Resource Library
Working With Teachers
Teachers are among the most important people in a child's school experience. They shape the learning environment, the social climate of the classroom, and the daily experience of every student in their care. When it comes to supporting a child's participation, inclusion, and sense of belonging, teachers are not just one part of the picture — they are often the most consistent and influential adults in the school day.
Effective support for children with additional needs works best when it is truly collaborative. Families, teachers, and therapists each hold a different and valuable piece of knowledge about the child, and the most helpful outcomes tend to emerge when those perspectives are shared openly and worked through together. Supporting participation is a shared responsibility — not the job of any one person or role alone.
Building strong working relationships between families, schools, and therapy teams is one of the most worthwhile investments in a child's wellbeing and development. It takes time, honesty, and genuine mutual respect — and when it works well, the benefits for the child are difficult to replicate in any other way.
Why Teacher Partnerships Matter
The relationship between teachers, families, and therapists is not simply a logistical arrangement. It is one of the most important determinants of how well a child is supported to participate and thrive at school.
Consistency Across Environments
Children benefit when the people around them share a common understanding of what they need and how best to support them. When teachers and therapists are working toward the same goals — using the same language, the same strategies, and the same understanding of a child's strengths — the consistency that results makes it easier for the child to transfer skills across different settings and to experience a more coherent, less fragmented form of support.
Shared Understanding
A shared understanding of a child's needs, goals, and participation profile does not develop automatically. It is built through deliberate communication — conversations, shared observations, and the kind of honest two-way exchange that allows each party to learn something from the other. When that shared understanding exists, decisions about how to support a child are better informed and more likely to be genuinely effective.
Everyday Opportunities
Teachers are present for the majority of a child's school day — far more than any therapist ever can be. This means that teachers hold access to the most powerful ingredient in any child's development: consistent, repeated opportunities for practice in real, meaningful contexts. When teachers understand what a child is working toward and how to support that in everyday classroom interactions, the reach of therapy extends enormously.
Supporting Inclusion
Meaningful inclusion requires active, informed effort from the adults in a child's school environment. When teachers are part of a collaborative support network — understanding a child's needs, aware of the strategies that help, and connected to the therapists working with the family — they are far better positioned to make the kinds of adjustments and decisions that allow a child to participate fully and feel genuinely part of their class community.
Teachers See Things Others May Not
A child's experience at school is largely invisible to the adults who are not there. Families see the beginning and end of the day — the morning departure and the afternoon return, the mood, the energy level, the willingness or reluctance to go back tomorrow. Therapists see the child in a focused, often one-to-one context that is very different from the demands of a school day. Teachers see what happens in between.
Classroom participation — how a child engages with learning tasks, manages instructions, handles transitions between activities, and responds to the demands of a structured learning environment — is something that teachers observe every day. They notice which tasks a child approaches with confidence and which they avoid. They notice the strategies a child uses when they are finding something difficult. They notice changes in engagement over the course of a week, a term, or a year.
Peer interactions are another area where teacher observation carries particular weight. Who a child gravitates toward, how they navigate conflict, whether they are sought out or overlooked by classmates, how they manage the social demands of group work — these are things that unfold in the classroom and playground in ways that no assessment can fully capture. Teachers hold this knowledge, and it is invaluable.
Playground experiences are often the least visible and most revealing part of the school day. How a child manages unstructured time, whether they have somewhere to be and someone to be with, how they move and play in an outdoor environment, and how they recover from social difficulty — all of these are things that teachers and playground supervisors are uniquely positioned to observe and report on.
The physical learning environment — how a classroom is laid out, how noisy or quiet it is, how transitions are managed, how much movement is built into the day — shapes every student's experience. Teachers make decisions about these things constantly, often without formal training in how environmental factors affect participation. When therapists can share their perspective on environmental supports and adjustments, and teachers can share what they observe about how students respond, the resulting conversations can lead to meaningful changes that benefit many students, not just one.
Daily routines — the rhythm of the school day, the predictability of transitions, the consistency of expectations — are things that teachers design and manage. Understanding how a particular child navigates those routines, and where they find them manageable or demanding, is information that teachers are best placed to provide. That information shapes good therapy planning in ways that no amount of clinic-based assessment can fully replicate.
Building Effective Collaboration
Effective collaboration between families, teachers, and therapists does not happen automatically. It is built deliberately, over time, through a set of practices that require genuine commitment from everyone involved.
Open Communication
Effective collaboration begins with communication that is honest, regular, and genuinely two-directional. This means families sharing what they observe at home, teachers sharing what they observe at school, and therapists offering their clinical perspective in language that is accessible to everyone involved. It also means creating the kind of atmosphere where concerns can be raised early, before they become significant problems, and where questions are welcomed rather than deflected.
Shared Goals
When families, teachers, and therapists are each working toward different outcomes — or toward the same outcomes expressed in incompatible ways — the child experiences a fragmented form of support that is less than the sum of its parts. Shared goals, agreed collaboratively and expressed in terms that make sense to everyone, create the alignment that allows each party's contribution to reinforce rather than run alongside the others.
Respecting Different Expertise
Teachers bring deep knowledge of their students, of learning and pedagogy, and of the school environment. Families bring irreplaceable knowledge of their child across the full breadth of their life. Therapists bring clinical expertise in development, function, and participation. None of these forms of knowledge is more important than the others — and effective collaboration depends on all of them being genuinely valued and drawn upon.
Problem Solving Together
When something is not working — when a strategy is not having the hoped-for effect, when a child's needs have changed, or when a new challenge has arisen — collaborative problem solving is more likely to find a good solution than any single party working in isolation. Different perspectives surface different possibilities, and the process of working through a problem together builds the shared understanding and mutual trust that makes future collaboration easier.
Practical Ways Teachers Can Support Participation
Many of the most effective supports for school participation are not complicated, expensive, or time-consuming. They are often small adjustments to existing practices — changes in how a classroom is arranged, how activities are structured, or how interactions are managed — that make a real difference to whether a particular student can engage fully.
Flexible Participation Options
Offering students more than one way to engage with a task or activity reduces the barriers that arise when a single participation format is assumed. A student who cannot participate in one way may be able to contribute fully in another. Flexibility in how tasks can be completed, how ideas can be expressed, and how students can demonstrate their understanding benefits a wide range of learners — and reduces the need for individually tailored accommodations.
Environmental Supports
The physical arrangement of a classroom, the management of noise and sensory stimulation, the predictability of routines, and the clarity of visual information all affect how accessible a learning environment is for students with different needs. Many of these factors can be adjusted without significant resource investment — and when therapists and teachers work together to think through what a specific student finds helpful, the adjustments that emerge are often ones that benefit the whole class. For a detailed guide to the specific adjustments that support classroom participation, see Classroom Accommodations.
Encouraging Peer Connections
Teachers have more influence over peer dynamics than is sometimes recognised. Thoughtful decisions about seating, groupings, partner pairings, and the design of collaborative activities can create opportunities for peer connection that might not otherwise arise naturally. Supporting a particular student to be seen positively by classmates — through highlighting their contributions, creating contexts where their strengths are visible, or simply ensuring they have a role and a place in group activities — is a meaningful form of inclusion in action.
Building on Strengths and Interests
When teachers know what a student cares about and what they are good at, they can create opportunities for that student to engage, contribute, and experience success in ways that build confidence and connection. A student who is an expert in something, or who is enthusiastic about a topic that arises in class, can have that expertise recognised and drawn upon — which changes how they are seen by peers, and how they see themselves as a member of the class community.
Supporting Independence
One of the most important things a teacher can do for a student with additional needs is to consistently look for opportunities to step back — to allow the student to try, to manage, and to succeed independently before offering support. The instinct to help is natural and well-intentioned, but premature or excessive support can inadvertently undermine the confidence and capability that independence builds. The goal is always to support just enough, and to keep adjusting that threshold as the student grows.
Working Through Challenges Together
Even the most committed and well-established collaboration will encounter challenges. Different perspectives, changing needs, and the complexity of real school environments mean that things will not always go smoothly — and that is entirely normal. What matters is not whether challenges arise, but how they are approached when they do.
Different perspectives between families, teachers, and therapists are not a sign that collaboration has failed. They are a sign that it is working — that people with genuinely different vantage points are bringing those perspectives to a shared conversation. A family who sees a different side of their child at home, and a teacher who sees a different side at school, are both right. The differences between those pictures are often exactly the information that is needed to understand a child more fully and to support them more effectively.
Changing needs are part of any child's development — and they mean that what worked well last term may need to be reconsidered now. As children grow, as the demands of school increase, and as contexts and relationships shift, the support that is most helpful will change too. Building regular review into the collaboration means that these changes can be noticed and responded to, rather than compounding silently before anyone is aware that something has shifted.
Problem solving together — when a strategy is not producing the hoped-for result, or when a student is struggling in a way that no one has a clear answer for — is more productive than any party withdrawing into their own perspective and waiting for someone else to fix it. A collaborative team that can sit with uncertainty together, share honest observations, and try something different in a spirit of genuine inquiry is one of the most powerful resources a child can have.
Ongoing communication and willingness to adapt over time are what keep collaborative relationships alive and effective across the long arc of a child's school experience. The relationship between a family, a school, and a therapy team is not a fixed arrangement that is established once and then runs on autopilot. It is a living partnership that requires tending — and the effort of that tending is among the most worthwhile things any of the adults around a child can invest in.
The Soul Movers Perspective on Working With Teachers
At Soul Movers, we regard teachers as key participation partners. The work we do in therapy is only as effective as the environment it connects to — and the school environment is shaped, above all, by the teachers who work within it. When we are working with a child in a school context, we are not working in spite of the school; we are working in partnership with it.
Physiotherapy and occupational therapy both operate most effectively when they are embedded in the real environments where participation happens — and for children, school is one of the most important of those environments. This means that we value communication with teachers, that we share our observations and thinking openly, and that we genuinely want to hear what teachers are seeing. The clinical picture we hold is always incomplete without that school-based perspective.
We also understand that teachers are managing enormous complexity. A classroom of thirty students, each with their own needs and their own learning profile, is not a setting in which any individual strategy can be implemented in a vacuum. We aim to offer recommendations that are practical, that fit into the existing rhythm of classroom life, and that serve not just the child we are working with but the wider community they are part of.
Meaningful participation at school happens throughout the day — in classrooms and corridors, in playgrounds and lunchrooms, in the small, unremarkable moments that add up to a child's experience of belonging. Supporting that participation is a shared endeavour, and we are grateful for every teacher who brings their knowledge, their commitment, and their care to that work alongside us.
Related Resources
These pages explore ideas that connect closely with working with teachers to support participation.
Continue Exploring
The Soul Movers platform has more resources, guided journeys, and stories to help families, educators, and therapists support participation and belonging across all areas of life.