Quality Rating 1: Positive Guidance
Instructions
To meet the requirements for Developmentally Appropriate Learning and Practice: Positive Guidance: DAP 3.1, your written policy should describe your program’s positive behavioral practices and include how you use two specific strategies with the children in your program:
- Providing Choices
- Redirection
The Policy or Statement Builder provides a step-by-step guide for creating your policy.
Positive Strategies
Your program’s policy for positive behavioral practices should contain positive strategies for addressing children’s behavior. The policy should clearly show how your program guides and supports children’s behavior in a way that is developmentally appropriate.
View this video to learn about positive guidance and how it relates to creating environments where children thrive.
Positive Guidance Strategies
Choose each heading below to learn more about the positive guidance strategies required for level 1.
Providing choices to children gives them opportunities to make decisions and guides their independence. Choices communicate to children that they have some control and responsibility, which helps to increase their interest, attention, participation, and overall engagement in daily activities.
View the video to explore providing choices in a child care program. Select the audio clip to hear examples of teachers providing choices to children.
What does the documentation look like?
Your written policy of positive behavioral practices describes in detail how children are offered choices throughout the day. Include specific examples of when and where children are offered choices.
Redirection is a proactive way to respond to challenging behavior. It helps guide children toward better choices when they are acting in ways that may be inappropriate. This approach can also keep children involved and focused, especially when they are starting to lose control.
Review the video to explore different types of redirection. Select the audio clips below each type to hear an example of each type of redirection.
What does the documentation look like?
Your policy on positive behavioral practices should describe the types of redirection used with children. It may also include the situations in which redirection is applied and how decisions are made about which type of redirection to use in those situations.
Policy or Statement Builder
Develop a policy that describes your program’s positive behavioral practices. The Reflection Questions below will help you think about what you do in your program to capture it when creating your policy. Once you have spent time reflecting on the questions below, you’re ready to build your policy.
Reflection Questions
- What positive behavioral supports and strategies do you use in your program?
- What kinds of choices do children have throughout the day?
- When do you use redirection as a behavior strategy?
- How do you share your program’s rules? Do the children help develop the rules? (Optional Level 1)
- Are reflection and problem solving used as positive behavior strategies? If so, what are some examples of how they are used? (Optional Level 1)
Did you know that if you include Questions 4 and 5 in your Positive Guidance Policy that you may be approved for Level 3 in DAP 3?
Policy Builder Resources
Use these optional resources to reflect on your program’s practices and create your Positive Guidance Policy.
Technology Tips
Choose the way that the provided resources will be most useful to you.
You can:
Download the PDF.
Save the PDF.
Print the PDF.
Edit the PDF.
Where can you learn more?
- The Value of Positive GuidanceThis video guides you through each type of behavior strategy required for a quality rating 5.
- Giving Children Choices This article explores how providing choices to children works to empower them and improve behavior.
- Advice for Guiding Children’s Behavior Child care providers play an important role in guiding children’s behavior in positive, supportive, and developmentally appropriate ways.
