What is Gentle Teaching?

• Gentle teaching is a set of humane and valuing principles, and practices aimed at helping parents, teachers and human service professionals facilitate behavioral change with individuals who have difficulty learning and or interacting with others. The values, goals, and strategies that comprise this approach are centered on building warm, trusting and fair relationships between the individual in need and those who support the individual. Human relationships are viewed as the primary vehicle for affecting positive behavioral change.
• Gentle teaching is unique in that it is an interactional approach to behavioral change. Both the people in need and those who help are challenged to grow and change. Reciprocal fairness is sought instead of compliance. Ways to share human value are sought rather than ways to control. Effective proactive teaching is the focus of the practitioner's thinking rather than identification and implementation of contingencies or negative behavioral practices.
• Gentle teaching is value based instead of strategy based. Strategies are viewed as neutral tools that are given life, meaning and efficacy by the practitioner's posture/values. The practitioner of this approach must be willing to adopt such a posture that: a) strives for human solidarity; b) rejects the use of pain, punishment or control as acceptable tools for prompting behavioral change; c) seeks to unconditionally acknowledge and uphold the worth and dignity of the individual.
• The primary goal of this approach is to bring people into relationship. Therefore the objectives of teaching are interactional, in both scope and content. In Gentle Teaching, the practitioner seeks to teach the person that: 1) human presence is safe, predictable, secure, and signifies the onset of human valuing; 2) participation and interaction with others is empowering, fair, and a primary vehicle for entering into valuing human relationships; 3) accepting, seeking and sharing value with others is the purpose for and the predictable result of living and learning; and 4) living, working and recreating interdependently is empowering for everyone involved.

Dave Yeiter
Shriver Clinical Services Corporation

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