OTS 193: How the C-SEA Can Help You Transform Classroom Environments
- Jayson Davies
- 2 days ago
- 49 min read
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Welcome to the show notes for Episode 193 of the OT Schoolhouse Podcast.
Walking into a classroom filled with visual clutter, constant noise, and lingering smells from an air fryer might leave you wondering how any student can focus—let alone those with sensory processing challenges. In this episode, Dr. Heather Kuhaneck joins school-based OT practitioners Linda Kinkade and Dana Hawkins to introduce the Classroom Sensory Environment Assessment (C-SEA), a tool designed to help teachers assess and modify their classroom environments to better support students with sensory needs.
Unlike traditional assessments that focus on individual students, the C-SEA evaluates the entire classroom across five sensory domains: visual, sound, movement, touch, and smell. Dr. Kuhaneck explains how the tool provides teachers with a visual map of their classroom's sensory profile—without labeling it as "good" or "bad"—making it easier to gain buy-in for meaningful changes. Linda and Dana share real-world examples of how they've used the C-SEA to uncover hidden sensory triggers, like the surprising impact of an air fryer on student behavior.
Whether you're struggling to help teachers understand sensory processing or looking for a collaborative approach to classroom modifications, this episode offers practical strategies you can implement immediately. Tune in to discover how the C-SEA can transform your practice and create more sensory-friendly learning environments for all students.
Learning Objectives
Identify the purpose of the Classroom Sensory Environment Assessment (C-SEA) and describe how it differs from student-centered sensory assessments such as the SPM-2 or Sensory Profile.
Identify the five sensory domains addressed within the C-SEA and describe common classroom-based sensory considerations.
Describe how the C-SEA can be used to support conversations with teachers about sensory-friendly classroom environments.
Guest Bio
Heather Kuhaneck, Ph.D., OTR/L, FAOTA, is a Professor and Founding Program Director of the MS in Occupational Therapy program at Southern CT State University. Prior to this, she taught occupational therapy students for 19 years at Sacred Heart University. Her clinical practice as an occupational therapist included a specialization in autism and sensory integration, working in urban, suburban, and rural public schools as well as private clinics in three states in New England and the midwestern US. She is certified in Ayres’ sensory integration and is fidelity trained. Dr. Kuhaneck is a Fellow of the American Occupational Therapy Association and the co- editor of Case-Smith’s Occupational Therapy for Children and Adolescents. She is also the editor / co-editor of 3 editions of Autism: A Comprehensive Occupational Therapy Approach and 2 editions of Making Play Just Right. She is a co-author of the Sensory Processing Measure first and second editions.
Linda Kinkade, OTR has just started her 35th year as a School Based Occupational Therapist and was named Indiana OTR of the year in 2009. Over three decades, she has gone from being the only OT covering 5 school corporations to currently 1 corporation with an additional full time OTR and 2 COTAs. Services have gone to pull-out to in class and are moving towards school wide support for ALL students. When AOTA formed a Cadre of 33 school based therapists throughout the country Linda was selected to participate and presented on IDEA and No Child Left Behind throughout the area. Presentations have been shared at the local level and at the Indiana Occupational Therapy Association State Conferences. Suicide prevention and mental health support to students and staff is also an area she presents on often.
Dana Hawkins, MOT, OTR began working in the school system in November of 2021. She brings over 17 years of hospital experience with a focus on acute care, trauma, and concussion management. Visual training is also an area she has extensive training in. Her experience as a college athlete with previous injuries and having a child on the autism spectrum and severe ADHD brings a personal touch with students accessing their education. She has worked with Linda on presentations at the state level for the Occupational Therapy Association on keeping all Occupational Therapists on the Same Page when treating in the school setting. Additional presentations within the school district include presentations on Sensory and Fine Motor Bootcamp.
Quotes
“The C-SEA kind of flips it around. Instead of assessing an individual student, you're assessing the entire classroom."
—Jayson Davies, MA, OTR/L
"It's not about the room being good or bad, it's just really about the match between what this room is set up like right now, which is changeable, and this child that you have in your room right now."
—Dr. Heather Kuhaneck
"The SPM and the C-SEA work so beautifully together."
—Dana Hawkins
"Once the classroom kind of becomes calming, then that also helps the students regulate to be able to learn more."
—Linda Kinkade
Resources
Assessment Tools:
👉Classroom Sensory Environment Assessment (C-SEA) -
classroomsensoryenvironment.com | Available through ATP (Academic Therapy Publications) at $3.50 per administration
👉Sensory Processing Measure - Second Edition (SPM-2) - Used to assess individual student sensory processing
👉Sensory Profile - Individual student sensory assessment tool
Programs & Initiatives:
👉Every Moment Counts - SUBASIC program that includes "Comfortable Cafeteria" component
Equipment/Tools:
👉Decibel meter - For measuring classroom and cafeteria noise levels
👉Light meter - For measuring classroom lighting levels
Related Research:
👉Multiple articles published in American Journal of Occupational Therapy (AJOT) and SIS Quarterly about the C-SEA development and implementation
👉International research using the C-SEA to measure teacher training effectiveness (particularly in UK and European countries)
Episode Transcript
Expand to view episode transcript
Jayson Davies
Hey there, and welcome to episode 193 of the OT school house podcast. I'm your host, as always, Jayson Davies, and today we have the perfect follow up to our last episode on sensory processing within an MTSS system. In episode 192 We primarily focus on supporting students using a sensory lens. This time though, we're focusing on supporting teachers and their classrooms through the use of the classroom sensory environment assessment, aka the CSEA, or the C SEA, as you will hear it reference. Now, I don't mean to cause you too much anxiety here before we get started, but how many times have you walked into a classroom full of sights and sounds and smells and wondered to yourself, Man, how does any kid in here learn with all the stimuli going on? If your answer is more than zero, which I imagine it probably is, then this episode is a must listen. We're going to discuss how you can help a teacher not only assess their own classroom, but also how they can use the C SEA, and you can use the C SEA results to start helping them make lasting changes. Joining me today to do just that is Dr Heather kohenek, one of the co authors of the classroom sensory environment assessment, as well as Linda Kincaid and Dana Hawkins, who are two occupational therapy practitioners in the schools using the C SEA to get buy in from their admin and better support the schools that they serve. Together, we're going to uncover the who, the what, when, where, why, all of that related to the C SEA. And more importantly, Dana, Linda and Heather will help you to identify how you can use it to help teachers and students alike, let's dive in.
Amazing Narrator
Hello and welcome to the OT school house 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
Heather, Linda and Dana, welcome to the OT school house podcast. It is such a pleasure to have you here. I'm excited to dive into the C SEA and just really learn about what it is and how Linda and Dana, you are using it in your everyday school based ot practice. So Heather, really quickly. It is a pleasure to have you here. How are you doing this morning?
Heather Kuhaneck
I'm great. Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here and talk about this easy Absolutely.
Jayson Davies
And we have Linda and Dana joining us as well. Linda and Dana, why don't you share just briefly a little bit about the school based setting that you're in?
Linda Kinkade
Well, this is Linda and I. We are in very southern tip of Indiana, close to Kentucky and Illinois, and we work for what's called the Warwick County School Corporation. It's kind of a suburban area outside of the big city. Next to us is Evansville, Indiana, and we have about 10,000 students in our corporation that attend school here, and basically there are over 18 schools that Dana and myself, our two assistants, are able to cover, or have the possibility of covering, serving All the students, along with private schools. So yeah, it's great. We are never bored. There's never a dull moment, and we try to be innovative in doing the best that we can to serve all the students needs that we get to serve and support the teaching staff as well.
Jayson Davies
Absolutely, we kind of have to do it all. The school based ot practitioners got to, got to help everybody. And Dana really quickly. How did I guess we're going to dive into the C SEA. But to what extent do you feel like you had to learn about sensory processing, sensory integration, as a school based occupational therapist, and at what point in your career did you kind of start to hone in on that a little bit?
Dana Hawkins
Well, we're very unique here at Warwick County, because we do have some classrooms that we have labeled Autism Behavior Support classrooms, so those children have a high sensory need, and we complete the assessment called the SPM two on every single one of the students in that classroom, as we have this kind of melting pot of all these sensory needs, it became very obvious to us that the SPM alone was not the tell tale tool that we could use to get everything done, and we really, as occupational therapists, look at the environment. We had built this environment for those students with high sensory needs, but then we needed to have something else to help us to problem solve some of these kids that we couldn't really figure out just using the SPM two alone.
Linda Kinkade
Yeah, we really liked when the C SEA came out, because we had been going in and doing environmental. Scans on our own and making suggestions with to the team of changes that could be made, but then actually having an assessment to really kind of back up and formalize what we had said, really kind of helped our suggestions come to fruition? Yeah, absolutely.
Jayson Davies
And, and let's go over to Heather and talk more about this, because we are here to talk about the CC. I've actually got the C SEA the classroom sensory environment com website pulled up. I love that you have this like ASI links for the C SEA website, and if I scroll down to the articles, of course, your name Heather, as well as Jacqueline Kelly, hers name pop up on a lot of these articles. And I wanted to point that out, because this isn't a assessment tool that someone decided to put together and put it up on Teachers Pay Teachers, or on their own website, perhaps, and just kind of put it out there. This is something that you obviously spent a lot of time going through the proper channels, the proper route, to get to the point where this is a really legit assessment tool. And so before we really dive into the assessment tool itself, I want to hear a little bit about that background and how you went from I understand sensory integration to I need to create this tool for sensory Yeah.
Heather Kuhaneck
So sorry. I was working at Sacred Heart University at the time, and our Dean had given some grant money to fund interprofessional collaboration. And so Jackie is a special educator who also has children with ASD and and so she This was her area as a special educator, and it was my area of practice to work in the schools. And also I had worked in sensory integration clinics. And si was kind of my love. And so those two things really got married together, school based, practice and SI. And early, early on, as I started kind of dipping my toe into doing research, I was seeing kids in the schools that had these intense sensory needs that weren't being met and taken care of in that environment in a way that was helpful for them to be in school. So, so my first, you know, all my first stuff was ot related and sensory related. And then, because of this grant that we were given, Jackie and I started working together and thinking about, well, what, what can we do together? And the idea of looking at the classroom environment as a special educator and an OT together so that we could help teachers, that that really just kind of came up as a way that we could use this grant money. And so we started this project, and that that was really how it got started. We went all over the state of Connecticut, going into classrooms and talking to teachers and and it just, you know, it just kind of blossomed out of that. So I want to thank our dean, Pat Walker, for really getting this started.
Jayson Davies
So awesome. Shout out to Pat All right, so now you talked about that. You decided, you know you have this grant money. You wanted to figure out how your Collaborate. I want to hear how this conversation way, because I'm sure you had this conversation with with Jackie, the SPM to exist. The Wow, the sensory profile also exists. And here you are thinking, You know what? That's not enough. We need this other tool. Did you have that conversation? And kind of, how did that go? Like, how did you decide, You know what? That's not enough.
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah, I'm trying to remember exactly how it started, but I don't know if this was the initial thing, but somewhere in the early conversations her one of her sons, was talking about how much the environment of the classroom impacted his ability to learn. And, you know, he's someone that is on the spectrum, and I remember him talking about that he was in a classroom and he was learning about history, but everything on the walls like maybe it was, I'm going to make this up. It was a math room, right? So everything on the walls was all math, but he was in that classroom learning about history, and he found all the math things really distracting when he was trying to learn about history. So it was something about the visual environment and how distracting that was to him, and that just got us down this path of the visual environment of classrooms, and that's where we started. And I started talking about how as an OT, I would go into classrooms, and I know that teachers love their rooms, and they think they're beautiful, but I would walk in sometimes and be just completely overwhelmed by all the visual in that classroom space. And so we really started initially on this whole visual idea, and then it just, you know, of course, being an OT, you know, it's. Not just about the visual system, right? So it, but then we got into the school bells and the fire drills and the, you know, the chairs squeaking on the floor and the electric pencil sharpeners and and as we started talking about all this stuff, it just, you know, it really became apparent that, wow, we should do something about this. Let's, let's, let's make our project bigger, and let's, you know, start doing some research. And so our initial work was just kind of descriptive, like, what's going on out there? Let's go look at classrooms and see what is the sensory environment in the classroom. And then that blossomed into, Okay, now let's try to measure it and see if we can help fix it, change it, etc.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, wow. So really started with that visual component, and then kind of expanded from there, awesome. Yeah, I've always found it really interesting, because Linda and Dana feel free to speak up for to this point, and Heather as well, if you have this experience. But I would give the SPM, I would give the center profile, and the teacher is filling it out on behalf of the student. And we're learning a lot about that individual student. But then often we go and talk to the teacher and say, hey, look, this student has visual overstimulation. What do you think about changing your classroom? But the way that we're going about that is kind of this roundabout. It's for this one student works, versus the CDC kind of flips it around. Instead of assessing an individual student, you're assessing the entire classroom. So I can imagine that maybe that gets some more buy in. Is that what the three of you have seen?
Linda Kinkade
I mean, go ahead. Oh yeah, we have in we're in the unique situation that these Autism Behavior Support classrooms were new, and we have a very powerful, proactive principal leading our charge, and she was very receptive to our input, and in the team collaboration that we have with these new classrooms. And so we also kind of start with the visual aspect, because teachers do, it's their it's their home away from home. And let me back up, because in the classrooms, we have a tiered system to our classrooms of three different tiers, where it's not tiered correctly, because ask us, but our tier one classrooms are the students that are their first time coming to school out of an ABA facility, so they really need A lot of support, more support than our tier two students that are able to do some individual tasks and are ready to learn, versus our tier three classrooms that those students are going out for Gen Ed. So we took a look at each different level of the classroom needs, again, starting with the visual aspect, because, again, teachers have a lot of stuff that they want in their classrooms, and the board, and the white board, the Promethean boards that they want students to do a lot of from there's a lot of stuff on the sides that we came in and suggested, Why don't we put curtains up and cover some of the extra stuff before, you know, so the student actually knows what to focus on visually. So even before the C SEA, we were trying to make different suggestions of how to eliminate the distractions based on what the classroom needs are. And once the classroom kind of becomes calming, then that also helps the students regulate to be able to learn more. Yeah. So it goes hand in hand the seat, the SPM and the C SEA work so beautifully together.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, and we'll dive into more of that in just a moment, because I think it's important to see how using the SPM with Johnny and using the C SEA with Mrs. Johnson, and how they work together can be really powerful. But before we do that, Heather, you took a moment when we met earlier to kind of walk me through what it actually looks like a little bit with the C SEA. And for those who are listening, many have never heard of the C SEA, and many have never, you know, had the chance to view it, and this is mostly an audio podcast, and maybe we'll do something on the side later, but for those who have never seen it before, can you walk us through a little bit about what it actually looks like from both the OT perspective as well as the teacher perspective in using the C SEA,
Heather Kuhaneck
yeah, so, you know, we we wanted to make it as easy as possible. And you know, in this day and age, we wanted it to be an online tool, partly because we wanted the information that they get back to be. Very visually based, and able to change based on what they input. And so it didn't make sense for us to have kind of a paper report come back. So everything was developed online. And so when the OT or the teacher, either one can go on and start the tool, you have questions to answer. So it looks almost, you know, like a regular, any kind of regular assessment tool that would be online. You answer questions, and it takes you through, First all, the visual environment, the auditory environment, things that children can touch, think how children can move in the classroom. And each section is separate, and it also will, you know, depending on how you answer, it will bring you to the appropriate next question. So if you say no to something, then you don't have to answer all the follow on questions from that original question, so it makes it efficient and a little quicker. But if you say yes to something, then it might ask you about, you know, how much, how often, how strong, etc. So there's kind of step down questions from each question. When you're all done, what you get is a visual picture that is color coded to kind of show you which sensory areas are the most strong in your classroom. So it kind of gives you, like a visual map of your classroom. And what was really important to us when we were developing this, and the reason why we wanted to do it this way is we didn't want teachers to get a score on their classroom and feel like their classroom was good or bad compared to some imaginary average classroom that doesn't exist. You know, back to that idea of teachers love their classrooms, right? They put a lot of time and energy into putting their classrooms together. There's all these videos on YouTube about com. See my third grade, right? Like, they love their rooms, and it is, it's like, it's like, their bedroom at home. And, you know, I think as OTs, we need to be really careful to not go in there and, you know, and like, trash their bedroom, right? Like, oh, this color is all wrong. Oh, this is all wrong. Oh, you have to change this, right? You wouldn't want anyone to do that to your to your house. So, so that was very much on our mind when we were developing this, to not have a score that would say something was good or bad, but just here's a description, a visual map of what is, and then maybe what is works for Joey, but doesn't work for Johnny or, you know, works for whoever you know, Linda, but not, but not for Dana, right? So that it's, it's not about the room being good or bad, it's just really about the match between what this room is set up like right now, which is changeable. And this child that you have in your room right now who won't be there forever, so can we make some modifications that work for this kid in this moment? And I think the other piece of it was just to give teachers ideas of things they could modify that they maybe don't even think about usually, because they definitely think a lot about visual but not so much about the other senses. Yeah, we did find that in our research, so perfect.
Jayson Davies
And I kind of want to piggyback off that, because on the ATP website that, you know, list out where you actually purchase the C SEA, it has this little map that's really cool, because it talks about like the classroom, and then it breaks the classroom into visual, sound, movement, touch and smell. Proprioception is not on there. We have movement, which could be that vestibular. We don't have probe. And then from there, it breaks it up into even further details. And that's kind of what you talked about a moment ago, where depending on what questions you respond to, it'll ask you different questions to get more details. How did you come up with those five visual, sound, movement, touch and smell, but decide to leave rope off. Was there any conscious decision about that? Was it based upon the observations that you conducted? How'd that work out?
Heather Kuhaneck
So yeah, we just, we put probe in with movement, because, you know, we wanted this to be relatable for teachers. We didn't want to use words like vestibular and proprioception, and you know, we were really aware of that also with the SPM that we wanted it to be teacher friendly and parent friendly too, and not use all of our big words that, you know, we understand but nobody else does, and the way that we really see when kids have probe issues is through their movement, or, you know, through their kind of lack of coordination of movement, or their forcefulness and their movement, or it's all really part of movement, or we wouldn't really know, so we just lumped it all in together with movement, and it that makes sense for teachers. And I think you know, OTs that are versed in sensory processing and sensory integration understand that and can and tease that out, you know, and so also in in the classroom, I don't know that you would, you wouldn't really have any kind of activity that was purely probe or purely vestibular, right? It's all put together. Other. You know, if you're jumping on a trampoline or you're out on the playground and you're swinging, or you're going down the slide, or you're climbing or whatever you're doing, it's both together. So it's just movement. And so
Jayson Davies
that was Gotcha. Yeah, gotcha. Similarly, I'm assuming taste isn't in there, because most kids are doing something out for when it comes to taste, it's more in a different environment, not the classroom setting.
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah, it's, it was, you know, we, we did see some when we went looking around the rooms, you know, people having snacks. It was so, so, so variable. It just, you know, you could get a little bit crazy about, like, listing all the different kinds of tastes that could be in a classroom. And so, you know, in in this, in the way that we were worrying, the items we were trying to think about, you know, things that children would do in this classroom, right? So, and then, what can the teacher really see, etc, right? So, it's not so much about the child tasting something. It's about, does the teacher provide things to taste in the classroom? And that's so variable between the different teachers and the different grades, and, you know? So it wasn't a huge focus,
Jayson Davies
yeah, yeah. And I think that is something to, I mean, very and maybe Linda and Dana, you might be able to speak to this. I think the the amount of referrals and actual assessment intervention that we do around, you know, feeding and tasting and all that is so minimal in school based ot compared to, you know, the students are overwhelmed with all the visuals in the room or the sounds going on. So I think you hit the hit the right spots to focus on.
Dana Hawkins
Yeah, I think the biggest that we can see also is when it comes to taste, she's absolutely right. You know, the kids have snacks. And as far as the school environment goes, those children that are so highly picky, they're typically bringing their own lunches and their own snacks to school that are their preferred items. So we don't really get too involved in that area. But what is interesting is when it comes to smell, one thing that we found that was just something we hadn't even thought about, and that what's beautiful about the C SEA is when it asks those questions and you start really diving into it with the teacher, there are things on there that you're like, Oh, I did not even think about that. And we had a very unique situation where within our Autism Behavior Support classrooms, because these children are picky, a teacher was bringing an air fryer into the classroom to heat up chicken nuggets because of the texture of it, because of the way that the kids wanted it. And whenever. But we were trying to figure out why children, why we were struggling with these kids kind of getting very dysregulated of an afternoon. And as we dove into the C SEA, we realized that it was actually the smell from the air fryer that was setting off so many kids within that classroom, and it was a simple movement of moving the air fryer to a different classroom outside of their natural environment, so the kids were not smelling that subtle smell from the air fryer that was just completely just regulating them. Wow, yeah,
Jayson Davies
and we all know that air fryer smells do not go away easily. So that smell lingers, all right. And yeah, so Heather, if you're looking for another project, maybe we need a C SEA, except for the cafeteria.
Heather Kuhaneck
Oh, my goodness, the cafeteria is set we did when Jackie and I first started this, our initial foray out into the schools. We did measurements in the cafeteria. We brought a decibel meter, we brought a light meter. The cafeteria is just so so so loud we didn't get into, you know, at that point, if there are tools now that can measure smells, and there probably are, we didn't have any of those when we went at that point, so we weren't measuring smells, but, but just the noise. Oh my goodness. It was really, really eye opening. And most OTs know the cafeteria is really loud, but to actually go with the decibel meter and measure it.
Linda Kinkade
We did. We did that our in our school, trying to do some of the every moment counts, the Sue basic, I was gonna say the the cafeteria program, yeah, yeah, comfortable cafeteria. And when we took decibel measurements, it was just below a rock concert. And, yeah, so and, of course, there's so many correlations between cafeteria and behavior referrals of the gen ed students, because they're all trying to scream a bunch above each other. And yeah, the cafeterias, we try to avoid them as much as possible for personal reasons.
Jayson Davies
So yeah, yeah. It is a hard, very difficult place. I mean, I know from my experience, typically it is not a teacher in the cafeteria. You had a few paraprofessionals in the cafeteria. The same thing, my wife's an assistant principal. Same thing, usually paraprofessionals assuming that they can actually find people that want that pair of professional role, and oftentimes I feel like it's their staff, because it's a $20 an hour job that's often doesn't include benefits, and it's not a, not a great job. And so it's hard to get people to want that job. And then it's just chaotic. It is just simply chaotic in there. And so the cafeteria is definitely a tricky place. Let's go ahead and take a break. We lost Heather. I'm sure she'll be right back. All right, so we'll move on from the cafeteria here. Heather, earlier, you mentioned going out and kind of observing schools, and I also talked about how this obviously wasn't a tool that just, you know, came together overnight or over a few weeks, you guys did your due diligence, you put out articles describing everything that you did and how this came together. So I want to give you a few moments to kind of share a little bit what that process looked like, because I know a lot of data went into this. So how did that evolve through the data?
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah, so we definitely had multiple stages. I had mentioned earlier that one of the first things we did was just going out to schools and sitting back and just watching, and we just wrote down everything we saw in terms of, what were teachers doing, what were the movement opportunities? What were the sounds? What were the you know, the smells, the sights, etc. We videotaped all the rooms so that we could look at the visuals. We made sure the kids were out of the rooms. When we did that, we had a decibel meter. We measured noise in the classroom. We measured hallway cafeteria. So we were just getting a lot of descriptive data of just what's going on. And we made sure, you know, Connecticut is a small state, but we do have very urban areas, very rural areas. And we went to schools in the inner city, in the, you know, farm land, and we and everything in between. We made sure we went all over the place. And then after that, we did a focus group with teachers. We did some one on one interviews with teachers. Then I think we've made our I'm trying to remember all in order. The order might be a little bit out, but then we made our first draft, and we had teachers look at the draft, and we got their feedback on the draft. Then we went out and we tried to use the draft and actually rate classrooms. Then we had a bunch of student projects. I had ot students doing their capstones. So we had a variety of student projects. And so did Jackie. So our students went and they rated the classroom, and the teacher also rated the classroom. We were trying to get reliability ratings. Jackie had her student teachers go out and rate classrooms and then explore what did they learn by doing that process, we also had our OT students work with teachers to try to rank order what the teachers thought would be the most and least bothersome kinds of things we were trying to get an idea of, you know, If we wanted to rate and give numbers scored to this visual environment. Could we reliably rate which visual environment was more or less stimulating, and we found between the most and the least, yes, but in the middle, not so much. So at that point, we were just like, Okay, we're not going to be able to score things like this. Like, it's just too subjective to be able to score what a classroom looks like. And that was when we decided the whole, you know, we're just not going to score things, and we have good reason to not score things. So, so lots of different steps along the way to get it to where it landed. The one article where we had, we rated a bunch of classrooms, over 150 classrooms, that gave us some descriptive data, which was kind of our first look at just what is out there, what are teachers doing. So that was helpful. The other thing that was really helpful was hearing from the student teachers of what did they learn from doing it? That was helpful for us, in terms of how can we use this, and also just knowing that the teachers did find it helpful, I think, kind of along the lines of what Dana was saying earlier, about just helping you think about things that you might not think about typically, and that that was one thing that the teacher said quite a bit, that they they do mostly focus on the visual, and this helped them see All the other things that they weren't really focusing on, yeah, so that was kind of like all the different steps in a nutshell that got us to where we are.
Jayson Davies
I'm curious, what did you find out? Because I'm sure some of this came up is, what did you find out in terms of what teachers already knew about versus what they did? Know about that. The C SEA was really helping them with, yeah. The OT was helping them with Yeah.
Heather Kuhaneck
The teachers talked a lot about things being distressing or things being overwhelming or over stimulating. So they kind of got that idea in particular around noise and visual. Those were the two, you know, they really seemed to get that, especially for the kid OTs on the spectrum, you know, that loud noises were bothersome and and that certain visuals were bothersome, they really understood that, I think they were less likely to understand that some of the sensory aspects of the classroom could be helpful, that it doesn't always have to be a bad thing. Sensory is not always bad, like some some of the things we do can be helpful for them, and also just that things that are, you know, maybe bothersome or distressing for one child might not be bothersome and distressing for another. And that makes it really complicated, that it's not a one size fits all, and that, you know, even with loud noises. There might be loud noises that some kids like. So, yeah, it would, you know, I think it just the scope of what OTs look at. I think was a little eye opening for teachers, at least, for this, for the student teachers, at least,
Jayson Davies
yeah, and I'm curious now, because I think a lot of people, they, and when I say people, I'm referring kind of to the people that this is designed for teachers. They might take something like this, you see, and look at the results and saying, Hey, these are great. I yeah, I agree with these. Or, Oh, I didn't think about this. But the carryover might not be there, maybe because it's a little bit overwhelming. Now, before we think about people like Linda and Dana and all the other school based ot practitioners listening that can help implement those What did the teachers say once they got the results? Were they saying, Hey, this is great, but I have no way to actually do this. Or were they saying, Great, now I know how to do this. Or, I guess, like, What do teachers actually get when they see the results assuming that an OT or other person is not yet involved?
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah, I mean, I guess first thing I would say is I would hope that there would always be involved, but I'm sure there's going to be times or that's not the case. And so you know what the teachers are going to see, you know, depending on how they fill it out, is my classroom has very strong visual components, or my classroom has very strong auditory components, and maybe I don't have a lot of movement in my classroom, or I do have some strong smells, or I don't have some strong smells, so they just kind of get a visual picture of, sort of where the sensory experiences are more or less in their classroom. And so also with the C SEA, when they click on individual items, it gives them some suggestions. So if they don't have an OT involved, Jackie and I did go, we made suggestions for teachers, you could try this, or you could try this, so at least it gives them some place to start, you know. But I would hope that there would be an OT involved to help really make it right for that particular situation, as opposed to what we did was kind of general, oh, your classroom has a lot of loud sounds you might want to try, you know, XYZ, which was a very general suggestion, as opposed to, you know, for this kiddo that you have, that's where you really need the OT and the teacher to collaborate. And, you know, for Jackie and I, that was really our goal, was to create a tool that people would collaborate around and work together.
Jayson Davies
So, yeah, I guess my question would be, like, without an OT involved, would changes actually be made? Are teachers actually taking this and implementing changes, or really, does it kind of you need that ot on the side to kind of almost to a degree, interpret it a little bit further and help the teacher, because teachers are busy, and like you said, they're very connected to their classrooms. And you know, it's, I think it's nice that telling them your classroom is too visually overstimulating, coming from an assessment is a little bit more softer, I guess, than an OT saying your classroom is very visually overstimulating, like you having this quote, unquote data, like telling you something, is a little bit easier than this person who comes into your classroom two times a month telling you something. And so I just wondering, I guess, if teachers are taking that and actually running with it, or if, typically, an OT is getting involved. And I know we're going to start to transition to how Linda and Dana are using it. But any thoughts on that?
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah, I was actually going to say that maybe they should take this question. You know, I'm not out in the school based practice anymore, so, you know, I'm teaching in academia. So, you know, I. Don't have firsthand experience right now with how our teachers using it, so I'm going to toss that to Linda and Dana perfect.
Dana Hawkins
The biggest thing is a lot of times when the teachers get the C SEA, you know, even with some of our seasoned teachers, you know, first of all, a teacher is usually pretty defensive about how their, you know, bedroom or their classroom looks. And I think our role as OTs, and we spend a lot of time, you know, kind of like you said with the whole terminology, is we try to speak in layman's terms. So especially whenever they get this report, sometimes what we have to do is just focus in on one section as to not to overwhelm them, because I feel like whenever we come in and we say, you need to change this and this and this and this, they become defensive, yeah, and a little bit overwhelmed. So sometimes what we do is we just kind of focus in on one area, bring it down to layman's terms, kind of discuss it with them, simplify it of what they can do and how it's truly impacting the student. Focus in on that one area, and then the next time we go in, okay, let's focus in on a different area. So I feel like whenever we have that interaction with the teacher, we still kind of tiptoe in a way, because we don't want to overwhelm them, because as soon as you overwhelm them, then you've kind of lost a little bit of the body, so we kind of use that as a very gentle conversation with them. The thing is, too It depends on how much a student or a group of students is blowing up that room. So if that teacher is literally pulling their hair out, and they are so incredibly frustrated, we know that's our opportunity, that we can probably hit a good portion of the C SEA, because they're just so desperate for help.
Linda Kinkade
And the other thing that we really know too is we use our psych background in dealing okay with staff sometimes, because if you want to make a change, you find the teacher that wants to make a change the most, and that's where you start. The other thing is relationship. You have to have that relationship with your teaching staff because, yeah, we're not there day in and day out, dealing with the stuff all day long. So who are we to pop in and go, Okay, you need to change this. That does that's you're not going to get the buy in. So you have to have the relationships with the staff, not just on a professional level, but to ask about their family and what they're going to do over break and all the other stuff that goes on day in and day out, to have that trust, so that they will trust us to make the changes that we're suggesting. So it's, it's, it's a whole lot, but it works.
Dana Hawkins
And then the other factor of it is too, with the administration, you know, the C SEA provides the credibility for why we're making those suggestions, and especially whenever consistently going to the administrator and complaining about children being dysregulated, and, you know, they're constantly needing help. When we bring this to the administrator, we, you know, say we have been making suggestions and we have been using the CC, they see that as a credible source, and then that kind of puts some ownership back on the teachers of you know, if you're continuing to have issues with these students because of dysregulation, and we have licensed professionals coming in using assessment tools and kind of giving you suggestions of what to do to help until you do that, I don't Know what you're asking. So it really provides that ability piece to us.
Jayson Davies
That that's a great point. That's something that most evaluation tools don't do because they're so specific to an individual students. So Wow. All right, well, Dane and Linda, you just answered like, the last of my remaining five questions, and I'm just kidding So, but we'll take a quick break, and I actually do want to after the break, I wanted to back up just a little bit and talk about, kind of where you both started with the C SEA, and kind of how you use it in your day to day. So we'll be right back. All right, Linda and Dana, I do want to talk a little bit about how you are using the C SEA day to day, and then kind of go back into that advocacy piece that Daniel was just talking about. But first, how did you two first get involved with using the C SEA? How did you learn about it? Why are
Linda Kinkade
you using it today? Well, I can speak to that because we have been going into the classrooms, in our abs classrooms, and we, again, like I've said, we do have a very powerful, progressive principal that loves us, which is always good, and we she knew we were going into these classrooms, the teachers were having some struggles with and we were doing our environmental scans, and we were coming up with different suggestions. We also. Have monthly team meetings with the with the teaching staff of these classrooms, and it involves the OTs, speech therapists, admin, the teachers, behavior, everyone involved with the in the classroom, we get together and talk about these big things. And so that was an opportunity for us to talk about the environmental concerns that we were seeing in the classrooms, and then, you know, we are always looking and trying to be the best that we can be. And so we came across the CC, and it's like, oh, wow, this might help us. And we were in one of our meetings one of our monthly meetings, and I brought it up, and we were discussing it with the principal, and the principal said, yes, let's get this. I'll buy it. And how many times does a principal say they're going to buy something for OT? Yeah, not after being convinced 18 times, yeah. And so, yeah, we talked about it. And, I mean, it ended up coming out of the OT budget because, of course, we have other buildings that we wanted to use it on, but we tried to get some money out of her, yeah, so I'm not gonna lie, if they're gonna offer, we'll take so she bought other things anyway. So we had that backing. We had that support, and so we jumped on it. And actually, when we started using it, Dana and I started going back into those same classrooms, and it was kind of fun then to see, were we off our mark, and what things that we had seen, it kind of goes, yeah, it was kind of, we didn't get a score on how well we did, which we were very glad, but yeah, but there's always room to learn and grow. And so that's what this tool also helped us as well. And so we've also started, we've got some teachers that we've given had the teachers to do it too, and that just gives them so much more ownership and credibility and another learning opportunity for them, because teachers tend to use the word sensory and kind of blame that for a lot of stuff. And you know, sensory is supposed to either make or break someone's life, and it doesn't really work that way. So it's another learning tool for everyone involved that gets to use it. So thank you, Heather, so much for creating this.
Dana Hawkins
I'm glad it's being used and it's helpful,
Jayson Davies
right, right. Always nice to have something you create be helpful. Okay, so you've got this tool now, between, yeah, hopefully it would come out the school budget came out of the OT budget, but you've got this tool. What was your initial thinking about? It sounds like you were initially planning to use it with the classrooms you wanted to go into a select number classroom that you had identified with, the classroom that had autistic students inside the classroom, is that kind of generally how it started. You started using this in select classrooms.
Dana Hawkins
So we did use it in select classrooms, and we chose the classrooms that we obviously had a very high sensory need within that classroom, because those are the classrooms that needed the most help at the moment, and we have found the tools so incredibly useful that it's almost been the missing piece to our team meetings where we have multiple licensed professionals all sitting around a table problem solving these issues that are occurring within the Classroom. It's kind of in the missing piece, the aha moment, that's kind of brought everything together. So now that we have been using it with those highly specialized classrooms, we're now branching out to use it within our other classrooms, where maybe you have a few kids that have a very high sensory needs, but others are not struggling, but we're using this to kind of bring it in to help decipher and, you know, figure out these kids that we're still continuing to struggle with.
Linda Kinkade
Right now, we're able to think bigger and when we're doing classroom observations and more of our gen ed classrooms. I mean, I was in a classroom a few weeks ago, and I was so overwhelmed. I don't know how the students were able to learn in this classroom. It was at the point I thought, Oh, gosh. Even the teacher was so distracting in her outfit that I thought, Well, maybe it's a dress up day, and it wasn't. So it was very scary. So I would love to give this teacher the CC to have her just kind of look at her own classroom. I mean, there's so many teachable moments and other uses.
Heather Kuhaneck
I. Yeah, Linda, you just made me think about Jackie and I had talked about years ago. We never got around to doing it, but it would have been a really great project. And if anyone's listening, needs a doctoral project to have the teachers do an adult SPM on themselves, yeah, and then do the CC with the classroom to just look at like to the teachers that are, you know, maybe they're sensory seekers. To their rooms look like that, etc, etc. Anyway, all I'm
Linda Kinkade
gonna say is the student I was observing was not the issue in that class. You can edit that.
Jayson Davies
Oh, no. I think we've all been there. We've all we've all seen that. Yeah. Okay, so it sounds like, in general, you are using, both of you are using the CC outside of the IEP system, per se. Is that fair to say, in the sense that you are not using it as part of an IEP evaluation tool?
Linda Kinkade
Like, no, no. This is bonus.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, I like that. Because the reason that I'm thinking is because I'm often getting asked, you know, anywhere, email, Instagram, direct messages, all that fun stuff, like, how do I conduct whole classroom screenings? And this is kind of like what I'm seeing as the perfect tool, right? You could pair this potentially with a classroom observation, and you would have a lot of information.
Linda Kinkade
Well, this would lend itself to a whole nother discussion on caseload versus workload. And we love the workload model, and have basically been doing it and not telling anyone, yes, that's the right way to do it.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, that's how I started it.
Linda Kinkade
I mean, there's people that still ask caseload, and we get the job done and we and we do a good job. So I mean, caseload versus workload in our system, that's kind of there's some people that will always focus on caseload, and we let them. So this is part of workload, and this is part of making a change in the educational environment that needs to happen across the board. In every classroom, in every building, there's myself. I love it.
Jayson Davies
Now going piggybacking on that a little bit because you're doing the CC with a teacher. Now, let's say you did the CC with a teacher at the beginning of the school year, but you do have an evaluation for a student now in January, is there a chance that you're going to do use the SPM or the sensory profile, and then kind of almost refer back to the CC that you did at the beginning of the school year with that
Dana Hawkins
classroom, absolutely, because I feel like you can retrospectively, go back to the CC to get those pertinent, pertinent pieces that may be contributing to the dysfunction of the child that you see within that SPM, and that's what's so beautiful, is you can do the CC at the very beginning and have that information and that data that could then be referred back to for an entire school year. Now, where you're going to run into difficulties would be if a teacher did the CC, they looked at the report, then they made multiple changes to their classroom. But then by the time you get to January or February, you have a student who is showing you know, significant sensory dysfunction. You may need to repeat the CC, because that environment has been changed. So you then need to look at that environment now versus back in, like August or September, when the classroom, you know, whenever the teacher first filled it out, if there were significant changes that occurred.
Linda Kinkade
And we were just having the discussion yesterday, Dana and I, because we talk about the CC all the time now on, we really do. But when would be a good time to have to have the teaching staff complete this. And we were talking, well, maybe the beginning of the year, but then, you know, the beginning of the year is so crazy, you get your classroom ready and yada yada, and then the end of the year you're tired, you're burned out, you want to throw half your stuff away. So we actually have a professional development day about mid September that we thought, well, maybe that would be a good time to have some teachers. You know, they've kind of been in a little bit. They're kind of a little bit in the zone. So how about mid September? You do the CC, and let's just see where you are and see where we can make changes if needed, and get things under control before we get into the chaos of the holiday season. It's everyone off.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah, I love that. I mean, like, I'm coming up and I don't know, Heather, if you've done, like, professional development, like at conferences on the CC, but, like. Like, I can almost imagine doing a professional development in the school, you know, with so many teachers there, and kind of going through the CC together in a one hour session, and kind of just showing them, like, how it works out, and kind of the changes that, you know, use one teacher as an example and go through it. Alternatively, I could see ot practitioners, you know, before your PD day in September, giving it out to teachers a month before that, or maybe two weeks before that, letting them complete it, and then using that data to then drive a PD, if your school will allow you to be one of the PD providers and kind of, hey, you know what? We had 10 teachers complete the CC. These are some of the results, and we want to provide you with ideas based upon those results. Linda and Dana, I don't know, maybe you're already doing that, but.
Dana Hawkins
Not as we've been discussing. You know, we get to this mid year, and we start thinking, Okay, next year, what are our goals? What are we thinking? What are we going to provide to our staff for their PD day, and that was definitely within the discussion of this would be an excellent tool to use with those teachers, because you're so fresh into the year, even in September, you know you've been in there, you got your feet wet, you're starting to know the kids. You're starting to understand the kids. And this may help to help with some of the sensory dysfunction that may come around with those kids. Because, as we know, you know that new environment coming back from summer break, you know they need that first, like 30 days to just kind of acclimate to the new environment of being in the classroom. So it's allowing that newness to wear off, to see what you're left with with these kids, and to see which ones are going to have those sensory dysfunction, you know, aspects. But the thing that we're hoping is once the teachers start to truly undergo the CC and start to look at things almost with a different lens, you know, they may understand things a little bit differently from their environmental aspect, and how it can be contributing to some of that sensory dysfunction that they're seeing within those kids. And so therefore, subsequent school years, things may be a little bit more proactively based, rather than reactively based.
Linda Kinkade
Yeah, always the goal as far as professional development, as long as I've been in the school system, there's never been a PD set up to gain more knowledge for OT, so shocker, so we always have something in our back pocket to do. PD wise, to help staff, whether they want to want us or not, we're ready and willing to do it.
Jayson Davies
Love that. Love that I am always so happy anytime. Like, it doesn't happen a lot, but we actually get districts that will reach out to me and say, Hey, can we use your conference or courses that you offer and provide them for our OT professionals? And I'm always like, yes, like, usually a high discount. I just want people to use them like, yes. Ot practitioners are sick of just being said, Hey, you have to go to this. PD, course that's designed for teachers and sit there. Or, hey, we don't have anything for you. Just have a day to yourself and meet as a team and yeah, do something.
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah.
Jayson Davies
So I love that. I want to kind of do a good bad, and instead of ugly, good, bad in OMG with like, because OMG can go either way, good or really, really bad, right? And the scenarios that Linda and Dana that you've experienced after having teachers take the CC, what have been some of the really good experiences, and what have been some of the more tough experiences that you've experienced with teachers trying to follow up on the results.
Dana Hawkins
Well, I think the biggest thing is just trying to understand each other through our own lenses. And I think what was very interesting when we did the CC is we did it with our classroom where those students are getting pushed out into gen ed. So of course, we come in and we do our environmental scan, you know, we have the teacher go ahead and undergo the CC and kind of do that, and the results came back. And here we have a classroom of autistic individuals with lots of sensory needs, but they're regulated enough that they're pushed out into Gen Ed, okay? And so it comes back and it shows all the visual changes that we need to make in order to calm down the environment. In with our OT brain, we're sitting here going, yeah, we've got to really calm down the visuals. But the teacher then said, but do we? Because if I am pushing my kids out to Gen Ed, I need them also to be able to learn and function within that environment that has a lot of visuals, because in order for them to succeed in their push out into Gen Ed, this is the environment that they're going to be faced with. And that caused me to take a step back and say, you know, you're absolutely right. This may indicate that we need. To do a lot of, you know, visual changes to this room, but maybe we don't, because if they're being pushed out, you know, in her classroom, the way that we have it set up, there are kids in that classroom that are all the way from kindergarten all the way up to fifth grade. So it's not as though they're only getting pushed out into one grade to where we can make changes. This is school wide. And I'm like, you know, until we are able to really get the understanding and knowledge out to our general education teachers and get the buy in from them to understand within their gen ed classroom how the visuals are very distracting to learning. I was like, You're right. In order to allow these kids to truly succeed within the next school year, we kind of have to let this one go. And that was just kind of a very much of an eye opening experience to me, to just be, you know, we have these results, and you have to be kind of sensitive to what environment, what teacher, back to the psychology of the teacher, how you're approaching with them, and kind of picking and choosing your battles as to what do we really want to do in this situation?
Jayson Davies
Yeah, that's why I love occupational therapy. I love our PEO model, because you kind of just hit it right there with the PEO, right? We can adjust the environment, but we can also adjust the occupation and the person. And sometimes you got to tweak all three. Sometimes you think, you know, it's not worth tweaking the environment in this in this instance. And of course, as soon as you go to a different environment, it all starts all over again. But no, I love that, because you're right. We can't tweak everything. We can't We can't change the environment for one kid in every environment that they will ever be in. And so sometimes we have to focus on the other two areas and see if we can do other things to support the students. So love that. All right, Linda, what about you?
Linda Kinkade
We call that the Walmart guest, because it's amazing how, like, if you can handle Walmart, you should be able to handle anything. And I mean, for real, and yeah. And, I mean, just think of it. Yeah, there's a lot going on there. So yeah. And it's interesting whenever you see kids out at Walmart and they're able to handle things, but then you see some little thing at school that they can't handle. So yeah. So you have to again, look at the whole picture. We're not going to do. Maybe we should develop a C SEA for Walmart, for industry.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, that would be great. Oh yeah, absolutely, for retail and whatnot like that would be a legit thing. We're going to see Linda start taking kids on a bus to Walmart to evaluate them for their.
Dana Hawkins
That would be our weekly field trip of we go to Walmart. And by the way, we may be working through the grocery list that we've printed. It may be ours, it may not, but we'll make sure it's functional.
Jayson Davies
There you go.
Linda Kinkade
All activities you can do.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, yeah. I that's do you guys do your classrooms? Do some of them do a weekly field trip and like the adult transition, or is that just your weekly field trip? They don't do
Heather Kuhaneck
weekly but they do field trips. But I would say maybe once every couple months, maybe once a month of a teacher is very proactive, but definitely not weekly.
Linda Kinkade
Yeah, and that happens more at the middle and high school level, within more of our functional academic classrooms.
Jayson Davies
Yeah, perfect. Yeah. No. I think there's a lot of applications here for the C SEA, and I definitely think right, like, we need to understand the classroom, but there's so many other environments that we need to better understand. And there's a, you know, a large there's a decent amount of not information, I would say there is information, but there's a decent amount of societal push for having, especially autistic individuals, working in various sectors, especially within the tech sector. And so I could see a version where it is related to the workplace model. So another project for you.
Heather Kuhaneck
Heather, yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, I'm getting close to retiring. That's a project for a doctoral student. I have a whole long list anyone who wants to go back to school, just email me. I have a whole list of project ideas for you. But yeah, we did. We talked about it. That would be such a huge project, because there's so many different workplaces, but, um, but I am fascinated by, you know, how do people choose where to work, and how does that relate to their own sensory needs? And, you know, why is this environment good for you in terms of a workplace? It's definitely interesting.
Jayson Davies
So, you know, be really interesting. We just had Matthew Hill and brand on the podcast a few weeks ago, and he works in an adult transition population, and once a month they basically they have a month long cycle where they prep for a work experience outing. And and then they actually conduct that work experience outing. And so I can absolutely see him using the C SEA, giving it to the actual owner of the business a month before letting them do that, bringing the results into the training of the work experience for the adult, you know, transition population, and using that to train for the actual work experience. Like, oh my goodness, it'd be insane, but yeah, so many ideas,
Heather Kuhaneck
yeah, you know, the the items on the C SEA were so specific to elementary schools. Like, not all of it would be applicable, but some of it could be, or at least the idea of it could be, and somebody could take the idea and go to a workplace and basically do the same thing. We just started with just describing what exists, and that's how we got our items.
Jayson Davies
So Heather, to your point, though, you mentioned in there, it's primarily designed for elementary school. But I do want to come back to Linda and Dana and ask, have you used this at all within the middle school or high school setting. Have you had a middle school teacher use the C SEA
Linda Kinkade
at all? Well, we haven't yet. I mean, we're back to us doing it so, but I do see, I think that we have some of our middle school classrooms that would still be able to do the elementary level of this. I mean, basically, environment is environment, so I think it would very easily lend itself to both middle and high school, and there's a huge need for it, because people still have the same issues, no matter where they are. If it's truly sensory, it's going to come out. Yeah, I think, I think the challenge
Heather Kuhaneck
that would is going to come from like the middle school and the high school level is, you know, within the elementary level, those kids are pretty much in one classroom through the day, and as you get to the middle and the high school level, you transition to different classrooms. And every classroom has a completely different feel. And so I think in order to appropriately do the C SEA, you would essentially need to do it on every single class that a student visits through the day, if they're having to be able to relate it back to where they're having sensory
Linda Kinkade
dysfunction at and I think there would also need to be a component to look at hallways and transitions, because that's a lot of time that is spent in the middle and high school buildings of that transition and, Oh, that's a whole nother sensory experience for everyone. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Jayson Davies
All right. Well, Linda, Dana Heather, we didn't get quite into our our ability to talk more about like getting administrators on board and advocating for this, but you sprinkled some stuff in there. Obviously. You both had a great principal who really facilitated you, talked a little bit about focusing on the teachers who want support, and that's something I always talk about as well, but unfortunately, I think we're out of time for the advocacy part. Are there any last words that the three of you would like to share when it comes to using the C SEA in a school based occupational therapy setting, any one final tip that you have?
Heather Kuhaneck
Yeah, I actually back a bunch of questions ago, when we were talking about kind of getting teacher buy in, one of the things that popped into my head was using single subject research methods to collect data for an individual student. So, you know, if teachers really are sort of like, I don't really want to change this, sometimes we can get them, you know, will you just change it for a month? Right? Let's collect some baseline data before you make this change. And I'm just going to use an example. Let's say, you know, again, using the name Johnny, right? Johnny's been hitting another kid every time something happens. How many times a day does he hit for these five days? Now, let's make this change, and let's keep data again. And does making this change in the classroom change the behavior? And then the teacher can see that, yeah, if I make this change in the classroom, this behavior gets better for this particular student, then hopefully they're more likely to want to keep that change in the classroom. So if you're really doing single subject method, you would, you know, you do baseline, you do a change, then you go back to baseline, then you do a change again. That's sort of gold standard. But sometimes you don't even need to, if the teacher sees that, like, oh, wow, this really seemed to help. Then, good, we're done. We just leave it there and but, you know, getting them to just be willing to do it for a short time, and collecting that data helps the OT too, because maybe you make a suggestion that actually doesn't work, and then, okay, so now let's not do that if it's not working. So the data collection piece is really important. That's my last tip. I think my biggest tip is allowing the teacher to complete. The C SEA, rather than the occupational therapist going in and sitting in the classroom to complete it for them. Because I feel like perspective is everything, and we are trained in our task analysis and to look at things very analytically. And I think whenever the teacher actually sits down to start filling out the tool, they start to get some understanding of the lens that we look through each and every day, and how we really break things down and start to analytically look at things sometimes just them, completing the tool alone without even seeing the results, allows itself for an aha moment where the teacher is like, oh my gosh, I did not even realize how many visual distractions I had within my classroom until I started actually objectively looking at it, counting and filling out this form. So definitely having the teachers fill it out themselves.
Linda Kinkade
And then I think another important thing after the teacher completes it, then that would be prime time for the OT to come back and say, Hey, how'd that go? Do you have any questions? What can I help you with? And that's a beautiful time for collaboration and support with the teachers. And you know, it'd be nice if teachers, whenever they have if they have paraprofessionals in their classroom, to also help with the assessment, give them some ownership, because the more ownership and buy in you get, the more support and follow through you're going to have. So that is a wonderful time. Then to follow up and say, Hey, and it may be okay, well, we want to change this. And then the OT can say, Okay, well, I can help you with that. Or here's some ideas that we can make this work. So just that follow up piece, yeah, yeah.
Jayson Davies
And earlier, I think it was Linda, you mentioned maybe Dana, the team professional meetings. And I think that even if this can just help you get into the door, right, because you talked about your principal liking the data and showing the principle of the data, and then the principal may be saying, Hey, could you come to our third grade team collaboration next weekend, share a little bit about this with the team. Like that is an opening that you can use to start making changes. So I love it. Linda. Dana Heather, thank you all so much for being here. Really appreciate your time, your energy, your enthusiasm here this morning, and we'll definitely have to stay in touch to see what more goes on with the C SEA and in your ot practice. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, that wraps up episode 193 of the OT school house podcast. As always, I want to extend a huge thank you to Heather, Linda and Dana for sharing their expertise on using the C SEA assessment with us today, the insights that you all have shared really give us an idea of a why the C SEA even exists and kind of how it came to be, as well as how we can use it in our day to day practice to support teachers better understand their classroom environments and better help shape those classroom environments to support the students that we serve. Now, if you found this episode helpful and want to learn more about implementing tools like the C SEA in your practice, I invite you to check out the OT schoolhouse collaborative. This is where you can access exclusive resources, monthly professional development courses and direct mentorship from me in the group setting to help take your school based ot practice to the next level, head on over to OTSchoolHouse.com, slash collab to join our community of dedicated school based ot practitioners. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast as well, so you don't miss our upcoming episodes. And if you found value in today's conversation, please share with a colleague who could benefit from learning about the C SEA as well. Until next time, keep doing amazing things.
Amazing Narrator
Thank you for listening to the OT schoolhouse podcast for more ways to help you and your students succeed right now, head on over to OTSchoolHouse.com Until next time class is dismissed.
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