (2009). Increasing receptive, expressive, and overall language skills in language-delayed preschool students. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A, 70, Retrieved from EBSCO host
Williamson, V. (2009). Special issue: The power of music. The Psychologist. 22(12), 1022-1025.
Worth, S. (1997). Wittgenstein's Musical Understanding" British Journal of Aesthetics. (37), 158-167.
Ms. Kristine D. Dickson, BCBA
Owner/Clinical Director
Nurture & Nature Applied Behavior Analysis and Consultation
5318 Laurel Canyon Blvd., Suite 101,
Valley Village, CA 91607
(818) 613-1206
