By Rochelle Mutton – Clinical Lead Occupational Therapist and Founder of Motivate Kids
You know you’re an OT when you walk into a classroom and head straight for the small chair.
It’s the lens we bring – stepping into a child’s world and attempting, for just a glimpse, to see what they see, experience what they experience. And from that small chair, the room looks completely different.
The whiteboard partly blocked.
The corridor noise closer than you’d expect.
A fluorescent light flickering overhead.
The chair hard, the table slightly too high.
A lot going on, everywhere.
And you sit there and think, they do this for six hours a day.
Nearly two decades in. And the small chair still teaches me the most. I trained here in Adelaide, certified in Sensory Integration in California, worked with families in London, and eventually came home to build Motivate Kids. And across all of it, I remain completely captivated by how much there is to learn – especially from the experts themselves, the children.
Because what looks like a well-resourced classroom from the doorway can feel completely overwhelming from that small chair. What looks like a child who isn’t trying is sometimes a child whose nervous system is working so hard just to stay in the room that there’s nothing left for the learning. What looks like defiance is often dysregulation. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
The educators I admire most share this instinct. They wonder. They ask why before they ask what. And when OTs and teachers bring their lenses together, something remarkable happens for children.
That’s the work I love most. Not the reports, not the tick boxes, but those collaborative moments where a teacher says “I never thought of it that way” – and you watch something open up in how they see a child.
If you work in a school, I’d invite you to try it sometime. Pull out a small chair. Sit all the way down. Look at the room from there. And notice what you notice.
At Motivate Kids, we partner with schools to bring an OT lens to the environments where children learn and grow. If you’re curious about what that could look like for your school, simply reach out here – I’d love to connect.
Rochelle
