The Evidence We Collect

By Regina Symons, Ph.D., BCBA-D, LBA

The Environments We Create

A seven-year-old sits in a classroom waiting for his turn to read aloud.

The teacher calls on him. The first few words catch in his throat before the rest of the sentence follows. This occurs repeatedly. His teacher notices the pattern. Wanting to better understand what she is seeing, she asks the school's speech-language pathologist if she would be willing to observe him informally.

A few days later, the classroom door opens. The speech-language pathologist has visited this classroom many times before, and the boy knows who she is. As far as he understands, she works with children who need extra help. He has watched classmates leave with her and return a short time later. It has always seemed like an ordinary part of school, something that happens to other children.

This time, she calls his name.

He isn't expecting it. No one has explained why she is there or what she hopes to learn. He quietly pushes in his chair, walks to the classroom door, and follows her into the hallway. From an adult's perspective, it is an entirely ordinary moment. A teacher notices something that deserves a closer look, a specialist gathers more information, and together they begin trying to understand whether this child needs additional support. It is exactly the sort of thoughtful collaboration we hope happens in schools every day.

For years, I have found myself returning to that walk into the hallway. Not because I think anyone handled the situation poorly. Quite the opposite. Every adult involved was doing exactly what thoughtful professionals should do. What has stayed with me is a different question: what might that moment have meant to a seven-year-old?

He could not know what the adults were discussing or why they had become concerned. He could not know that they were still gathering information or that no one had reached any conclusions. All he knew was that he had watched other children leave with the speech-language pathologist before, and now she was calling for him. Like any child, he was left trying to make sense of an experience before he had enough information to understand it.

Several weeks later, his parents discovered something no one had considered. He needed glasses. Once he could clearly see the words on the page, reading became noticeably easier, and the difficulty everyone had been trying to understand suddenly made much more sense. His reading improved, but his confidence did not recover as quickly. Years later, he still believed he wasn't "a good reader."

This is not simply a story about reading. A child struggled, adults searched for an explanation, and eventually they found one. You can see similar moments in places that had nothing to do with books or classrooms.

A middle school student logs into the school portal to view next year's schedule. Friends are already comparing classes and celebrating Honors placements. The student searches for one word. It isn't there.

On another day, a youth soccer player waits while a parent opens an email announcing team placements for the coming season.

Although the circumstances are very different, I found myself wondering whether the children were engaged in remarkably similar learning experiences. In both situations, they were trying to make sense of an experience without access to the information the adults had, so they used only the evidence they did have. Adults experienced these moments as ways to make decisions. The children experienced them as part of their own capability.

We need to reframe how we think about learning. Learning is more than something adults intentionally teach. We teach children to read, solve mathematical problems, play sports, and develop new skills. Yet, alongside every lesson we plan, children are learning so many other things we didn’t intend.

They are learning what mistakes mean. They are learning whether asking for help feels safe, whether effort is worthwhile, and what adults expect from them when things become difficult. Those lessons rarely appear in a curriculum, yet they are learned every day because they emerge through experience. Every interaction offers another piece of information from which they begin constructing explanations about themselves and the world around them.

Perhaps that is what children collect as they move through the environments we create.

Not evidence in the way adults think about facts or proof, but evidence about themselves.

Every child arrives with a history we cannot immediately see. Before we meet them, they have already spent years learning from parents, teachers, coaches, siblings, classmates, and countless everyday interactions. They have learned what happens when they make mistakes, when they ask for help, when they succeed, and when they struggle. Those experiences become part of every new classroom, every new relationship, and every new challenge they encounter.

Behavior analysis offers a different way of thinking about behavior. Rather than looking only at the child, it asks us to consider the environment in which behavior develops. That simple shift in perspective may have implications that extend well beyond behavior itself.

This doesn't mean every interaction carries extraordinary weight or that a single experience defines a child. Children are remarkably resilient. What shapes development is something much quieter than that: the gradual accumulation of experiences over time, each one becoming another opportunity to learn, not only about reading, mathematics, or sports, but also about themselves.

Perhaps that is why it is worth thinking differently about the environments we create.

We naturally devote enormous attention to children's progress. We observe them, assess their strengths and needs, monitor their development, and adjust our support when something isn't working. Yet we don't always apply that same level of attention to the environments we have created around them.

The environments we create should never be treated as fixed. They deserve the same careful observation, evaluation, and revision that we devote to the children learning within them.

Think about the image of the seven-year-old walking into the hallway. It’s not that I believe that single moment determined the course of his life. It didn't.

I return to it because it reminds me how differently adults and children can experience the very same event. While the adults were gathering information to understand his reading better, he may have been gathering information to understand himself better.

When I see a child struggling, I still ask what they are learning.

But I also ask:

What is this environment teaching?

And if the answer isn't what we hoped, perhaps our first response shouldn't be to ask how we can change the child.

Perhaps we should begin by asking,

How might we change the environment?