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Behaviour as Communication: The 30 Seconds Before She Hit

Hi, I'm Steph, an Autism and SEND specialist. I've spent the last 20 years working in education with 6 of those years visiting lots of different classrooms across London. Watching. Advising. Asking questions about what's really going on for the children in the room, and how the adults around them can help.

I'm also neurodivergent. Which means I can often see what others miss. Not because I'm better at looking, but because I've been the child in that room. I know what it feels like to be misread, and what can change when someone does the right things to help.

This is one of those visits. What happened. What it meant. What it changed, once we looked close enough, as a team.

The thirty seconds nobody saw

I was sitting at the back of a year 1 classroom. Notebook in hand, quietly watching. The teacher was giving an engaging demonstration at the front of the classroom.

The student I was observing hit the TA next to her.

The TA redirected her calmly back to the teacher, using minimal language, and gesturing. Textbook response. From the front of the room, it would have looked like a behaviour incident, handled well.

But I'd been watching the thirty seconds before.

The student had been looking at her core vocabulary board. Not passively, actively scanning and pointing. She was mid-communication.

And then, with no unkindness at all, she was redirected away from it. The communication message closed before she'd finished sending it.

So she hit.

“That hit wasn't aggression. It wasn't defiance. It was the message the first communication attempt couldn't deliver.”

This is what I see again and again in schools. A behaviour sits at the end of a chain of events, and our response begins at the behaviour. Not at the chain.

We manage what's visible. We miss what's underneath it.

I'm not saying that to judge anyone. I've been a teacher and I know what its like - classrooms are extremely busy, time is short, and everyone in that room was doing their best. But our best gets better when we know what to look for.

Why did she hit? The answer is almost always there. We just have to start looking earlier than the moment everyone remembers.

Names are always changed. Schools are never identified. Everything else is as observed.

— Steph Reed

Take this into your classroom

  • • Before you respond to a behaviour, pause and ask, "what led up to this?" There's almost always something there, and it's rarely the moment you first noticed.
  • • Make time to check with other adults who were in the room. What was their version of events? They may have seen something very different to you.

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Meet the Author

Steph Reed is an autism and SEND specialist with twenty years in special needs education, including six years leading classrooms across London. She now consults in schools and runs the online training platform Autism for Teachers. She's neurodivergent herself, and her own experience of school is a big part of why she does this work. The School Visit is where she shares what she notices in real classrooms, with practical strategies you can use straight away.