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School & Agency Workshops

Trainings

Healing Tools for Hard Behaviors

Angry Kids: How to Calm, Comfort, Connect, and Redirect!
A 4-hour workshop on understanding childhood anger as necessary, and approaching it with connection and healing.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Self-Care

The Science of Self-Care
1 - 2 - Hour Workshop on learning about your particular nervous system's stress-resilience profile.
Self-care is best achieved from the accumulated little things. Learn what those little things are for your particular nervous system by finding out what triggers and soothes it at each of four brain-network levels. In addition to helping you provide yourself with targeted self-care, this session will help you gain self-compassion, and give you a tool for taking care of your more challenging emotions. and how best to increase its calm and resilience in a stressful job.
Radical Self-Care
3 - 4 Hour Workshop in 3 Parts: Envisioning Radical Self Care, The Science of Self Care, and Making Self Care a Reality.
Stress Reduction +
Energy Tools
Three, 3 or 4-hour sessions (9-12 hours total) on the inquiry-based technique for reducing stress (The Work of Byron Katie) and tools for getting your energy back. Co-trained with Joanna Wardisko.

Three Steps to Resilience: The NeuroRelational Framework for Educators and Other Nonclinical Providers

The NeuroRelational Framework Series
An 8-Workshop Course (3 to 6 hours per workshop) on using the NeuroRelational Framework to respond to challenging behavior in Schools

1) The NRF: Assessment to Intervention

An introduction to the NeuroRelational Framework, this workshop compares the NRF with conventional responses to behavior, walks through the 3-step process of assessment to intervention, and gives participants practice in creating their own NRF interventions for behavior issues.

2) From Co-Regulation to Self Reflection

Co-regulating with children leads to self-regulation; co-reflecting with children leads to self-reflection and greater agency in cooperating and contributing to the whole. Learn tools that regulate both adults and children simultaneously, and build skills in collaborative and reflective problem-solving with kids.

3) Assessing Arousal States

Learn about the difference between toxic and adaptive stress, and how to promote the latter in schools and home.

4) Soothing the Sensory System

A workshop dedicated to the brain's Sensory System: learn about the 7 senses and practice spotting vulnerabilities and devising soothers for each.

5) Healing-Centered Teaching and Parenting

A workshop dedicated to emotions and relationships, learn status quo conditions that trigger trauma responses in children and how to approach behavior with a neuro- and relational framework. More than three hours of training enables participants to practice responding to behavior with simultaneous curiosity, connection, and limits.​

6) Executive Functionality: Sparking Reflective Thinking

A workshop dedicated to the brain's Executive System, learn how to move children from lower to higher-level brain functions, promoting regulated and reflective adults and kids.

7) The NRF: Putting it Together

Gain NRF fluency by applying the NRF's three steps of assessing and addressing arousal states, levels of relationship engagement, and brain system strengths and vulnerabilities to specific cases.

8) Reflective Consultation with Parents & Peers

Build skills in using NRF language and principles in student consults with colleagues and parents.

Minimum of 10 monthly 2-hour Community of Practice sessions.

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"The Angry Kids workshop was amazingly helpful to me. I’ve been an OT for 20 years and I always felt inconsistent with behavior plan implementation because I’ve always been drawn towards the relational side, but still felt required to attempt it all. My 12 year old son just lost his father to a heart attack a 6 months ago and he has suddenly erupted into anger in the last 3 months. I feel like I’m suddenly able to manage those behaviors after taking this training, and the last two days we have been laughing and enjoying our commute to school rather than fighting. I also used the intervention with a student at school and it worked beautifully. Clenched fists relaxed within two interchanges. I’m really grateful for Betty's work." 

— Rebecca K., Occupational Therapist

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