If you follow Behavioral Observations on Instagram, you might recall that I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to travel to the 20th Annual Hawaii Association for Behavior Analysis conference to give the closing Keynote Address.

I could devote an entire podcast episode to talking about all the wonderful people I met, the fun experiences I had, and the amazing sights I was able to take in. One of the biggest highlights though, was the opportunity to sneak in the following conversation I had with a panel of employees from Hawaii's Department of Education.

It turns out that the State of Hawaii is doing some innovative work in bringing to bear specific behavioral technologies to improve the supports provided to children in school settings. This work is organized into a large scale endeavor that they have named The CARE Project.

This panel consisted of Alysha Kim, Dodi Pritchett, Joshua Hoppe, and Sherene Hajiro. And before getting any further into this introduction, I want to thank my friends Katie Croce and Jamie Salter from Self and Match, for not only nudging us to have this conversation, but for also financially supporting it with a generous donation to the HABA.

Here's what we talked about:

The ways in which the Hawaii Department of Education differs from other state DOEs.
The specific problems the CARE project was designed to address.
The mindset shift from responding to preventing problem behavior.
The DOE's collaboration with FTF and Emergent Learning.
Specific case studies of successful interventions.
How the DOE is collecting data for research purposes.
The challenges of scaling these interventions in the face of staff turnover.
How they turned the term "PFA/SBT" into a verb.
How they see these types of supports evolving over time.

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Supporting Schools in Hawaii with the Care Project: Session 314, Live from HABA 2025

The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria