Burnaby school district pilot project logs students' behavioural challenges

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, allowteachersto log the conductofstudents' withbehavioural challenges like autism spectrum disorderin 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 dataenables the district to address individual students' needs.

"The idea for this informationis to use [it] to inform our assessments and ourbehaviour support plans," saidNadine Trottier.

At the end of a school day, a teacher logs in to asecure server, and records when and for how long a student displayed certain behaviours.

That could mean negative behaviour like outbursts or disrupting a lesson, orpositive behaviour like interacting with friends on the playground. That data would then beused 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. Adeveloperon the project believes the information, now being gathered on 16 students acrossfiveBurnaby 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 CostaDedegikas."By definition, anything on the web couldbe hacked, It's how badly does somebody really want to get into something.I don't think itwouldbe something that hackers would belooking for."

With the project still in the piloting phase,Trottier hopes to see Behaviour Profilesreleased to the entire Burnaby School Districtin the near future, and eventuallyto otherdistricts thatmight find it useful.