Blog Archives
Strategies for Fostering Resiliency with Indigenous Children
This workshop will provide an in-depth look at the powerful effects of resiliency and strategies for fostering resiliency with Indigenous children. The 4 Blankets of Resiliency: Strong sense of self; family; community; culture, language and connection to the land will…
What To Do After The Meltdown: Practical Strategies for Prevention, Intervention & Instructional Consequences
When working with a child or adolescent with an Autism Spectrum Disorder, ADHD, or another developmental disorder, meltdowns may occur that may be a result of sensory overload or an inability to self-regulate emotions. This course will provide many practical…
High Functioning Autism: Proven & Practical Interventions for Challenging Behaviours with Children & Adolescents
This intensive, full-day workshop provides proven intervention strategies, essential treatment tools, and behavioural techniques to help you analyze behaviours and actions, identify consequences for behaviours, and teach new skills to children, adolescents and young adults with high-functioning autism (HFA). Walk…
Smart But Scattered: Strengthening Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents
Executive function is a neuropsychological concept referring to the cognitive processes required to plan and direct activities. Skills include task initiation and follow through, working memory, sustained attention, performance monitoring, inhibition of impulses, and goal-directed persistence. While the ground-work for…
Rescuing the Dysregulated Child: Effective Interventions & Strategies with Children, Adolescents, & Parents
Working with emotionally dysregulated children is an often overwhelming and exhausting endeavour. Many teachers and counsellors feel the pull of being “saviours” for dysregulated children and their parents. How to intervene and steps that can be taken by teachers and…
Is It Disability Behaviour or Just Disruptive Behaviour?
Both educators and parents struggle with what to do with difficult behaviour in the classroom and home. Both are often hesitant to provide consequences when a child with special needs exhibits problem behaviours because they are afraid they will be…
Interventions for Executive Function Difficulties: Changing the Brain to Change Behaviour
This course will help participants gain a deeper understanding of executive functions and how executive functions deficits impact the behaviour and academic production of children and adolescents. Participants will gain state-of-the-art knowledge of how to identify executive function strengths and…
What is it About Me You Don’t Like? Practical Classroom Management Strategies to Minimize Challenging Behaviours
Quality indicators for an effective classroom include: teacher behaviour (tone of voice, volume, cadence, verbal and nonverbal communication, paraverbals), environment (physical structure, schedules, routines, expectations), instruction (boring vs. stimulating, age appropriate vs. non-age appropriate, hands-on), and student behaviour (function of…
The Neuropsychology of Reading & Written Language Disorders: A Framework for Effective Interventions
This workshop will examine reading and written language disorders from a brain-based educational perspective, and classify both dyslexia and dysgraphia into distinct subtypes. There will be a detailed discussion linking each learning disorder’s subtype with scores of evidence-based interventions. Four…
Over 30 Proven & Effective Brief Interventions for Students with Emotional & Behavioural Problems
Over 30 Proven and Effective Brief Interventions for Student with Emotional and Behavioural Problems will guide you through focused, clear and proven approaches to working with children and youth. Every professional who seeks to fill their toolbox with tested methods will…
Life Skills: Practical Strategies that Work for Students with Severe Cognitive/Developmental Disorders, Autism, CP, & Syndromes
Students labeled as having moderate to significant cognitive/developmental disabilities may appear to have such challenging deficits that their educational needs are perceived as far exceeding their abilities. Their needs may appear so basic (e.g., simple communication skills, appropriate manipulation of…
Overcoming Anxiety Disorders in School-Age Children
The increasing rate of stress and trauma to children, which includes divorce, family breakdown, violence in society and the media, has produced a “shell shocked” generation suffering from anxiety in many cases. The challenge for educators and clinicians is to…
The Neuropsychology of Emotional Disorders: A Framework for Effective Interventions
This workshop will explore the neural architecture of emotional behaviour by examining various brain structures laying the foundation for higher level social skill functioning. Specific biological factors related to the development of social competence and emotional self-regulation will be explored.…
Stopping the Noise: Practical Strategies to Help Clients with Panic, Generalized Anxiety, Phobias and OCD
Therapists are supposed to make clients safe and secure, creating a cozy haven from a cruel world, right? Well, when it comes to treating anxiety and OCD, growing evidence shows that the quickest, most effective approach involves instructing them to…
Grief Therapy and Quest for Meaning
When a loved one dies, one world ends and another begins. Explore how loss casts us into a changed life as we struggle with the meaning of the death and search for the meaning of our lives now. At the…
Advanced Motivational Interviewing: Using Deliberate Practice To Develop Skills in M.I. (Part 2 will be built on the content provided during Part 1)
Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an empirically supported treatment that has been shown to enhance engagement and outcomes (especially long-term outcomes) for numerous clinical problems. It is a brief, client-centered therapy aimed at understanding and resolving ambivalence to change. MI has…
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy Skills Training for Mental Health Professionals
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) is a highly effective form of treatment for clients with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). However, many of these individuals have rarely developed life skills to build a proactive and responsive life versus a defensive and reactive…
Attachment-Focused EMDR: Healing Developmental Deficits and Adults Abused as Children (Part 2 will be built on the content provided in Part 1)
Over the last two decades, EMDR has emerged as one of the most powerful clinical tools available to trauma therapists. In this workshop, Dr. Laurel Parnell will teach you how to integrate an attachment focus into EMDR and to use…
Advanced Motivational Interviewing: Using Deliberate Practice To Develop Skills in M.I. (Part 1 of 2)
Motivational Interviewing (MI) is an empirically supported treatment that has been shown to enhance engagement and outcomes (especially long-term outcomes) for numerous clinical problems. It is a brief, client-centered therapy aimed at understanding and resolving ambivalence to change. MI has…
Attachment-Focused EMDR: Healing Developmental Deficits and Adults Abused as Children (Part 1 of 2)
Over the last two decades, EMDR has emerged as one of the most powerful clinical tools available to trauma therapists. In this workshop, Dr. Laurel Parnell will teach you how to integrate an attachment focus into EMDR and to use…
The 10 Best-Ever Depression Management Strategies
Depression is painful. Ruminating thoughts, lethargy, and increasing alienation from others create a negative internal and external environment. Those symptoms actively interfere with carrying out basic demands of daily life. While depression is one of the most common mental health…
Post-Traumatic Growth: Leading Clients on a Journey of Resiliency and Healing
Become empowered as a trauma clinician! Learn from expert trauma clinician Lisa Ferentz how to shine a spotlight on your clients’ resiliency and creativity – while planting the seeds of hope and Post-Traumatic Growth even in the earliest stages of…
Failure to Launch: Overcoming Delays in Independence
Parents who formerly worried about “empty nest syndrome” might today worry more that their children will never leave home. In countries around the world, increasing numbers of young people – particularly males – are having difficulty navigating the transition from…
Harnessing the Transformative Power of Mindful Acceptance and Commitment (ACT)
Acceptance and mindfulness-based practices are rapidly making their way into mental health care, medicine, and society both to alleviate human suffering and nurture psychological health and wellness. This body of work also offers a fresh perceptive on psychological suffering and…
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy
Much has been written about mindfulness in recent decades, but clinicians are often left without concrete, practical skills to teach clients in acute distress. Applying the methods of an evidence-based intervention such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), requires in-depth knowledge…