OTS 175: What Teachers and Admin Really Think About School-based OT
- Jayson Davies
- May 5
- 15 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 175 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
In this episode, Jayson discusses the often misunderstood role of school-based occupational therapy practitioners. He emphasizes the need for OT practitioners to advocate for their diverse skills beyond handwriting instruction, highlighting the importance of collaboration with teachers and administrators.
The conversation explores teacher and administrator perspectives on OT services, the value of collaboration, and the challenges faced by OT practitioners in schools. Jayson encourages listeners to find ways to support teachers and improve the perception of OT in educational settings.
Takeaways
School-based OT practitioners are often seen only as handwriting instructors.
Teachers value collaboration with OT practitioners to support students.
Many teachers want to see more OT involvement in classrooms.
Administrators may not fully understand the workload model of OT services.
OT practitioners need to advocate for their diverse roles in schools.
Collaboration can lead to better outcomes for students.
Teachers appreciate OT support in their classrooms.
OT practitioners should provide practical strategies to teachers.
Understanding teacher perspectives can improve OT services.
Advocacy is essential for changing perceptions of OT in education.
Quotes
“Seventy three percent of teachers said that they really want to see collaboration happen and that they actually think that collaboration with OT practitioners help their students.”
-Jayson Davies,M.A, OTR/L
"I know it sometimes gets tiring feeling like we have to advocate all the time, but everyone has to advocate all the time until people understand what they do.”
-Jayson Davies,M.A, OTR/L
"OT practitioners, you know, we we aren't always understood. However, we can change that. We can do a lot to change the way that OT is perceived, and the teachers actually want that.”
-Jayson Davies,M.A, OTR/L
Resources
Episode Transcript
Expand to view the full episode transcript.
Jayson Davies
What's happening at school based ot practitioners, welcome back to another episode of the OT school house podcast. If my numbers are correct, I believe this is episode 175 so thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Whether you've listened to one episode, or this is your first episode, or you have already listened to 174 episodes, anywhere in between. Thank you so much for being here. Really appreciate it. Today is just gonna be me, and I'm talking about a subject that I think a lot of us have dwelled over in the past, and that is the idea that nobody understands what we do as school based ot practitioners, that everyone believes that we are handwriting instructors and that our role is to find one student in a class or maybe a few students in a classroom, take them to another room, support them in that classroom, bring them back and have them magically improved their handwriting overnight. You know, as a school based ot practitioner yourself, you know that that is not the case, and today I'm going to flip the script a little bit. I've done some digging into the research, and I have some things that I think will help you out a little bit, especially if you're in a little bit of a funk. I think these articles will really help you kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel, per se, or see how others, such as teachers and administrators actually perceive us as school based ot practitioners, rather than the way that we often ruminate about how practitioners or sorry about how administrators and teachers think about us as just the handwriting instructors. So I've got about five different topics here today that I want to go through. We're going to go through each one a little bit. I've got some research that I'm going to tag in at times throughout this episode. But first, let's go ahead and jump in to the intro music, and when we come back, we'll dive into the real ideas that teachers and administrators have about school based ot practitioners.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the OT schoolhouse podcast. Your source for school based occupational therapy tips, interviews and professional development now to get the conversation started, here is your host, Jayson Davies class is officially in session.
Jayson Davies
All right, we are back. We're going to start off with a quick debunking of the myth that teachers just want us to grab kids and take them off to the OT room and bring them back, magically able to, you know, improve their handwriting. And the truth of the matter is, is that there's research that shows that that is not true at a more broader base. First of all, teachers do value occupational therapy. They do, and I think most of us do know that, maybe some more than others, right. Some teachers are more outward with their emotions about how they appreciate school based ot practitioners, where others are more reserved, and maybe we don't have as good a communication with them, and so they don't share that appreciation. But there is research out there, especially within the last 10 years or so, of OT practitioners being appreciated by teachers. Now the more important part of this research is not just that they want or that they appreciate us as ot practitioners, but even more so, the important part is that they want more collaboration from us, which I don't think a lot of us think about. We think that teachers just want us to make their lives a little bit easier by taking a student who is sometimes a distraction in the classroom, and help them one on one and bring them back, right? But that's not the case. We are hearing from teachers that they want us to collaborate. They want us to come into the classroom model what works, and to show them what works, so that them, as well as their paraprofessionals counterparts, can also support students in the classroom, for example, Benson, majestic, majestic. There's a few names here that I'm butchering, but this article from 2016 found that teachers clearly see ot practitioners as valuable team members, but challenges like time and scheduling often prevent the collaboration that they actually want. And so they also are realizing that as much as they want us to collaborate with them and as much as we want to collaborate with them, there are some barriers in the way that prevent that, like scheduling and caseload demands. EdX 2021 study found that 73% of teachers said that they really want to see collaboration happen, and that they actually think that collaboration with ot practitioners help their students. However, only about a third of them said that they actually are able to collaborate often, again, showing that teachers appreciate collaboration but understand that it's not always the most simple thing to do. So then, what are we to do with all this knowledge? Well, first of all, let's stop getting down on ourselves about teachers not understanding what we do, or just thinking that we are handwriting instructors. They do value us, and they do want more work with us, but they also understand the time constraints and the caseload constraints that we all have are preventing that collaboration. So from here on out, maybe we start to kind of assume that as a truth, as opposed to teachers not appreciating us or just seen as the handwriting coach or teacher, we'll get more into the whole scope of occupational therapy in a minute. But I think that we need to start almost instead of defaulting to a pull out model, maybe we need to start defaulting to more of a collaborative model. Now that we understand that there is research out there a few different research articles that share, that teachers actually appreciate their collaboration, let's confidently go into those collaborations and work with teachers. Let's kind of default to collaboration. And you know what? It might surprise a few of your teachers. It might even surprise yourself a few times when you do this at first. But let's aim from a strength. I guess you could say from a position of strength, and say, You know what, I'm going to collaborate. I know this might be a little tricky, but I'm confident in my ability to support the teachers that I serve, and I'm going to do that. And you know, it may not be easy at first, but once you put in those reps, that rep with one teacher, collaborating with them, week in and week out for a month, you will start to see progress in your ability to effectively collaborate with teachers to make progress for the students. All right now diving into the second myth, or the second problem, if you want to call it that, is that we sometimes believe that either a teachers only see us as handwriting specialists, that is it, and that's all they'll ever see us as, or B. We sometimes assume that they know everything there is to know about our role in OT or the school based model, and they think that, or we think that they should know that we are executive functioning specialists, and that we are ADL specialists, and that we can support sensory processing difficulties and all of that. But in actuality, that's simply not the case, because occupational therapy practitioners, everyone from me to you, I mean, I'm generalizing here, but even all the way up to your state organizations, all the way up to our national organizations with a OTA and everyone in between, we have not done the best job at getting the word out there. And I know it sometimes gets tiring feeling like we have to advocate all the time, but everyone has to advocate all the time until people understand what they do. So I think it is a little bit on us, but it's also on the programs that teachers learn from and administrators learn from to be a part of the solution. Here just a few different points from the research, just at all from 2023 show that targeted education sessions significantly improved. Teachers are standing of the OT role. What that means right there is that we can provide little me in services, if you will, for the first grade team or for the K through four team, or for our entire school, or maybe even if you're lucky, for an entire school district, and share with them what you can do beyond handwriting and sensory processing. Share with them what you did in one class at a school that maybe they aren't even at, but how you improved that classroom and how you supported that teacher and the kids. Share with them what you are doing, and they will better understand how you can support them. Another article from 2020 This is from Aria and her colleagues. Sorry, there are some names here that I'm sure I'm butchering, but I want to get this knowledge to you, and I'll be sure to link to all these articles in the show notes. But what this team found is that even special education teachers often received little or no training about school based occupational therapy when they were in their program to learn how to be a teacher. And you know, it makes sense, right? The people that are teaching those people, the teachers and the administrators, are other teachers and administrators, the same way that the people teaching us in our OT programs are OTs and OTs and other people related to occupational therapy, we don't fully understand what it means to be a teacher or an administrator, and the teachers and the administrators don't fully understand what it means to be an OT practitioner. So how do we go about changing that piece of it? This is a complicated one, and one that is going to take time, but it is one that I know some people are already taking on. One of my good friends, Danielle de Lorenzo, over at mindfulness in motion. She was actually being a guest lecturer, I think even multiple sessions, not just like a one time thing, but she was providing instruction at a local teaching university, or teacher University, places where teachers went to learn how to be teachers. So that is one thing that we can do. I think another thing that we can also do is start presenting at teacher conferences and administrator conferences. That is something that. I made one of my goals for the next few years is to continue to go to OT conferences, but also get outside of OT conferences and go present to teachers, administrators, maybe even parents. I think that's going to be one of the best ways that I can support all of you, is by helping teachers and administrators better understand our role. So take every opportunity you can get to teach through short tips at staff meetings, through handouts or even casual conversations at the PTA meeting for your own kids, if you go to PTA meetings for your own kids, or whatever it might be, frame ot services in a way that you want ot services and entire MTSS classroom type of services to look like. We need to start talking about ot in a way that we want ot to look like. Otherwise it's going to continue to look like the way that it is right now, at whatever school you support, all right. Now, I want to stop talking mostly about the teacher perspectives of school based occupational therapy and start moving over to the administrator side of school based occupational therapy, and how our administrators, from assistant principals and principals to maybe even the special education director or other people at the district level might think about school based occupational therapy, and I think that we as a school based ot practitioners, often perceive administrators as trying to cut costs, save money, trying to provide the least valuable service as a play on the least restrictive environment, but I think that we have to Flip this a little bit. Yes, administrators are focused on the cost of education. That to a degree is their role. It is their job to balance the cost with the impact of services, right? So we often may think that, oh, they only care about students who have IEPs and making sure those service minutes are met. Well, if we feel that way, it might be, because if you talk to administrators, it's kind of true that is their role. Their role is to make sure that IEPs get done the way that they are supposed to be done, and they have to do that within a certain budget. However, from our perspective as occupational therapy practitioners, we need to show them how the type of services that we provide can be cost effective at different levels of service, whether that's a one on one service, a group service, or maybe a larger MTSS class wide or grade level wide service through collaboration, administrators have a tough job, just like every other person within public education, like it is no different from if you're talking about people all the way at the top, the superintendent, down to the district administrators, to your school site administrators, and then going down from there, teachers and paraprofessionals and every single person that works on that campus to Make It Happen, from the custodians and the lunch people, everyone, right? It all takes a village to support these kids, but there are budgetary constraints. That doesn't mean that that is the only piece that administrators are looking at. So what this means for us is that we need to help administrators better understand the value that we can provide as ot practitioners, and the way that we do that a few different ways, showing that our IEP services are actually effective, and maybe showing how our services are even impacting other measurable items, such as scores on other tests. How are we having an impact on standardized testing, not just on ot tests, but on the reading or mask, course, if you can show that mind blown, administrators will be happy to support you. The other way that we can potentially show data that is good for occupational therapy is that if we go through an MTSS route, if we can somehow provide data that shows that MTSS ot type of services or collaboration, can reduce the resource requirement for evaluations and individual services and IEPs and all the time management that goes with serving IEPs. There's a lot of things that people don't like about IEPs. Like the meetings. You probably don't like the meetings either administrators don't like the meetings, because that's five professionals getting paid to sit at a table when, in theory, those people should be getting paid to provide services to the students. So if we can show them that our OT MTSS services, or, you know, with your speech friends and PT friends, can show them that all the MTSS services can reduce the number of minutes that we spend in meetings. Well, there's that data that you just might need to show administrators. Hey, MTSS is a good idea. A recent survey from bully a Barry and pot Finn This is 2025, so very, very recent just came out, found that while. Administrators value ot services. Many aren't familiar with workload models that account for the ways that we contribute. And you know, as you all know here at the OT school house, I am a big, big advocate for the workload model, and unfortunately, it's just like occupational therapy services as a whole. Administrators don't know about it because we haven't brought it up to them. I mean, a lot of OT practitioners don't fully understand the workload model, and until we fully understand it and can share it with our administrators, they won't fully understand it. So it's not like they're going to OT school learning about this workload model. We have to share it with them so that they understand it and so that they can help us. Help them help us. I mean, it's like a win win win circle going on. If we help them, they can help us. So yeah, to wrap this all up, if you get one thing from this podcast episode, and I hope I have kept it pretty short or short enough for you, I should say I want you to understand that teachers and administrators aren't against us. They may not fully understand what we do. They may be in a budgetary or time crunch, just like we are, but that doesn't mean that they don't want to work alongside us. There is research out there, especially more recently, that shows that teachers want to collaborate with us. They get value from working with us. They appreciate us coming into their classroom and working in their classrooms and showing them and the paraprofessionals and the kids how to work with one another. And I think that's valuable, and I think that is something that we haven't had for a long time in school based occupational therapy, and we just felt like teachers wanted us to take that one behavioral child out of the classroom so that they could have a break. But that's not what the data is showing us. The data is showing us that they want us in the classroom, and whether that's working with a single kid in the classroom, a group of kids, or even their entire classroom running a 10 week handwriting instruction program or supporting an interoception program where we teach kids how to better understand their body, the teachers want us in those classrooms. Similarly, administrators, they don't always know what we do when they don't always understand how our role can impact the entire school, or, more importantly, sometimes their budget. But if we can begin to show them, then they'll be able to fight for us and fight for potentially more ot practitioners on campus, or a better use of our time than sitting in meetings for way too many minutes every single year. So at the end of the day, teachers want our collaboration. They are open to learning more, as are the administrators, and they are looking for support for the students who need it most, and if we can provide that, they will appreciate it. All right. So the final thing that I am going to leave you with today is a little bit of a challenge, and I just want you to find one small way to step forward, maybe offer one quick sensory strategy, or share a visual schedule idea that the teacher can do in the classroom. And I've been saying this for a long time, but teachers don't need more work. Teachers need more support. And so let's get away from just telling a teacher how to do something and actually going in showing them in the moment how they can do it, because if we solve that teacher's one problem in that one moment, they are more likely to carry out that same action or similar action that we showed them at a later time when they need that support going forward. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and let you enjoy the rest of your day without me in your ears, but I really appreciate you coming in and listening to this episode again, solo episode, just you and I today, but I hope you appreciated that I will post a link to all the research that I talked about today, and then a few extra articles that I found on this subject of teachers and administrators perceptions on school based occupational therapy. You can grab all that over at 175, or by clicking on the show notes link wherever you're listening to this episode. And yeah, I I just really hope that, especially if you're a little down on school based ot right now in your professional career, I hope that this episode just helps to lift you up a little bit and make you feel like, you know what? Yes, ot practitioners, you know, we we aren't always understood. However, we can change that. We can do a lot to change the way that OT is perceived. And the teachers actually want that. The teachers want to see how we can support them. And you know, there will be teachers who just kind of want us to stay in our handwriting Lane from time to time, but more so teachers want to see all the different ways that we can support them, not just one handwriting or sensory processing strategy that we have for them. All right. With that, I will see you next time on the otschool podcast. Take care and have a great rest of your day.
Amazing Narrator
Thank you for listening.
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