Katelyn Balcer

The Summit Center

Spring 2022
 My placement for internship continued at the same location as last semester, The Summit

Center, located in Getzville, NY. The Summit Center has multiple locations all with different

purposes and functions, I interned at Summit Academy which works with grade school aged

students. Summit works to serve those with ASD (autism spectrum disorders), as well as other

developmental, social, and behavioral challenges. Summit offers five different divisions of

services and other subdivisions which fall under those. The five different divisions are the adult

division, the behavioral health division, the community division, early intervention and education

division, and collaborative programs with the WNY region center for autism spectrum disorders.

Since, I have been at Summit they are also opening up a CAAT center, if I am being honest, I do

not recall what the acronym stands for. The Summit Center’s mission is guided by evidence-

based practice, we maximize life success for people facing developmental, social, and behavioral

challenges. The vision of the Summit Center is Lives made better! The goal of Summit is to

provide every individual they serve achieve the highest level of independence possible.

I have one supervisor but a few people I would say I work under; they guide me and help

me in understanding things I do and see. My supervisor is Johanna Shaflucas, she has her Master

of Science in education and her BCBA licensure/certification. Johanna is the clinical coordinator

for Summit Academy which consists of the preschool wing and the grade school wings, working

with children up to the age of 18. Kat McDonald is the behavior support consultant. She is often

in our classroom helping with behaviors. Kat works on behavior plans and FBAs including

making them and making changes to them. I also work with the classroom teacher, Kiri

Kochanski, she has her Master of Science in special education. She is a lot of helping in

explaining the children’s experiences and understanding the possible functions for behaviors.
 Interning at Summit me and Johanna had many goals set out for me. Some things for this

semester were becoming more familiar with DTT. DTT is discrete trial training, and it is one of

the better ways to teach students numerous different skills. DTT is a method of teaching a variety

of thing and it works to break down larger tasks into smaller achievable components that can be

easily taught. There are many ways to teach the child a small task depending on prompts.

Another set goal was to be able to work in some way with every child. However, I did get to

work with five out of 6 children. One child when I came back from covid had increasing

behaviors, those of which were becoming harder to handle. The last goal we had made during the

middle of the semester, was to work on the FBA for one of the children in the classroom.

However, about one week later I had gotten covid, an earring infection, and food poisoning. I did

get to see Jo in passing once I came back however, that was more of a warmup to get used to the

classroom again. Jo left an email that she would be out most of the week upcoming which means

we will not be able to work on it together.

During the semester I feel as though I have gaining mass amounts of knowledge and feel

accomplished in what I have learned and experienced. I was not super sure how my knowledge

applied within behavioral analysis but since reflecting on this even general knowledge that I have

acquired has been of use to me. One thing I feel as though was huge was understanding biases

and how they work, many people think less of people with developmental disabilities. I was one

of those people at first however, my eyes have been opened so much. These children are so

smart, they may not be able to communicate but they understand you, they know how to listen

and ways to act. I think neuro also plays a large role in what I have experienced. I did not know

that it is possible for people to process some information at a slower pace, giving children 5-10

seconds to respond to prompts and not expecting an immediate reaction is huge. When using a
token board with a child there is a need to allow them to process prompts you are providing

before awarding or removing tokens. Naturally you would expect a response in a few seconds

but providing that extra time always the child to respond before awarding or providing a

consequence. This semester I did not get to take behavior modification from D’Youville, but I

still received the book and I have looked into the book quite extensively. Everything that I would

have learned in that class is something that I learned in internship and/or something that I have

been able to apply to it. I believe I was so overwhelmed in the placement at first because I was

gaining all that knowledge to understand behaviors and how to work with them. I never thought

very deeply about this until later, but Pavlov is something highly applicable to something like

behavioral analysis. Working to control the initial stimulus and later using extinction of the

prompt to teach skills and other measures. One thing that we want as well is generalization when

teaching skills in order to have a response working at all times, we do not just want something

learned in the classroom to stay there. We want things like toileting to generalize to the home or

being able to pick up toys or relinquish items to be generalizable as well. One thing also

explained in the textbook was chaining which is exactly like DTT but used to work as a variety

of tasks to achieve one thing. Like bathrooming is a chaining procedure that is used. When fully

completed the child will be able to go to the bathroom, clean themselves up, flush the toilet, and

wash their hands after. It may seem like such a small task to us since we have done it for years

but completing it can be difficult because it needs to be thought about in small steps like each

and every one. From grabbing the toilet paper to flushing the toilet to using soap on the hands

and scrubbing the hands. I did not realize how much a chaining task could entail until I created

my own on how to make a pot of coffee. There is so much knowledge I have gained, and I did
not understand where it came from at first or how I could relate it to what I have learned but so

many things in psychology relate in one way or another.

Over the course of two semesters, I feel as though I have learned and gained knowledge

about myself and people with developmental disabilities. One thing I learned is that my time

management is lacking in regard to understanding the time it will actually take me to complete a

task. Creating things for the children like morning work or PECS seems as though it should not

take much time, which it does not. The part that takes the longest and I tend to underestimate is

the time needed to laminate, cut them out, use Velcro to put to the together, etc. Another thing I

learned it that people with people with developmental disabilities are easily underestimated,

especially when it comes to how smart they are. These children are very successful in their

learning, it may take them some more time to understand certain concepts, but they end up

achieving them. This children with the help of Summit will one day help them lead fairly

independent lives, they are going to be capable of completing many daily tasks on their own.

There is also a misconception that children with developmental disabilities are all similar

however, that is the opposite. That is one thing I have learned, each child in the classroom I have

been in is unique in their own way with their own personality. Each child interacts differently

and has their own unique preferred items, they laugh at different things, and smile at different

things that make them happy. Lastly, I have learned that many people do not understand what

ABA therapy truly works toward and how it functions. I did not realize that there are many

misconceptions associated with ABA until I had seen it posted on Facebook. There is a notion

that the goal of ABA is to change who a child is, like their personality, their stereotypy, and

other aspects that makes these children who they are. However, that is never the goal of ABA,

we work to change maladaptive behaviors (self-injury, peer-peer aggression, aggression toward

staff, flopping, etc.) into something healthy. We give these children a way to cope with what they

are feeling and change it into something positive. I also witnessed a video on social media of

women raising money for the Summit Center, she was previously a student at Summit who has

moved to achieve greater things. She was talking about her success thanks to Summit. On a

normal day I would have never known this woman had suffered from a developmental disability.

I was amazed and teared up a little because you never truly know the impact you can have on

someone.

In order to enhance my knowledge about ABA I have looked into a lot of research, read

the behavior modification textbook, and watched many videos by BCBA’s. I have also often

looked to Kat McDonald; she has been vital to my understanding of what I see at Summit. I still

feel as though there is so much that I can learn regarding ABA. However, being able to witness

how things works in real time is probably the best experience one could ask for. I have been able

to ask why, how, and the cause. I believe this experience has provided me the hands-on learning

that I have needed to better understand ABA. I have learned how to take data, and read data for

behaviors, learned how to take ABC data then analyze it, I have learned that not all behavior can

be changed by a proven method, and that working as team is a way to provide the best care for

the children. I have also learned the beginnings of an FBA and how to write them which is

actually a very interesting process. I also learned how to properly fill out PIT (personal

intervention technique) forms, especially since they are a legal document. ABA is a very hands-

on subsection of psychology and even though it is not a traditional office setting it has provided

me with a lot of clinical experience for the future.

My self-assessments tend to be lacking in all honesty and I consistently feel like I could

have done more, or a better job. However, I feel as though I have fulfilled many of the
expectations me and Johanna have worked together to lay out. I did not have many expectations

when I first began at Summit because I did not know what to expect and did not have much of a

knowledge base in ABA. I spoke with Johanna, and she had asked me what I wanted to get out

of it, and I was honest I did not have any idea and we were able to work to set out some

beginning goals. I feel as though I could have had more goals to achieve but I am not sure what

they would have been. However, Johanna provided me with realistic goals that I would be able to

reach in my time at Summit and I think that was a key to my success. One thing I still would

have liked to see was a preference assessment but, that goes along with the fulfillment of a full

FBA. Other than that, I am proud of the goals I have achieved and all of the knowledge I have

gotten from them.

My internship placement at Summit has worked to change me in many especially

professionally, and somewhat personally. Summit helped me become of aware of the underlying

biases I had about people with developmental disabilities. I previously would look down on them

and believe that I needed to treat them different because they weren’t the same as me. I have

come to realize that people with developmental disabilities are so very smart and can function

just as well as I can. Maybe they cannot tell us that, but they can surely show, and it opened my

perspective on the world. I have become more communicative in a professional way; I am now

more able to converse with people for a better understanding of things and why they happen, and

I am able to communicate my concerns if I have them. One thing I do need to work on is the

nervousness I experience when I know there is a power differential of sorts, I become very

nervous when talking to those who are above me. In regard to communication, I have learned

how to better communicate in a work setting, like how to be more effective at expressing what I

am trying to say and in a shorter manner. I also struggle to reflect on myself and I feel with the
weekly activity logs we complete I have learned how to reflect on my experience and how it has

affected me. I have also learned how to better work as a team with others. I was always fairly

independent with my work, not wanting to include others or ask for help. Working as a team has

allowed me to pull information from different perspectives to end up at a solution. I have input

from multiple angles allows for a better change for the children. I have seen myself change in

ways I do not exactly know how to explain, I feel as though I have becoming more accepting and

understanding as person. We all come from different backgrounds, but goals can be the same, I

do not know how to explain it other than that.

From the knowledge I have acquired psychology is both a profession and a science. We

have established theories even though their can be outliers we have ways to explain certain

things. Psychology is not like biology as a science because it is not one size fits all, the brain can

function in different ways based on genetics and experiences. I have learned that it is not just

nature vs. nurture, but how they interact with each other to form who we are. I feel that is what

makes psychology difficult to understand as a science. We tend to want to group people into

clusters or say well everyone has x or y. However, we cannot when each person is different and

has had different experiences than the next. I feel as though we need to continue to explore the

brain and how the interactions a person has makes them different from the next person. Focusing

on theorizing true interactions and being able to say a causes b or a influences b is how we are

going to fully establish psychology as a true science. As for a profession psychology relates to

almost everything, there is room for it everywhere. Somethings as I showed in my PowerPoint

we do not even know about, and we are psychology majors. Since psychology relates itself to

many things that is how it can be related to different fields of study. With interdisciplinary work,

even communication or work between different subsections of psychology will allow for more
scientific formulations. For example, applied behavioral analysis relates to behaviorism,

neuropsychology, and other subsets. All the fields are in some way related from the basis of

information we have gained from our founders.

Psychology of the future is a difficult topic and at first, I struggled with researching such

a topic. Many psychologists have concerns of where the future of psychology is going. I believe

we need to focus on theorizing ideas, not ones that are just present in current life. We need to

look into the larger picture and form the basis for the science we claim to be. Instead of focusing

on a micro level we need to look macro to form the understanding we need to be a trusted

science. We need to able to work with other disciplines to form such a science we can stand on in

future years. Since psychology can be applied to consumerism, mannerisms, you name it, we

need to work with other to understand such relationships and connections.

Psychology at D’Youville what a time it has been. I have gained so much knowledge and

some I genuinely thought was unimportant at the time. It has opened up my perspective on the

world and has helped me become a better person in numerous ways. Psychology has helped me

understand biases and interactions we have because of them, which has changed me as a person

and helped me stand in a more neutral position in life. In regard to professional development, I

have been told my writing skills have become more improved from when I started college which

I always felt was a lacking point for me. So, many things have changed about me, and I do not

know if I can explain them all or even understand them all. I was always the person who thought

they could get by in college without studying which I now see as hilarious. However, high school

was such a breeze I thought it would be more or less of the same. I have been able to become a

more communicative person and I have also see my skills change in regard to leadership. I had

previously been the quiet person, do what your told and you will make it mentality. I have been
able to speak up for myself and others more and more. I have also seen this at my retail job

where I have now applied to become a key holder and continue some of those leadership skills.

In regard to communication, I am now able to concisely express my ideas without batting around

the bush or not saying anything at all. Since internship working in/as a team has become much

easier for me. It has turned into a skill that I have and enjoy more so now than ever. It became

more apparent during internship that working as a team allows for information from different

perspectives and ideas from different perspectives to culminate into a larger idea. I feel as though

the education I have received from D’Youville is better than what I could have received other

places. Especially, when it comes to philosophy classes that were required, I felt as though those

classes have opened my eyes in such a large way. I also at first was upset by internship, thinking

my time could be used in better ways but honestly, I think it is one of the best experiences I have

had in my undergrad studies. As Shelby had said internships are not commonly something

required or even done for psychology at other colleges, it may not be but that is something that

makes D’Youville one step above the other colleges.