Indigenous 
Submitted by Mike Williams, Manager, A. Britton Smith Centre for Behavioural Studies
Researchers from SLC’s A. Britton Smith Center for Behavioural Studies (CBS) published an article in the scholarly journal, Behavioral Interventions on Friday June 26th, 2026. The article summarized community-based research wherein front-line autism therapists were trained to implement a rapport building procedure and then trained to teach SLC placement students on that procedure.
This train the trainer approach is called pyramidal training and is a cost-effective way to expand the accurate implementation of desired skills, in this case – how to build rapport with children on the autism spectrum. Click here to read the article: A Pyramidal Training Model to Teach Rapport Building Skills to Placement Students.
The research was conducted in partnership with Dr. Alison Cox from Brock University Alison Cox, who has experience conducting community-based research. The ongoing cooperation and support from a community service provider in Kingston (information redacted to protect study participant confidentiality) was essential to the success of the research project from recruitment, scheduling, problem solving, and use of the community provider space.
The entire SLC research team including the primary author Mike Williams and two former SLC employees Alexander Glecoff and Cierra Vandermeer, are all SLC graduates of the Honours Bachelor of Behavioural Psychology (BPSYC) degree program and are all now master's level clinicians in the Kingston area. The research also utilized two CBS placement students from BPSYC who learned to implement research quality data collection, support scripted confederate roleplay sessions (to reduce client time away from therapy and increase learning opportunities for students) and be overall engaged in high-quality applied research.
An essential piece of applied and immersive learning at St. Lawrence College is the interconnection between the amazing academic programs with high-quality faculty and the community service providers and businesses in our community. This research is an example of the intersection between those entities and collaboration across post-secondary institutions to enhance the student learning experience and better prepare future graduates and community placement sites.