Healing Responses to Hard Behaviors Using the NeuroRelational Framework

 It's not just challenging behavior; it's a stress response! In this trauma-informed training, you will learn how to use your relationship with children to improve behavior by reducing stress. You will learn how to grow children's social-emotional skills by...

 - Using behaviors to recognize when a child is in a stress response (or soon will be) and how to help

 - Challenging children to do hard things without triggering their trauma

 - Building children's ability to reflect on their behaviors and solve their own problems in harmonious ways

 - Help children with their BIG emotions while dealing with a whole group of children at the same time

 - Have more fun doing all of this!

The NeuroRelational Framework is an equitable approach to responding to behaviors and teaching social-emotional skills. It is equitable because it shifts from a compliance lens of behavior, which is subjective and inherently biased, to a safety-challenge-threat lens, which aligns with neurodevelopment.

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Testimonial of a version geared toward parents: "I attended the 'Healing Responses to Hard Behaviors' workshop for parents at El Centro de la Raza last May, and it has truly transformed the way my daughter’s father and I parent. We are much better able to provide our 4-year-old an outlet before challenging behaviors start, as well as a better understanding of how to support her and meet her in challenging moments. We’re both incredibly grateful for the insights and guidance we received and use them every day. (I actually pretended my daughter was a pillow this morning, which made my daughter laugh and laugh and just completely changed the trajectory of our day.)" --Katherine Hannula Hill

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Anti-Bias Practice Toward Children (and adults) Who Have Experienced Trauma

A 3 to 8-hour workshop on ways to decrease your implicit bias using the NeuroRelational Framework.

•  Understand how implicit bias affects children who have experienced trauma.

•  Explore the shift from dictatorship to leadership between adults and children.

•  Practice self-compassion on your anti-bias journey.

•  Learn how to create safe spaces, both for yourself and the children who challenge you.

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How Neuroscience is Catching Up with Indigenous Wisdom

A 1-3 hour training on how we can use our inborn indigenous ways to heal from colonialism.

We are all born from indigenous cloth, and neuroscience is showing us how moving away from our old ways has hurt us. Get in touch with the attitudinal conditions under which we all evolved and rejuvenate them through your relationship with children, who already espouse and model them for us.

• Understand how distress and disease are products of our colonial-centric lifestyle

• Learn how to recognize nervous system imbalances

• Gain nervous system-balancing practices gleaned from worldwide indigenous wisdom and new neuroscience

• Get indigenous tools for staying connected (and stress-free) in conflict with adults and children.

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Transforming Child Consults & Parent Conferences Using the NeuralRelational Framework

A 3 to 8-hour workshop on a trauma-focused, neurodevelopmental, and equitable protocol that replaces typical consult agendas that use a compliance lens of behavior.

Create real change for children by turning those ineffective behavior-based meetings on children into ones that are anti-biased, trauma-sensitive, and neurodevelopmental. If you’re someone who consults on children/youth, bring one in mind to this practical workshop. Learn how to

• Recognize and tactfully respond to bias in the meeting room using reflective practice as your tool.

• Create a new kind of needs assessment that replaces child/youth “weaknesses” with vulnerabilities.

• Replace Whac-a-mole and dead-end behavior systems by repairing lower brain networks (like sensory) to stabilize higher brain networks (like executive function).

• Transform behavior intervention plans by replacing consequences and rewards with neurodevelopmental strategies in ways that promote safety and social-emotional growth.

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Staying Connected in Conflict: How Healing Happens Through Relationships

3 - 12 Hours

Brains are designed to thrive from interaction with others, and big growth happens through conflict. Holding a reflective stance with children when in conflict protects you from power struggles and turns you into a healing presence--even in the most charged of circumstances.  

In addition to learning about and practicing this tool, we will look at how it

• Promotes equity (racial and otherwise) between you and the children you work with;

• Helps children heal from post-traumatic and developmental stress;

• Builds children's capacities to regulate and reflect;

• Empowers children to resolve their own conflicts in equitable ways.

 

The Cradle to Prison Pipeline: What YOU Can Do

A 3 to 8-hour training on understanding the causes of the cradle to prison pipeline, and how to change the trajectory of baby and toddler lives using the NeuroRelational Framework.

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Decolonizing the Classroom: Practical Tips on Expanding Minds

 

Our culture's typical way of treating children reflects a colonialist, compliance-based mindset where children are denied their dignity when they make our job difficult. Conversely, Indigenous cultures worldwide value children’s right to autonomy while they skillfully bring them into alignment with community needs. 

 

Develop your decolonization practice by learning how to indigenize interactions with children and help the adults around you change. Using concepts from the NeuroRelational Framework (NRF) and Facilitating Attuned Interactions (The FAN), this workshop will help you...

 - Make clear distinctions between colonialist and Indigenous interactions with children;

 - Learn how even children with the most challenging behaviors can be wooed into alignment with community values;

 - Help the adults you work with cultivate an egalitarian approach to children’s behaviors;

 - Expand the capacity in children and adults to reflect on and solve problems collaboratively;

 - Help adults you work with overcome their resistance to this change.