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

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.

Watch it

Positive Choices video
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Redirection

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.

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Redirection video
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Verbal

Physical

Cues

Attention

What does the documentation look like?

Documentation should include a written positive guidance policy that describe how children are offered choices throughout the day, with specific examples of when and where choices are provided. The policy should also explain how teachers use redirection with children, when it is used, and how they choose the appropriate approach.

Review the video for tips in writing your own positive guidance policy.

 

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
  1. What positive behavioral supports and strategies do you use in your program?
  2. What kinds of choices do children have throughout the day?
  3. When do you use redirection as a behavior strategy?
  4. How do you share your program’s rules? Do the children help develop the rules? (Optional Level 1)
  5. 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?