• Affect is central to all learning. Affective reciprocity allows children to find meaning and symbolize experience.
  
• The continuous flow of interactions allows child to become intentional and capable of generalizing and abstracting.
  
• Provide long periods of spontaneous floor time to obtain engagement, initiation, and multiple circles of communication in high affect states.
  
• Get children to think and problem solve. Reach towards higher levels of symbolic thinking and abstraction within wider range of emotions.
  
• Individual differences and variations in learning styles are expected.
  
• Recognize sensory processing and regulatory challenges within all interactions and learning.
  
• The child has to bring different processing skills across modalities to learn. Challenge all capacities.
  
• The child must apply their thinking to multiple contexts.
  
• Keep activities experience based and meaningful. Make learning dynamic. Be flexible and seize opportunities for spontaneous learning.
  
• Work at the child's developmental level. Do not skip over basic foundation capacities for shared attention, engagement, intentionality...
  
• Group activities should meet the needs of children at different levels.
  
• Follow the group's lead!
  
• Relationships and pleasurable interactions are essential for learning to be meaningful.
  

Additional Recommendations:

• Intensive training for regular and special education staff prior to the beginning of the school year is crucial.
  
• Incorporate flexible work shifts for your staff to allow for a one to one ratio during Floor Time.
  
• A schedule should be created that allows for long periods of Floor Time. Trying to implement effective therapy in short spurts is not effective. Long periods of continuous interaction are needed for children to make significant developmental progress.
  
• It is a challenge to keep DIR programs predominantly Floor Time. Constant evaluation of the daily schedule should focus on maximizing the amount of time spent doing Floor Time and take care not to drift into a heavy academic schedule. Think developmental!
  
• All lessons should have an experience-based component. In regular education classrooms lessons are often presented verbally with some visuals. It is crucial that these concepts be reinforced by experience-based learning.
  
• Parent involvement is crucial to the developmental process. Parents of children in public schools are not consistently involved. It is important to help them realize their involvement is crucial.