“An OT is coming to observe on Thursday.”
If that sentence has ever landed in your inbox, you’ve probably wondered what we actually spend that hour looking at. Watching the child, obviously… but watching them do what exactly?
The answer is more interesting than most people expect (in my unbiased opinion, ha!), and knowing it makes the whole visit more useful for everyone. So here’s what’s really on my clipboard…
What I’m actually watching is the fit
What I’m generally looking at is participation — how the child is taking part in what’s happening around them. To get a good sense of this, I’m watching the interaction of three main things:
- The environment — both the physical (classroom layout, seating, noise, and so on) and the relational (the teacher’s perception of and interaction with the child, plus peer interactions).
- What the task is asking of them — the academic and social demands.
- Whether the child feels safe, and what capacity they have available right now — their regulation, sensory processing, motor skills, executive function, and whether they seem settled or hypervigilant. How are all of these internal factors playing out, and how are they interacting with the environment and what’s being asked?
And that’s way more than one blog post can hold! So I’m starting where I start — in the room: the environment. It’s something us OTs can’t get enough of, because it has such a significant impact on participation, and it’s where you can often get some easy wins.
To keep this practical, I’m using a table to break the environment down. For each part below you’ll find two things: what I’m actually looking at, and the reasoning behind why we consider it — because the why is where the OT lens earns its keep. Then under each table, one easy and practical thing you could try this week.
One honest caveat before we start: this isn’t everything. It couldn’t be — every child and every room is different, and half of what I do is follow the particular child in front of me. Think of this as a way of looking, not a checklist to complete.
The classroom space and layout
Layout has a profound impact on participation. And there’s no best seat in a classroom — there’s only the best seat for this child, doing this task, in this room.
| What I’m looking at | Why |
|---|---|
| The kind of space — open plan, closed room, shared, portable | Open plan spaces ask more from a child: more filtering, more visual traffic, more working out which adult’s voice to follow. A child who manages in a closed room but not an open one might be spending all their energy filtering sensory demands — with nothing left over for the actual learning. |
| This child’s seat relative to classroom traffic | The seat beside the door, the bin, the sharpener or the main walkway often carries the highest filtering load in the room. But it depends on the child: some do best near a door — knowing exactly what’s happening around them helps them feel safe and better able to attend. For others, that same spot is really distracting. |
| Who and what is around this child | Where a child sits shapes who they talk to, copy, and turn to for help. I’m looking at which peers are beside them, and whether a supportive adult is close by. |
| Flexible seating — wobble stools, cushions, standing desks | Wobble stools can be brilliant for some children and very distracting for others. And if a child has low muscle tone or reduced core strength, staying balanced on a wobble stool takes a lot of extra energy — which can add to their fatigue rather than help them focus as the day progresses. In those cases I’m thinking about alternatives that still offer movement but with more stability, or working with the child and teacher to work out which lessons or times of day a wobble stool actually helps, and when something steadier is the better fit. |
| Sensory tools and participation | The question isn’t what the child’s hands are doing — it’s whether they’re still engaged with the lesson. A child can be spinning a fidget, eyes down, and still answer the teacher’s question, follow what’s next, and know exactly what’s going on in the room. That’s a tool doing its job. And if they can’t — if the fidget has pulled their attention away from the room entirely — that’s my cue that it’s the wrong tool, or the wrong moment for it. |
| A quiet or safe space — and whether it’s reachable | What I’m wondering is whether the child uses it. If they’re not accessing it but would benefit from it, then why? Is it the space? Where it is? How it’s framed? Their ability to get there when it’s needed? |
Try this week: if a child’s seat looks like it might not be working for them, have a go at moving them somewhere different for a week and see what changes. Sometimes it’s the simplest thing.
Sound
Sound is the input a child can’t close their eyes to. Hearing takes in information from all 360 degrees around us — and unlike our eyes, we can’t aim it or shut it off. So for a child who’s hypervigilant to noise, there’s nowhere to look away to.
| What I’m listening for | Why |
|---|---|
| Sustained noise — a hum that never stops (air con, fan, fish tank, traffic) | Filtering constant noise costs effort all day, even when a child isn’t reacting to it. For a child who’s sensitive to sound, this is a background tax on everything else they do. |
| Intermittent noise — the door, the pencil sharpener, chairs scraping, the class next door | Unpredictable sound pulls attention harder than constant sound. A child who startles or looks up at every interruption may have a sensory system that’s hypervigilant to noise — each sound nudging them further outside their window of tolerance. |
| Music playing during work | Genuinely mixed. Some children attend better with background music; for others it can be distracting. |
| What happens at the loud moments — pack-up, transitions, wet-day play | Do they change when it gets loud? Peak noise is when I see the most reacting. For some children it might look like withdrawing — leaving, covering their ears, going quiet. For others it’s the opposite: getting louder, sillier, or more rigid. Both are similar in terms of the why — a child trying to manage the sensory input of the environment. |
| What happens in quiet and learning times | Less obvious: near-silence is hard for some children. A child who hums, taps or whispers to themselves in quiet work time may be supplying the input their system needs to stay alert — that sound is often helping them work. |
Try this week: before a loud moment you know is coming, give a heads-up (“the bell’s going in ten minutes”), and have headphones or a special job ready for whoever might need an escape route.
Lighting
Lighting is easy to overlook, but it’s worth a closer look — it can have a big impact on how some children participate at school.
| What I’m looking at | Why |
|---|---|
| Brightness | Bright, even light supports most children’s attention, but a room lit like an operating theatre can feel relentless for a sensitive child. And for a child who needs lots of input to stay alert — our low registration kids — a dim corner can make it even harder for them to stay focused and follow along. |
Try this week: have a look at one child’s workspace from their chair, at their height. You might spot a glare you’d never notice standing up — an easy fix like closing one blind, angling the desk, or swapping glossy laminate for matte.
Visual load
Walls talk. The question is how loudly, and whether a child can stop listening to them when it’s time to work.
| What I’m looking at | Why |
|---|---|
| Density of wall displays | Rich displays are lovely! But for some children, thirty laminated things in peripheral vision is thirty invitations to look away, or makes it tricky to work out which information matters for the task in front of them. |
| The visual schedule — and whether it’s usable | Visual schedules are one of the best-value supports in any classroom, but only if they’re genuinely usable: visible from the child’s seat, at child height, the “just right” number of steps (too many can be overwhelming for some), and actually referred to. |
Try this week: touch the visual schedule at every transition for a week. The pointing is what turns it from wall art into a tool.
The social environment
The second half of the environment doesn’t tick as neatly, but it matters just as much. Every classroom has a social climate, and children feel it long before they can describe it.
| What I’m looking at | Why |
|---|---|
| Felt safety | A child who feels safe can learn, take risks, ask for help, and have a go at hard things. A child who doesn’t feel safe is spending their energy scanning for what might go wrong — and there’s very little left over for anything else. So a lot of what I’m watching in the social environment comes down to one question: does this child feel safe here? |
| What’s available when a child’s capacity runs out | This is co-regulation availability: when things wobble, is there an adult who stays alongside rather than escalating? Because co-regulation is the strategy. Regulation develops inside a relationship first, and every other support works through that one. |
| Peer interactions | Peer relationships shape a child’s day as much as anything an adult sets up — and it goes both ways. I’m watching how peers respond to this child: included or left out, helped or corrected, sought out or avoided. But just as much, I’m watching how the child moves toward them — do they initiate, join in, hang back and watch, or play happily alongside on their own? And when a child is on their own, I’m noticing whether that’s a genuine preference or a lack of anyone to be with. |
| The predictability of the day | Predictability is an environmental support as real as lighting. A visible routine, warnings before change, knowing what’s next — for many children this is the difference between spending capacity on the work and spending it on bracing for surprises. |
Try this week: start each session with two sentences — what we’re doing, and what’s after that. Ten seconds, and for some children it’s the most important thing said all morning.
You already have the lens
You don’t need an OT in the room to look this way. If you take one thing from this post, make it this: when something isn’t working, look at the fit before you look at the child. What is the room offering? What is the task demanding? Change one of those and the picture often changes with it.
Keep an eye on the blog over the next few months — I’ll explore some of the other factors I think about when I’m doing classroom obs.
And if you’re looking at the environment across a whole school rather than one classroom, that’s what the School & Clinic License is built for — the same way of looking, set up as an eight-week implementation you can run with your team.
Questions
If you have any questions or need further assistance please do not hesitate to get in touch here or at hello@otwithsoph.com.
