Course Description:
Schools across the country are seeing increased rates of emotional and behavioral regulation challenges in youth. School mental health professionals and building administrators are often asked to provide reactive support by removing the dysregulated child from the classroom to support regulation. This approach can increase problem behavior as it reinforces classroom avoidance by removing the demand that elicited the emotional distress and providing individualized attention from an adult. This course focuses on how to help schools shift towards proactive, classroom based approaches to promote emotion regulation.
This course will provide several different approaches to help schools become more proactive. First, students will learn about how to establish effective Tier 1 emotion regulation structures in the classroom. Second, participants will learn evidence-based approaches for leveraging Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) curriculum to build and generalize new skills. Third, the course will review how to utilize an Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) to identify at-risk students and provide them targeted skill building to build replacement behaviors. Finally, participants will learn how to leverage consultee-centered consulting to help move building-based stakeholders towards greater adoption of these preventive practices.
Audience
School Counselors, School Adjustment Counselors, School Social Workers, Board Certified Behavior Analysts, Building Administrators
About the Instructor
Dr. Alex Hirshberg, Founder/Executive Director of Hirshberg Behavioral Health Services, is a clinical psychologist and the founder and executive director of Hirshberg Behavioral Health Services. He provides professional development and consultation services to schools across New England in several different areas, including building in-district social-emotional programs and comprehensive school mental health systems. In addition, Dr. Hirshberg also supports school counselors to provide evidence-based mental health interventions in schools. He also has a small outpatient therapy practice, using Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) with children and adolescents with anxiety and mood disorders.