Positivity Strategies Guide
Positivity provides visual, auditory, and interactive strategies that educators can use to support communication, self-regulation, transitions, task completion, and independence. The strategies can be individualized to meet learners' needs and incorporated into daily classroom routines.
Implementation note: These strategies should be individualized. When addressing challenging behavior, educators should work with the appropriate educational team to understand the behavior's function and select an intervention that meets the learner's needs.
Incentive strategy
What is an incentive strategy?
An incentive strategy increases desired behaviors by allowing students to earn a preferred item, activity, or privilege for demonstrating a targeted behavior.
A token economy is one type of incentive strategy. Students earn tokens, chips, or points for demonstrating specific behaviors and exchange them for a preferred reinforcer.
In Positivity, educators can create personalized incentive charts using labels, images, and symbols. These charts can be assigned to events on a student's visual schedule.
Impact for students
Incentive strategies can encourage students to engage in desired behaviors, participate in learning activities, and work more independently over time.
Token economies also help students learn to work toward a goal before receiving a reinforcer. Gradually increasing the work required to earn an incentive can build persistence and help students develop skills that transfer to other environments.
Incentives must be meaningful to the individual student. If the available reinforcers are not motivating, the strategy may not produce the desired result.
What Positivity provides
Positivity supports incentive strategies through:
- Customizable incentive charts: Create strategies that reflect individual student preferences.
- Images and symbols: Pair incentive options with visuals to improve understanding.
- Audio support: Use the play button to hear incentive labels read aloud.
- Saved strategies: Save named incentive strategies in My Strategies for future assignment.
- Visual schedule integration: Assign incentive charts to scheduled events.
- Flexible token requirements: Define the number of tokens a student needs to earn a selected incentive.
Breath strategy
What is the breath strategy?
The breath strategy uses a visual representation of a heart to guide students through steady breathing. It provides a concrete visual cue to help learners practice a relaxation technique when they experience strong emotions.
Educators can initiate the strategy when a learner shows signs of anxiety, frustration, or other emotions that may require support with regulation. The strategy can be used individually or with a group.
Impact for students
Some learners benefit from explicit instruction and visual support when learning to manage emotions. Teaching breathing as a concrete, repeatable skill can help students practice self-regulation rather than relying exclusively on adult direction.
The strategy is most useful when students learn how to use it during calm periods and then practice it when they begin showing signs of frustration or anxiety.
What Positivity provides
Positivity allows educators to:
- Select the student or group who will receive the strategy.
- Choose the number of breaths.
- Customize the color of the heart.
- Deliver the strategy on demand.
- Review intervention data, including when the strategy was initiated and how often it was delivered.
Break card strategy
What is a break card strategy?
The break card strategy teaches students to request a break when a task, demand, or situation becomes difficult or overwhelming.
Instead of relying on challenging behavior to escape or delay a task, the learner is taught to communicate the need for a break by selecting a break card on the screen.
The strategy initiates a break for a designated period and then provides a reminder that it is time to return to the scheduled activity.
Impact for students
A break request provides an alternative form of communication for learners who may struggle to express their needs appropriately when frustrated, anxious, or overwhelmed.
The strategy is especially relevant when the function of a behavior is to escape or avoid a task, demand, or situation. The intervention should match the reason the behavior occurs.
A break card is not a universal solution for every challenging behavior. The team should determine the likely function of the behavior before implementing the intervention.
What Positivity provides
Positivity supports break requests through:
- Break cards displayed at designated times.
- Assignment of break cards to individual or multiple scheduled events.
- Customizable break-card images and auditory cues.
- A defined break duration.
- A visual indication of the break period.
- A reminder when the break is complete.
- Data about the frequency of break-card use and the associated events.
- Break cards can also be repositioned on the screen when using other Everway solutions.
Video modeling strategy
What is video modeling?
Video modeling teaches a behavior, skill, or sequence by showing the learner a video demonstration. Types of videos may be individualized to the learner's needs, preferences, and environment.
- Basic video modeling: Another student or staff member demonstrates the desired behavior.
- Video self-modeling: The target learner is shown demonstrating the desired behavior.
- Point-of-View Modeling: The video shows the activity from the learner's perspective.
- Video Prompting: A task is divided into individual steps, with pauses that allow the learner to complete each step before continuing.
Impact for students
Video modeling can help students learn communication, social, academic, play, and behavioral skills. It can also support multi-step task completion.
Videos allow learners to observe and repeat the desired behavior. Individualizing the model, length, and detail can improve the likelihood that the student will attend to and imitate what is demonstrated.
Video modeling can also promote independence by reducing the need for repeated adult prompts.
What Positivity provides
Positivity enables educators to:
- Create and save video-modeling strategies.
- Upload video files and assign titles.
- Configure videos to play automatically when the strategy is delivered.
- Schedule videos alongside classroom activities.
- Present videos on demand through the service provider's account.
- Assign video models as activities students can access when needed.
- Review video delivery information and add observational notes.
Decision tree strategy
What is a decision tree or workflow?
A decision tree or workflow is a visual representation of a process, sequence, or choice. It helps learners understand what to do, what happens next, and which behavior is expected in a given situation.
Strategies can be scheduled to appear at the beginning, middle, or end of an activity, or made available for the student to access as needed.
Impact for students
Visual instructions can make abstract expectations more concrete. They help learners understand the steps in an activity and the consequences of their choices.
Decision trees and workflows can also support self-regulation, task completion, and independence. Instead of depending on an adult to repeat directions, a student can refer to a visual prompt to understand what to do next.
What Positivity provides
Positivity supports decision trees and workflows through:
- Premade visual templates.
- Customizable visual strategies.
- Icons, pictures, and text to communicate expectations.
- Scheduled delivery during classroom events.
- Read-aloud support when students select cells in the visual.
- Integration with incentive strategies.
- Flexible delivery at specific points in an activity.
Social narratives strategy
Impact for students
Social narratives are individualized stories that explain social situations, expectations, and appropriate responses. They help learners understand what is happening, why it is happening, and how they can respond.
Social narratives may use pictures, symbols, drawings, and text. They should be written positively and non-judgmentally, with language and content appropriate to the learner.
Why it is important
Learners may experience difficulty understanding social expectations, interpreting others' perspectives, or responding appropriately in different situations.
Social narratives provide a structured way to explain these expectations before a situation occurs. They can support communication, self-management, social skills, and participation in classroom routines.
What Positivity provides
Positivity offers:
- Existing social narratives that can be used as written or individualized.
- Templates for creating personalized narratives.
- Tools for adding symbols, images, shapes, and text.
- The ability to create narratives from scratch or adapt existing ones.
- Scheduling options to deliver narratives during specific events.
- Text-to-speech support.
- Data on narrative delivery and whether the narrative was read in its entirety.
Visual schedule
What is a visual schedule?
A visual schedule is a sequential representation of the day or an activity, using pictures, symbols, text, or a combination of these formats.
It helps students anticipate what is happening now and what comes next. Schedules can represent an entire day or provide a more focused view of upcoming activities.
In Positivity, the current event and the next two scheduled activities are displayed to help students prepare for transitions.
Impact for students
Visual schedules make routines and transitions more predictable. They can help learners understand the sequence of the day, prepare for less-preferred activities, and cope with changes in routine.
A schedule also promotes independence by giving students a consistent way to determine what to do next without waiting for an adult to provide directions.
What Positivity provides
Positivity allows educators to:
- Create a classroom schedule.
- Add individualized student schedules.
- Customize schedules using text, images, or symbols.
- Display schedules vertically or horizontally.
- Show the current event and upcoming activities.
- Schedule reminders and supporting strategies.
- Incorporate alarms, incentive charts, social narratives, and other interventions.
Alarms
What are alarms?
Alarms are audio or visual reminders of a specific time or event. They can prompt students to begin an activity, complete a routine, or respond to an important event without relying entirely on adult reminders.
In Positivity, alarms can be individualized to reflect students' communication, sensory, and accessibility needs.
Impact for students
Alarms can help learners develop independence with time management, transitions, and routines.
They are particularly useful when an action must happen at a particular time regardless of the activity currently taking place. For example, an alarm can remind a student to complete a scheduled sensory activity or attend to a recurring classroom responsibility.
A consistent alarm system can reduce the need for adult prompting and help learners become more self-directed.
What Positivity provides
Positivity allows educators to:
- Create alarms for individual student or classroom schedules.
- Set specific times and choose whether alarms repeat daily or weekly.
- Select from different alert tones.
- Add custom text-to-speech messages.
- Include images or symbols.
- Choose whether alarms appear on the student's device, the caregiver's device, or both.
- Configure alarms to close manually or advance after a set time.
Additional Resources
Explore the visual schedules, strategies, and on demand delivery features within Positivity that can be used to create a consistent support system throughout the day.