Kindness Savant Will Pixelate, Chapter 3 — The Edutaining Behaviour Detectives

The period of time you have between first walking into the classroom with your class, and when you start to speak or act and either establish or lose the interest of the group. If there is a mathematical equation that can spotlight all the mechanics that spin in this brief duration, it would surely exist as a natural tattoo within the DNA of what we refer to in our school as The Edutainer. There is quality of spirit that The Edutainer embodies that we seek out as part of the key formula that gives rise to master practitioners in the education of children on the autism spectrum. It is a little too easy to say that they are ninety percept entertainer and ten percent educator, although this does capture the importance that The Edutainer places on engaging the mind of a young student. Not content to simply allow the curriculum subject matter to speak for itself as an object of inherent value, The Edutainer knows that the curriculum is just a stone that means precious little until it is juggled or skipped across a pond. Like all good orators, The Edutainer knows meaning is to be found not in the words themselves, but in the way the words are delivered, it is all in the delivery, this is the crucial factor that either ignites the interest of the class when they first notice that someone is out the front of the classroom, or else gives the class reason to consider other alternatives for entertainment and distraction.

Two years ago when I was speaking to educators in New Zealand I was wrapped over the knuckles by one of the attending participants for using the term Edutainer. They contended that it was a mass cheapening of the value that a teacher brings to the classroom, to consider that a teacher should only function as a tool for entertainment, like a walking version of a less than pedagogically sound video game claiming to be educational while being instead just a two dimensional gimmick. I appreciated the critique, as it is a positive consideration to keep in mind for any intervention that wanders in the classroom with shiny bells and whistles and little substance within, and it also gave me the opportunity to compare the value of what we try to render with the term Edutainer in likeness to the value that we find in play. The value of play and its role in the healthy development of children is now a foundational given in most every educational context, although its realisation in actual classroom implementation is something that from my observations is still quite limited. Parents, educators and therapists all recognise the ways that children need to be given the opportunity to explore, imagine and make decisions according to a narrative of their own creation, and that genuine educational revelations are generated within this space of pure play. So too should the value of The Edutainer not be reduced to a state of seeing educational benefit diminish behind a facade of clowning around out the front of the classroom, but rather recognising that it is within this clowning around that education actually finds its heart and can begin to bloom. The old adage of what we learn with pleasure we never forget cannot be more true for our motto of what The Edutainer delivers.

I took a mid-morning stroll around our school the other day with the idea of The Edutainer in my mind, and I was so thrilled with all the amazing examples of practice that I observed. In one classroom, a teacher had a long wooden board suspended from the ceiling at one position in the room, with a list of visual numeracy concepts attached to the front of the board, and a student was laying on his stomach on a hammock suspended from another point in the ceiling, and he was swinging towards the board of numeracy concepts while the teacher stood close by and pointed to the board, prompting the student to talk about and engage with the ideas presented while he was able to swing back and forth on the hammock in what looked to all the world like Sesame Street meets Cirque du Soleil.

In another room, a teacher had a green fabric screen suspended across the front of the classroom, and she was sitting with a Tiger head on, with students beside her wearing an assortment of crafted animal masks, as they filmed themselves delivering a morning news report on the ecological state of local bushland environments. The next classroom along was empty, and I looked out to the vegetable garden near the chicken coop to see the class teacher and her students playing in the soil with Lego characters, microscopes and iPads, creating comic strip narratives imagining a space colony of Lego characters who have crash landed on some alien planet that looks like Earth except all the flora and fauna in the area are absolutely gigantic. The teacher told me to check out what another colleague was up to, he and a few fathers who were volunteering for the morning had taken the class for a walk through the bush all wearing Minecraft style costumes created out of boxes, and when I caught up to where they were, the collective of explorers were using loose objects from the area such as large branches, rocks and fragments of metal broken away from a now obsolete nearby rail line, to build a bridge over a metre wide creek running through the bushland that would be capable of allowing a Sphero, a robotic ball that can be operated by a smart device, to roll from one bank of the creek, over the bridge, and down to the other side. A few different variations of bridge were being trialled, and lucky for Sphero being waterproof, as it was spinning into the running water of the creek on a few dozen occasions while the constructions were taking place. The most successful bridge ended up being one that used parallel straight wooden branches to cradle Sphero as it rolled nestled between the branches, replicating in a fashion the physics of the nearby abandoned rail line.

But being an Edutainer doesn’t necessarily mean starting every day wearing a Tiger head and building loose object constructions in local bushland, although I certainly wouldn’t dissuade anyone wanting to go down that path. Walking past other classrooms, I saw a teacher strumming a pink acoustic guitar and singing a song about how to say hello when you meet someone new, and in this simple act of singing a song to her class the teacher had switched on all the bright lights for her students, I could see the sense of ease and trust that the students were enveloped in, the sense of flow and attention being composed within the culture of the classroom as a result of this musical and very human act of relational connection. This is how The Edutainer works, building on the cores of the previous two chapters - The Edutainer knows who the students in the class are, and employs the principles of Universal Design for Learning to establish connections with every individual student in a manner not pre-determined by expectations of how a classroom should operate.

What is ironic in part about this notion is that there is actually little more traditional than a teacher singing out the front of the classroom, or constructing a bridge across a stream, or creating stories out of toys in the dirt, or even the physical gross motor trapeze work in the classroom with the hammocks. This is not a new pedagogy riding the wave of some invented future schooling, this is a refocusing of the lens cast into the beating pulse of what is interesting to children and how we can render our current approaches to teaching, with the plethora of curriculum outcomes to be engaged across the year, into a vision of schooling that gives rise to true education, particularly, as always, for those students who are always in the front of my mind, our children on the autism spectrum for whom this style of teaching is not simply a beneficial paradigm, but an absolute requisite for finding any success within and beyond school.

There is to my tonal rejoicing of the qualities of The Edutainer a criticism that could readily be made here, that the whole conceptualisation and description of The Edutainer is too full of poetry and fleeting descriptions of spirited school practice to actual capture with any accuracy what this philosophy actually entails. To this I would say, with absolutely no intention of tying to slyly dodge the critique, that this is because it is within the inherent quality of The Edutainer to represent, for lack of a better expression, more of the art than of the science. If I could sidle up to Nietzsche for a moment, I might borrow his dichotomy from The Birth of Tragedy as relating to his description of two polar opposite representations of spirit as established out of ancient Greek theatre — the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In the Dionysian spirit we have a representation of character that is passionate and full of unbridled emotion, not to be constrained within schedules and ordered routines and neat checklists of jobs to get done, the Dionysian is in love with music and inventing wild new ways of representing and engaging the world and, as Nietzsche so beautifully put it, to have chaos in oneself so as to be able to give birth to a dancing star. The Apollonian is at the other end of the spectrum, it is an orderly mode of being, of being calmly attentive to the details, there is more of the science here than of the art in a sense, there is a freedom from unrestrained emotion, allowing for a more considered, gentle glow of structure and form allowed to take hold. It is with little surprise that I would align The Edutainer closely within the camp of the Dionysian, and it is as a result of this that anyone seeking to unlock the spirit of The Edutainer should know that there is no checklist of qualities that allow a measured, scientific approach to engaging this mode of delivery, it is something that needs to be generated from within the annals of ones own personal perspectives on life and on passion for teaching and on the potential of children beyond multiple choice formulations of success. It is in this way very much teaching as art, with all the poetry and dancing that goes into describing it.

This is not all that I am suggesting teaching children on the autism spectrum is about though. The title of this chapter is not The Edutainer, it is The Edutaining Behaviour Detectives. For while we must engage the Dionysian spirit of The Edutainer, we must also consider the need for the Apollonian equivalent, The Behaviour Detective. To transition into a description of the orderly and diagnostic world of The Behaviour Detective, I will make reference to some of the key influences related to student achievement as published in John Hattie’s book Visible Learning for Teachers.

Of the top ten interventions that Hattie establishes, ranking the effect sizes of meta-analyses he scores for his Visible Learning project, the majority are within what we would consider as base requirements for most any special education teacher, but particularly in our setting we would align them very closely with the daily practice of The Edutainer. Having a sensitivity and awareness of Piagetian program is one of the top impact interventions, which involves focusing on the thinking processes of children rather than making an explicit focus simply on lesson outcomes, avoiding the imposition of adult ways of thinking onto children, and being aware of the Piagetian stages that children progress through with their thinking, from the sensorimotor stage through to formal operational thinking. This is the bread and butter of The Edutainer, to focus inherently on the thinking processes of children, respecting the need to engage the interest of children and to then tailor learning experiences that allow children of all ages and developmental needs to construct new levels of understanding and to problem solve situations and scenarios with increasing degrees of complexity.

Teacher credibility is another of the interventions listed amongst the top influencers on student achievement and one that strikes directly at the core of what The Edutainer embodies — a projection of confidence with regards to knowing what the plan is for the school day, of sharing this openly and respectfully with students, and in being proud of this plan for the day, knowing that it is not just a list of boxes to tick, but rather it is something that is going to be a source of inspiration, excitement and challenge for the class. For a student to enter a classroom where this is the tone set immediately upon entering is a very powerful thing, regardless of the perceived processing capacities of a child, you can see on the faces of some of our youngest and most high support need students that they react so very differently when an adult in the room displays mature tenets of trust, of being competent in providing the right classroom experiences, of having an energy and a dynamism that sponsors eager attention and high levels of interest, and of having the sort of classroom immediacy that allows The Edutainer to recognise a teachable moment and to go with it, not to worry about an Apollonian timetable of lessons to get through, but to take a moment of special interest for students and to maximise its impact completely, to run with the moment for as long as possible with a completely Dionysian devotion to passionate curiosity and a fervent exploration of new and unfolding ideas.

Other high impact influencers on achievement that Hattie notes are closely related to the idea of pitching the right level of learning activity at the appropriate processing capacity and need of the child, similar to the aforementioned awareness of Piagetian stages of thinking processes that children progress through, but with a more direct focus on being able to match a particular learning strategy to a child who is projecting a specific need for that intervention. Response to Intervention is one framework that Hattie mentions as it has a focus on providing systematic assistance to students who are experiencing challenges with particular areas of schooling, and this again is closely aligned with another framework noted, the use of Comprehensive Interventions for students with additional learning needs, which similarly places a focused emphasis on the teacher being aware of the right learning strategy to support a present learning need. These strategies place a responsibility on The Edutainer to be a highly observant diagnosing professional in the classroom, not as a teacher who simply delivers content, but as one who takes up the goals noted in the first chapter in this essay, on getting to know each individual child on a level that provides insight into who they are, how they function and what the right intervention is going to be to suit the needs of the child. It is something that gets better and more finely attuned in educators the more time they spend observing students in the classroom, which unfortunately is something that can be hard won to come by at times.

I was amazed when I first started to do Educational Outreach work and was afforded the time and opportunity to sit in a classroom and observe what was going on while the classroom teacher was teaching - I felt like I’d received a years worth of professional development in three hours, just being able to sit and watch how students react to the behaviours of the teacher and the behaviours of peers around them, and to their own behaviours as well, and all the little moments that happen within the weave and flow of a lesson that you miss out on when you’re the teacher trying to facilitate a dozen different responses all at once. Jugyokenkyu, or Lesson Study, the Japanese professional development framework of teachers observing each other, collaborating together on developing and improving lessons, and then implementing and further observing these lessons in evolving cycles of practice, is an approach that definitely addresses the benefits of this approach to being a better diagnosing professional in the classroom. A variation of this methodology, more specifically focused on teaching a mini-lesson to students, video recording the lesson and then discussing the lesson in collaboration with professional peers, is also mentioned, not coincidentally, as one of the top ten influencers on student achievement that Hattie notes, titled Microteaching.

This squarely places us in position to properly address the other half of The Edutaining Behaviour Detective, as this need to be a keen observer and diagnoser of need in the classroom is what constitutes the bones of the Behaviour Detective. I first heard Autism Spectrum Australia’s manager of Positive Behaviour Support, Tom Tutton, use the phrase Behaviour Detective as part of a workshop we facilitated on the skills involved in being attentive to the core mantra at the heart of behaviour support, which is that all behaviour is a form of communication. When we really understand the deep centre of this simple phrase it takes away the fear and the judgement that can sometimes be directed towards challenging behaviours that students might exhibit. If we can stop from taking a reactive stance towards challenging behaviours by imposing our predesigned expectations of what we assume a child should be like and should be doing in a model of personal reality that we have in our minds, we can instead start by taking on the calm, orderly, emotionally measured Apollonian response of the Behaviour Detective by simply asking, What is this behaviour trying to communicate.

We can learn something of the measured approach of the Behaviour Detective from Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesmen and dramatist who was also a tutor and advisor to the Roman emperor Nero. One of Seneca’s principle ideas that rose from Stoic philosophy is the notion that when we react negatively and with destructive emotions to an event that has occurred, such as a challenging behaviour that a child has exhibited in the classroom, it is because we must personally believe in a reality where children do not exhibit challenging behaviours, and so we are absolutely shocked and aghast to think that such an incident would occur. Our frustration and at times our anger rises out of wanting and hence expecting the world to be different than it is, however Seneca would note that this is an unnecessary conflict with the agency we have over our own freedom of choice in relation to the trajectory of the universe. We have the freedom to elevate our perspective above the immediacy of the classroom and to be able to take on a bigger world view, to recognise that challenging behaviours are going to occur because children are going to communicate with us in whatever manner is most readily available and most effective to them given their particular skill set at any given time, and that we can be philosophical about this and choose to not be angered or to be harshly judgmental, but to rather understand that this is just a simple reality, and that we are fortunate to have the power as educators to be able to work out what is going on and to then implement the right response. To hear it in Seneca’s voice, Fate leads the willing, and drags along the reluctant.

While the Behaviour Detective fashions the craft of diagnosing need by taking the time to build up a catalogue of observational experience, there are also some very clear processes to follow in order to identify, consider and implement the right behavioural supports and replacements for challenging behaviours in the classroom. Our Positive Behaviour Support process uses a simple four step procedure with accompanying documents, all colour coded, that can be downloaded from the website just linked: one, complete an Individual Autism Profile, our Green form, that identifies the big picture elements of what makes the child who they are, much along the same lines as the sort of Green strategies identified in the opening chapter of this essay, making clear the quality of life indicators for the individual, their strengths and interests, and other components that give us an insight into how we can establish Green strategies in the classroom to set a foundation of proactive behavioural support that provides the best platform for safety, respect and optimal learning conditions; two, if a challenging behaviour is present we then complete a Behaviour Form, our Orange document, that allows us to identify what exactly the challenging behaviour is that we are observing in a child, to identify what the antecedents to the behaviour are, and what the consequences to the behaviour are, in order that we can establish a window into the function of the behaviour and the kind of environmental strategies we can implement and the skills that need to be taught to the child so they don’t need to use a challenging behaviour to communicate their needs; three, complete an Implementation Checklist, our Blue form, is completed so as to make explicit to all participants in the child’s life about their responsibilities and strategies to be aware of with regards to implementation so that our response to the present challenging behaviour is clear and consistent across all domains; and four, if the behaviour is particularly challenging we need to consider a Behaviour Response Plan so as to make clear our level of intervention and response at every step, when things are traveling well and the child is in the Green zone, when things are becoming more elevated or challenging, when things become a safety risk, and how the process of recovery will proceed after a challenging behavioural incident is over. All of this is, of course, a drastically reduced summary of what the components of Positive Behaviour Support involve for a practitioner in the classroom or in any other situation, however having in mind an orderly method of considering and supporting behavioural need is the cornerstone of being a Behaviour Detective, and so it is valuable to look at the documents linked in this paragraph and to read further into the processes involved so as to establish your own Behaviour Detective toolbox and accompanying mindset.

The only thing left to consider, then, is what the synthesis of Edutainer and Behaviour Detective presents as in the classroom, this harmonising of polar extremes, of the The Edutainer, the Dionysian enthusiast, unbridled in energy and creation, thinking in inversions and being hungry for experimentation and capturing the imaginations of students who often leave open only a very small window of error for either considering us interesting or boring, and then on the other side of the equation, The Behaviour Detective, the Apollonian sculptor who works methodically and with emotions in check to consider without moralistic judgement what it is that the behaviours in front of us are trying to best communicate. The Edutaining Behaviour Detective needs to simultaneously hold both these personalities within the state of educational projection required for the most effective education of our students on the autism spectrum and, as is always my universal qualifier, for surely every student. To be a bridge towards the reaching of all learners, thus spoke the Edutaining Behaviour Detective.