About Us

What Is Gentle Teaching?

Gentle Teaching is an interactional model for helping people with challenges of learning and behavior. The behavior (communication skills, teaching-learning styles, modality use and preferences, personality characteristics, etc.) of both the teacher/caregiver and the student/child/client are objectively analyzed to identify interactions that positively or negatively impact person-to-person interactions. Well researched and traditionally accepted strategies such as shaping, fading, chaining, social reinforcement, errorless learning, visual strategies, etc. are combined to restructure maladaptive interactions and fortify adaptive interactions. Increasing the number of pro-social interactions, creating a high frequency of success in learning, and lowering the number of maladaptive and inequitable interactions shared by the teacher and the student helps them build a trusting, safe, and mutually valuing relationship.

The Gentle Teaching approach holds that the qualitative and quantitative nature of the interactions shared between the teacher and the student has a significant and critical impact on learning and behavior. While this approach is attentive to environment and organic variables that may have a functional relationship in the onset of challenging behavior or learning difficulties, person-to-person interactions always receive consideration since they are always an element of daily living. In many situations, the powerful influence of human relationship is clearly evident; attention seeking, avoidance of demands, inability to communicate, boredom or low levels of stimulation are often sited as having a functional relationship in the onset or exhibition of challenging behavior. These circumstance which can trigger problems are most often created by or outcomes of human interactions that are mismatched, poor in quality or quantity, or in some manner insufficient. Therefore, Gentle Teaching considers that these interactional variables that may facilitate, exacerbate, and or maintain interactional difficulties as well as provide a mechanism for remediating and overcoming such challenges.

Because Gentle Teaching has a relationship based ethos, practitioners are expected to hold all individuals in high regard despite their current lifestyle or behavioral repertoire. Advocates of the approach, maintain that practitioners must delineate a clear set of values and boundaries that continually upholds the dignity of the teacher and student while excluding the use of punishing and controlling strategies. Time-out, response cost, restraint, and other control oriented methods are viewed as having a high probability of negatively influencing relationships and therefore are not used in this model.

Gentle Teaching is not an approach that utilizes methods that are different from what many teachers and parents have used throughout recorded history. The methods imbedded in the approach are a composition of best practices from the field of education, habilitation, psychology, and other social sciences. It does differ from other models in the disability field in that it espouses a set of values that limits the practitioner's behavior. It differs from other models in that it does critically and carefully examine the behavior of both the teacher and the student. It is similar to most models in that the outcomes sought include skill acquisition and deceleration of challenges behavior. It does differ from some models in that it includes building valuing relationships as an important outcome of the teaching-learning process. Gentle Teaching is not a static set of values, goals, and strategies that are universally applied to anyone without noticing that they are individuals. It is dynamic, personalized, and personal. These characteristics make the approach difficult to catalog and categorize. However, Gentle Teaching is not without parallel or companionship. In past ten years, the term "person-centered" has been recognized as an essential characteristic of services that are offered to people with developmental disabilities. Largely, the term has been associated with current and future lifestyle planning. While the proponents of Gentle Teaching have never used the phrase "person-centered" as a referent to the values, goals, and strategies that comprise the model, Gentle Teaching is without question "person-centered teaching".

Dan Hobbs
July 20, 2004