What We Do: Enlightened Shadowing
Enlightened Shadows Apprentice Experiences
Beyond talking about behavior is experiencing engagement
Expert practitioners usually have limited time to work directly with students. Often, they work with children in clinics, leaving the child and family to try to integrate new skills into the child’s daily life.
The Learning Seeds team of Enlightened Shadows work side-by-side with children to practice and develop social skills during unstructured play.
We are a highly collaborative, multi-disciplinary team with experience in social emotional learning (SEL), early childhood, education, play, occupational therapy, applied behavior analysis (ABA), curriculum, speech, communications, technology, and software development.
Our sessions take place in a children's local schools, afterschool programs, camps, parks, playgrounds, and other inclusive environments in their own communities. Enlightened Shadows don’t set up board games—our support helps children join in the unpredictable, exhilarating, challenging, scary, confusing, exhausting, joyous moments of unstructured play (“free play”).
Cultivating Comfort and Interest in Play with Peers
Enlightened Shadowing bridges the gap enabling children to get more positive play practice and social interaction with peers than their behavior might otherwise elicit. With this additional practice, children experience new comfort and interest in play in order to increase their social connections.
Discovering Opportunities in Difficult Behaviors
With a focus on what is motivating a child, Enlightened Shadows look for the opportunities in a child’s difficult behaviors to help the child plug into the real play happening in the moment within a community of typically developing peers.
The Milestones of Engagement
To set engagement goals and track a child’s progress, the Enlightened Shadow team uses our Milestones of Engagement framework, consisting of seven major experiential categories.
On our Experiencing Engagement page, you can find examples of what it means to view a young child’s behavior through our Engagement Lens.
