In Australia, the intentional teaching of social and emotional competencies and the implementation of social and emotional learning (SEL) programs have increasingly engaged early childhood educators over the last decade. Disruptions to normal routines from fires, floods and the COVID−19 pandemic have heightened the need to support children, families and educators, and have made SEL an essential part of curricula (Cahill et al., 2020). This chapter establishes the broad rationale and key concepts associated with SEL, and also details recommended approaches and evidence-based practices relevant to teaching for SEL. It also considers the crucial role that educators play in supporting young children during troublesome times.

In the chapter, five questions guide discussion and reflection on teaching for social and emotional learning (SEL) in the early years classroom. First, social and emotional competencies are described in teacher-friendly language. Second, a rationale is given for prioritising these competencies in early years classrooms. Third, the nature, types, and uses of frameworks with particular connections to SEL in Australia are introduced. Fourth, an overview of the four major approaches and related practices that contribute to successful teaching for SEL comprises the largest section of this chapter. Fifth, the chapter concludes with an examination of the essential role that professional learning and development plays in improving wellbeing in a school community, student learning outcomes, and professional sense of efficacy.

In the present Australian context, behavioural support for students with SEN is filtering through government and nongovernment educational systems as the complexity and number of students with problem behaviours in schools have increased. Historically, models for managing problem behaviour progressed from ABA-based behaviour modification for individual students with significant disabilities to more positive and ethical approaches. In the 1990s, the Americans LaVigna and Willis from IABA introduced professional audiences across the country to comprehensive training in individualised interventions for students with severe and challenging problem behaviours. Their multi-element intervention planning was based on detailed data gathering, functional behaviour assessment, and nonaversive procedures. This initiative gave rise to capacity building within several Australian universities that prepare specialist teachers for intensive behavioural assessment and intervention. Subsequently, visits by American leaders of the school-wide behavioural support movement such as Sugai and Lewis presented the multi-tiered whole-school approach to education department staff in several states and later to special education audiences at national conferences. Over the past decade, many Australian education systems and schools have adopted the school-wide model, adapted it to their local contexts, and rebadged it as Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL). Some clusters of schools are starting to cooperate to share the administrative tasks and training activities. Development has been hindered by the absence of large-scale federal funding and national and state legislation, as provided in the USA.

The systematic introduction of a multi-tiered continuum of services and supports has offered a cost-effective solution to the range of behaviour problems in American schools. From 2000 onwards, the strengths of school-wide positive behaviour support (SWPBS) have come from the careful documentation of procedural guides for implementation within schools and a corresponding emphasis on the building of capacity within the school community to deliver that implementation. Research has continued to demonstrate the viability of this problem-solving approach to local educational contexts across the USA. The effectiveness of SWPBS has been demonstrated by the increasing number of schools undertaking this approach to continuous school improvement and the decreasing number of student disciplinary problems in those schools. Moreover, there is evidence that schools demonstrating higher fidelity of SWPBS implementation have fewer behaviour problems and more sustainability. A new range of measures have arisen from the research facilitation of online data collection to track behaviour change and plan further improvement of practice. School teams now have access to a comprehensive online inventory that measures their school's fidelity of implementation across all tiers. Schools and teachers can check their cultural responsiveness to the instructional and behavioural needs of their diverse students. Schools can assess their sustained implementation of SWPBS. Capacity building for teachers in classroom implementation of multi-tiered supports continues to advance.

Over three decades, the positive behaviour support approach, together with its practice base, has been methodically developed, applied, and researched within elementary and secondary schools in the USA. The approach was initiated to better address the severe and challenging behaviours presented by students and adults with developmental disabilities, and the framework has been expanded to meet pressing needs to keep schools safe and free from antisocial behaviour and bullying. The 1997 IDEA legislation in the USA mandated this approach for all students whose problem behaviour inhibits productive learning. Historically, the 1960s theory of applied behaviour analysis and the 1980s philosophy of nonaversive behavioural intervention gave rise to a new value-based technology providing behavioural support for individuals. Positive behavioural support (PBS) technology advanced as key dedicated groups of people strengthened the reach and relevance of behavioural support to individuals within and across systems. Tracing the work of LaVigna and Willis through their Institute for Applied Behavior Analysis and that of Horner and Sugai as codirectors of the federally funded Office of Special Education Programs Technical Assistance Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports illustrates the breadth and ongoing development of PBS. The shift into a school-wide approach fostered three tiers of behavioural assessment and intervention planning for behaviour and academics, with Tier 2 supports and Tier 3 intensive interventions providing positive and at times prevailing outcomes for many students with SEN.

Scientific understanding of how students behave, develop, and learn is central to mass education, inclusive schooling, and behavioural support in Western education. The shift to inclusive schooling has changed the demands on how teachers practise. Behavioural support offers schools and teachers a bridge connecting research to preventative, proactive, and proven practices for educating diverse learners, including those with special educational needs (SEN). The movement away from separate provision for students with SEN has challenged schools and teachers to be better prepared to proactively manage problem behaviours, to incorporate social-emotional learning in school curriculum, and to provide needs-based education for all students. In Western education, wellbeing has become a popular idea for whole-school improvement, and the construct of learning is returning to popularity for improving academic instruction. However, classroom teaching, student learning, and problem behaviour have remained somewhat disconnected. For all students, behavioural support links research-informed practice to meaningful outcomes in wellbeing, learning, and behaviour.

The societies and cultures considered in this book deliver services and supports for students with SEN in many different ways. Equally so, education systems and their guiding policy and practice are varied. All countries are engaging in behavioural support initiatives and building local staff and school capacity. The blueprint for implementation and capacity building from the PBS movement in the USA provides a proven pathway to integrate existing efforts in learning reform, research on school practice, and training of practitioners. At this stage, it is possible to be optimistic about the spread of these early initiatives in PBS for both individuals and schools across the Asia-Pacific region. However, it is premature to compare case studies, and there is a long road ahead for universities, education systems, and government policy makers in these modern economies to achieve full implementation of PBS with sustainability.

The transition of young children with autism from early intervention to school needs to be carefully managed in order to maintain intervention gains, protect against the risk of child-and-family anxiety, and enable a successful start to formal education. While many North American studies have mapped high-intensity practices for transitioning children with disabilities to school, only a few have recently examined autism-specific practices. The present study drew on this literature to identify and socially validate transition-to-school practices for Australian children with autism and their families. Queensland intervention and advisory teachers (N = 91) used an on-line survey to rate 36 transition practices. Results indicate that all practices were perceived to be highly important in the Australian context. Future transition-to-school research can draw upon this socially validated practice listing.

Qualitative cross‐cultural research on the education of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has offered an alternative way to examine the presence of cultural values in the teaching of children with their social difficulties. In a focus group study, three special educators in Japan and Australia respectively discussed their ideas about ASDs, teaching of children with ASDs in their small special needs classes, and the outcomes that they valued. While the “teacher talk” of the Australian teachers spoke directly to evidence‐based practice in English language literature, the group discussion of the Japanese teachers required prompting and spoke to cultural meanings that did not translate well into English. Analysis of the Japanese transcript required a multistep, multiphase process of reflection beyond translation issues anticipated in the original design of the study that involved innovative interrogation of the English‐language transcript and cross‐checking of subjective and objective interpretation.

Current educational globalisation has revealed differences in teacher practices across cultures. Qualitative ways of doing research have helped to unpack cultural reasons for everyday practices. This paper explores the use of video-clip examples (VCs) to interview Japanese special education teachers working with children with autism spectrum disorders about their classroom practices. A previous study showed that a group of Japanese teachers talked about their practices in an abstract way so that what they were actually doing with these children was unclear to an Australian researcher. In this study, VCs selected from observation data of Japanese teachers' own teaching provided a concrete focus when individual teachers talked about classroom interactions and helped them articulate their culturally embedded practice. This method provided a useful way to interview these teachers about their classroom interactions from moment to moment and about their lesson study practices focusing on learning process. Talking about live interactions in VCs clarified their explanations of what they were doing. Their talk about the VCs was also consistent with the lesson study process of transforming knowledge from tacit to explicit form in their own teaching.

This paper examines methodological challenges throughout a cross-cultural case study on teacher work and practice and outlines the researcher's reflections on and responses to these challenges. Special education teachers working in Japanese and Australian special education settings shared classroom ecologies in that they worked with small groups of children including one or more with autistic spectrum disorders (ASDs). They also engaged with other educators about their everyday work. However, how they did their work differed within their multilayered cultural contexts: National (e.g., educational emphasis, curriculum approach), institutional (e.g., school emphasis, community of practice), and personal (e.g., classroom structures, personal experiences). Field research in these complex settings and data analysis of these two cases encountered boundary issues. The paper outlines how the researcher worked with teacher participants to solve problems together and how she employed their shared ecologies to create a structural framework to compare and contrast these culturally different cases. The need for slightly different methodological paths for investigating these cases will be discussed.

Research into best practice in special education has concentrated on the identification and description of practice standards against which schools can evaluate their performance and thereby guide collective efforts toward program improvement. A Queensland special school wanted to update an Australian listing of basic indicators of best educational practice for students with significant disabilities (Beamish, 1992) that they has used for over a decade. This paper reports the Participatory Action Research (PAR) process undertaken by this school to develop a contemporary listing in partnership with university colleagues. Two cycles of the process took two years. In the first cycle, staff engaged in a systematic review of the original listing and then generated new teaching practices for their school. In the second cycle, staff refined the emergent listing through internal consultation. Key learnings from this PAR experience were commitment to the reciprocities of PAR process, the value of active administrative support, and the critical leadership role of teachers.