9. Providing Individualized Support

Are there children in your program who struggle to engage in certain activities, follow directions, or complete specific tasks even with some basic supports in place? Or, maybe you have needed some extra help learning something new, like a new recipe, sport, or hobby. Everyone needs extra support at some point, and it’s likely that children with identified disabilities require additional help to participate in inclusive programs.

This video talks about how we can provide individual support for children who need it. We’ll talk about three different strategies: how to provide good, clear instructions; ways to provide the right amount of help; and how to use positive feedback.

We provide individualized support to help children fully participate in our programs, activities, and routines, especially when these are new skills they need to do! This could be teaching a child to open their lunchbox independently at a summer camp or supporting a preschooler in getting out their nap cot at childcare by themselves. We also provide extra help when a child acts in a way that limits their participation, such as using physical behaviors like hitting or kicking, leaving the group, or not following directions.

We start by reflecting on the directions we give children and making sure they understand the expectations. Providing really clear instructions that let children know exactly what they need to do is important! Good instructions help children be more successful and independent, and prevent behaviors that are challenging.

Good instructions are short, clear, focused on behavior that we can see, and stated positively. By “positively,” we mean telling the child to do something, like “You can use your walking feet inside!” rather than to stop doing something, like “Stop running in the library!” Good instructions also give children clarity on exactly what they are expected to do.

For example, in a preschool classroom, the instruction “Please get your coats and line up on the yellow line” is much clearer than “It’s time to stop playing and get what we need to go outside!” The second example doesn’t tell kids exactly what they should do, which could be confusing because we don’t explicitly name the materials they need to get and where they need to go. Another example is a swim teacher telling children to “Keep your bodies on the pool steps while waiting for your turn” instead of “Stop! Don’t! Stay there!” Again, the second example doesn’t give children the exact information they need to safely wait for their turn.

Clear instructions are a huge way to help kids be successful before we need to provide more individualized support.

Now, let’s talk about different ways we can give children the right amount of help so they can be successful with a certain task or activity. By providing the right amount of help, we are teaching kids exactly how to participate in certain activities or routines. This is called “prompting.”

There are many ways we can use prompting in early childhood programs. We can verbally remind specific children of expectations for a certain activity, like telling a child that they will need to clean up the toy cars in five minutes. We can also use gestures, like pointing to where a child needs to line up or pointing towards the carpet for story time. Sometimes we model or show how to do something, like how to check out a book at the library or how to play a new game. We can also use pictures or photos to show a child a list of things they need, or the steps in an activity. For example, for a nature walk, we could show a child a checklist of a (1) water bottle, (2) hat, and a (3) clipboard.

These examples all provide different levels of help and different ways to use prompting. Of course, our goal is to help children learn new skills while encouraging them to be as independent as possible. We should take a step back and let them do things all on their own once they have learned a skill.

Now, let’s talk about how we can celebrate children when they do the right thing! Positive feedback is one of the most commonly used and most effective strategies when working with young children. Positive feedback happens when we celebrate after a child follows the directions or engages in an activity as expected, which increases the likelihood that they will do this again in the future.

The most effective positive feedback is called Behavior-Specific Praise, where we directly name what a child is doing. For example, a Sunday school teacher saying, “I see how Isabella is playing so safely on the playground!” or a soccer coach saying, “Great job, Leonard! You are staying with the group!” Behavior-specific praise is an easy-to-use strategy where we tell children exactly what they are doing that is correct.

Other examples include, “Khalid, way to use those walking feet in the hall!” or “Isabella, I love how you are using a quiet voice in the library!” instead of a more generic statement like “Good job!” Sometimes, positive feedback can also involve specific items paired with behavior-specific praise. For example, Elaine is working on participating in a preschool ballet class and earns a sticker when she joins the group and dances with the other kids. Her teacher is very mindful in using behavior-specific praise, saying things like, “Elaine, I see you dancing with your friends! You earned a sticker!” specifically noting exactly what she is doing.

Sometimes, we use several of these individualized support strategies at the same time. This can be helpful for children who seem to need even more help to participate after one of these strategies doesn’t seem to work.

For example, Leonard is having a hard time at soccer practice. While he really likes soccer, he struggles to do drills with the rest of the team and participate during the whole practice. After talking with Gordon, Leonard’s dad, the coaches plan some individual supports for Leonard. First, they reflected on how to give really clear, concise directions and use pictures of each drill to help Leonard understand what to do. Gordon shared that Leonard is really successful when people show him exactly how to do new things, so the coaches made sure they always demonstrated each drill and had Leonard follow kids who could do the drills independently. This way, he had several different models of what to do.

Finally, Gordon thought they could always have an extra fun activity planned after soccer, like visiting his favorite playground or watching some Star Wars together – Leonard’s all-time favorite movies. With these things in place, Leonard began participating the whole time! The coaches noticed these things also seemed to help a few other kids and were so proud to see Leonard playing with his friends. There weren’t huge strategies to implement, but rather small things they could easily add in that helped create an inclusive practice where Leonard could participate much more independently – and had more fun!

We know that some children in our programs will need extra help to participate and access some activities, routines, and settings. We can use specific strategies such as providing clear instructions, giving the right amount of help, and using positive feedback, or several of these things all together.

All of us need extra help at one point or another. What could this look like for the children in your program?