Know

Reflect on your childhood and think about the adults who helped make a difference in your life. Was it a parent, family member, family friend, or teacher? How did they influence your childhood? How did they help guide you to learn or make decisions? How did they encourage and support you? What words did this person use to tell you when you made a mistake? How did you develop ideas about yourself or other individuals as a result of your interactions with this person?

As a preschool teacher, you play an important role in guiding the behavior of young children. You recognize the opportunity to consider young children’s strengths, temperaments, skills, development, and family culture as you determine your approaches and strategies to supporting and influencing their behavior. In essence, you help maintain a relationship-based approach to guiding young children’s behavior while meeting their needs.

What is Guidance?

Guidance is how you help children learn the expectations for behavior in a variety of settings. It is how you help children know what it means to be a member of your community, learn social rules, manage conflict, and regulate their emotions. It means helping children learn from their mistakes and make positive choices. As you read this information, it is also important to think about what guidance is not. Guidance is not punishment. It is not about control or making children fear adults. It is about knowing children and creating the best physical and social environment in which they can learn.

Your approach to guidance for preschoolers is likely influenced by different life experiences, such as your own childhood, and your personal beliefs about the role of a preschool teacher in helping children guide their behavior. Some preschool teachers may believe that it is their responsibility to maintain and manage the behaviors of young children, while others may believe that preschoolers will learn to control their own behaviors through teaching and experiences. It is important to consider how your beliefs shape the guidance that you are providing preschoolers in your program. When guidance is viewed as a process of understanding and supporting the development of skills, in other words, as teaching, the needs of families and children can be understood, respected, and met.

Family priorities affect children’s behaviors. For example, some families might place a high value on talking about emotions and expressing them as they occur, whereas other families may value keeping emotions quiet and private. As a preschool teacher, you need to be sensitive and respectful of individual differences in social and emotional development when engaging with children and their families.

Guidance and Children’s Development: Understanding Proactive Approaches to Guidance

Being able to listen, follow directions, manage emotions and actions, and peacefully coexist with other individuals are essential skills for meaningful and successful participation in life experiences, both in our professional and personal lives. Difficulty managing behaviors and emotions can cause frustration and disappointment and can strongly influence our relationships with others and our overall quality of life.

Positive guidance helps promote the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children in preschool. When you intentionally support young children’s development through positive guidance, you help them learn one of the most important skills for school and lifelong success: self-regulation, or the ability to manage one’s own feelings and behaviors. It is important that the children in your classroom understand how to function civilly in a modern, diverse, and complex democratic society. Dan Gartrell, author of Education for a Civic Society, suggests the following five essential skills, which he calls democratic life skills:

• Finding acceptance as a member of a group and as a worthy individual
• Expressing strong emotions in non-hurtful ways
• Solving problems creatively—either independently or in cooperation with others
• Accepting unique human qualities in others
• Thinking intelligently and ethically

Applying these democratic life skills can help ensure that all the decisions we make are helping us move in the right direction. These can be challenging to remember in the midst of a stressful situation involving a child. It is important to both remember and teach children to evaluate what we can and cannot control. We have no control over how others choose to treat us. However, we do have control over how we react to the actions of others.

A proactive approach to challenging behavior relies on guidance to teach a child the skills they may be missing. Guidance can be defined as (Hearron & Hildebrand, 2013):

• Using words and actions that positively influence the behaviors of others
• Establishing appropriate expectations and supporting others so they do the right thing
• Providing multiple opportunities for practice and success
• Remaining helpful and encouraging when mistakes occur
• Understanding your own values while respecting the values of others

Additionally, Gartrell (2004), in The Power of Guidance, describes six practices of teachers who are committed to positive guidance:

Impact of Culture and Experience on Guidance

There are multiple factors that can influence how we, as adults, respond to a child’s behavior, including how we were raised, our personal values and beliefs, and our understanding of child development. Through careful consideration of these factors, we can better understand and improve our interactions with children and their families. This will positively influence the overall development of the children we serve. Consider a few examples of culturally determined adult expectations of children:

• The age at which a child feeds or dresses herself or himself
• The age at which a child uses the toilet independently
• Whether and when a child sleeps independently
• The amount and nature of eye contact between children and adults
• Expectations for how adults and children talk to one another (e.g., acceptability of questioning adults, talking over one another, etc.)
• The ways adults and children show affection (hugging, etc.)
• How children express emotions

A mismatch between our own expectations and a child’s behavior (or family’s priorities) may cause tension. It is important to understand the variability in behaviors that might be culturally determined. Consider your own childhood, if you grew up in a strict home, you may view guidance very differently from a colleague who grew up in a home with few rules. You will learn more about the importance of understanding culture-based behaviors in Lesson Two.

Your own upbringing may influence the kinds of behaviors you tolerate. For example, think about how you would respond if a child left circle time without permission in your classroom. While some teachers may have considered this child’s behavior challenging or problematic, and therefore may have expected the child to return to circle, others may think that this behavior demonstrates the child’s sense of independence and choice-making. This belief could cause the teacher to ignore the behavior. Neither of these responses are right or wrong; they are simply representations of how culture and experiences shape individuals’ approaches to guidance.

Guidance as a Strengths-Based Approach

As caregiver working with young children, it is important to recognize that all behavior is a form of communication. Your job is to observe the behavior and determine what the child is trying to communicate. In your daily work as a preschool teacher, you should think about approaching behaviors that may be challenging as opportunities to problem-solve and teach new skills. You should encourage children to assume responsibility for their behaviors, to care about and get along with others, and to contribute to the group. By doing so, you help create and sustain a positive climate that focuses on teamwork, acceptance, cooperation, and patience even when mistakes are made. When you focus on the positive traits of others, it is likely that you will see an increase in the occurrence of those positive behaviors. You can encourage other colleagues to do the same with children.

See

Do

As a preschool teacher, it is your responsibility to provide developmentally appropriate experiences and activities that are sensitive to children’s individual needs. As you plan and implement your program, you must remember you are setting the foundation for children’s growth and success. When thinking about guidance in your preschool classroom, consider the following:

• Plan meaningful, fun experiences for the children in your care while acknowledging their individual differences and backgrounds.
• Model positive behaviors, acknowledge mistakes, and demonstrate problem solving in your own behaviors and interactions with young children.
• Remember the importance of regulating your own emotions. When caregivers are dysregulated, it is difficult to access all your positive guidance strategies.
• Embed opportunities for guidance learning throughout your school day and provide children with multiple opportunities to express themselves in various ways.
• Acknowledge, validate, and respond to children’s needs, emotions, and concerns.
• Remember that children’s behaviors, and in particular challenging behaviors, communicate a message and that it is up to us adults to “decode” and interpret that message.
• Be sensitive to children’s unique life circumstances and experiences that may influence their behaviors.
• Arrange your environment in ways that promote children’s success.
• Use natural classroom events, relationships and interactions with peers and adults as opportunities to talk with children about emotions or challenging behaviors.

Completing this Course

For more information on what to expect in this course, the Positive Guidance Competency Reflection, and a list of the accompanying Learn, Explore and Apply resources and activities offered throughout the lessons, visit the Preschool Course Guide.

Please note the References & Resources section at the end of each lesson outlines reference sources and resources to find additional information on the topics covered. As you complete lessons, you are not expected to review all the online references available. However, you are welcome to explore the resources further if you have interest, or at the request of your trainer, coach, or administrator.