Burnaby school district pilot project logs students' behavioural challenges
Educators log students' positive and negative behaviour in online database to inform later teaching
The Burnaby School District believes a running online database their teachers are piloting could be a valuable resource for educators struggling with how to approach students with behavioural issues.
Behaviour Profiles, as they're called, allow teachers to log the conduct of students' with behavioural challenges like autism spectrum disorder in a database, which can then generate graphs and visual data on that student.
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The behavioural analyst spearheading the project says she hopes that data enables the district to address individual students' needs.
"The idea for this information is to use [it] to inform our assessments and our behaviour support plans," said Nadine Trottier.
At the end of a school day, a teacher logs in to a secure server, and records when and for how long a student displayed certain behaviours.
That could mean negative behaviour like outbursts or disrupting a lesson, or positive behaviour like interacting with friends on the playground. That data would then be used to teach students positive ways to express their negative impulses.
"That could be teaching the student to request a break or to request help. So the emphasis, as much as it could be on a challenging behaviour, is also on the positive," said Trottier.
Questions of online security
But when personal information is logged online, questions of security are soon to follow. A developer on the project believes the information, now being gathered on 16 students across five Burnaby schools, is safe.
"The school district has been looking at these issues for years now. Anything hosted on their servers has double, triple layers of security," says Costa Dedegikas. "By definition, anything on the web could be hacked, It's how badly does somebody really want to get into something. I don't think it would be something that hackers would be looking for."
With the project still in the piloting phase, Trottier hopes to see Behaviour Profiles released to the entire Burnaby School District in the near future, and eventually to other districts that might find it useful.