The Teaching-Family Model: The First 50 Years

The Teaching-Family Model was perhaps the first "evidence-based program" in human services. This article describes the development of the treatment model, the failure of the first attempts to replicate the treatment model, the discovery of larger units for replication, the modest success of first attempts to replicate larger units, and the eventual success of replications. The Teaching-Family Model is a testament to the sustainability (and continual improvement) of innovation and implementation methods and the value of the Teaching-Family Association for sustaining a community of practice and for managing the practitioner fidelity and organization fidelity data systems nationally. The benefits of applied behavior analysis and the implications for a new science of implementation for having research purposefully used in practice are explored.