From Control to Support: A Rights-Based Practice

This course invites Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) to move beyond “compliance training” into a deeper shift in mindset and practice. Rather than just memorizing regulations, you’ll explore how your everyday decisions either protect or quietly erode the rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), including children and adults—in home, community, employment, and residential settings.

Using four core spectrums: Controller to Support, Gatekeeper to Liberator, Parental to Coach, and Safety to Meaning, you’ll learn to recognize where your instincts land and how to move toward approaches that honor autonomy, dignity, and real adult life. We’ll name and challenge infantilizing practices, unpack what rights look like in real homes and real communities, and examine how to balance safety with choice without slipping into control or chaos.

The course also clarifies what is never okay (prohibited practices like abuse, seclusion, aversive techniques, and punishment-based restraint) versus what is a rights restriction that requires formal justification, documentation, and oversight (like locked kitchens, controlled money, restricted communication, or planned restraint). You’ll practice recognizing rights violations in the moment, responding safely, reporting concerns, and working with families and guardians while keeping the person at the center.

By the end, DSPs will see themselves not as rule enforcers, but as coaches and liberators, professionals who use their role to expand people’s freedom, not shrink it.

Participants will be able to:

• Explain human, civil, explicit, and implicit rights in everyday DSP practice.
• Identify where their own behavior falls on the four spectrums and how to shift toward Support, Liberator, Coach, and Meaning.
• Recognize infantilizing language and actions and replace them with adult-respecting practices.
• Describe what rights look like in home and community-based settings (privacy, food, visitors, community access, freedom from coercion and restraint).
• Distinguish prohibited practices from rights restrictions that require formal planning and oversight.
• Respond in the moment when rights are at risk, including de-escalation, support, and reporting.
• Work with families and guardians in ways that respect legal roles and the person’s voice.

This course is designed for DSPs and frontline staff across residential, day, employment, in‑home, and self‑directed services who want their work to do more than meet regulations, who want it to change lives.