Episode 61 of the Becoming Centered podcast starts an episode arc focused on the use of House Meetings in residential treatment programs.  House Meetings are a structured meeting of all the residents and available staff that are part of a residential unit at a treatment program.

House Meetings are the single most powerful structure for building a positive unit culture that supports the formation of a resilient residential team of staff and clients.  This episode arc starts out by presenting a vision for how House Meetings can contribute to team-building efforts and especially to the kids developing a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of agency, and a sense of meaning to their residential experience.  At the same time House Meetings also provide an effective forum for encouraging the development of social skills and executive skills in the kids.

This episode also addresses the first step in developing House Meetings to meet their full potential; creating a shared vision among all the staff involved in the residential unit.  This requires aligning the development of House Meetings with the mission and vision of the residential treatment agency, creating a shared understanding of the purposes and goals of House Meetings, empowering direct-care staff to take an active role in developing House Meetings, and helping people find meaning in putting work and effort into the design and implementation of these meetings.  

Episode 60 continues along the Group-Level Interventions Pathway.  Building on the last episode, other foundational perspectives for going beyond only providing quality Care to providing transformational Treatment are presented.  These include making a distinction between Care and Treatment, and understanding that behavior management techniques, while often times essential, are part of Care and not Treatment.  Several organizational traps of becoming too focused on behavior management are explored, including the key distinction between interventions that inspire mindless compliance and interventions that inspire thoughtful cooperation.  The importance of respect for a transformational treatment experience is also highlighted.  

Episode 59 of the Becoming Centered podcast marks the start of Season 3.  This Season will contain two learning pathways.  One series will focus on working with kids in varying size groups.  Group work ranges from simple interactions in a living room or classroom to managing various activity groups to running group meetings focused on various aspects of team-building and congregate living.  Another series will focus on physiological centering by presenting a program for listeners to gain a basic level of competence at mindfulness / relaxation / meditation; in preparation to teach these techniques to kids.  This episode will also touch upon one of the foundations for forming therapeutic relationships – explaining your intentions.  It ends with a brief pitch about the importance of kids having fun and of you having fun with the kids.   

Episode 58 of the Becoming Centered Podcast provides a vision for how to design and facilitate an extremely challenging structure in residential treatment programs – the weekly unit staff meeting. 

This episode covers a lot of ground.  Along with presenting a general team-building strategy, an outline is suggested for how to do simple case presentations, for how to organize an issues agenda-driven portion of the meeting, and for how to deliver trainings specifically geared toward the needs of direct-care staff. 

In addition, a general model for how to develop your program’s existing staff meeting design to a more sophisticated approach is presented.  Guidance is also given to listeners to help adapt this material to fit the size of your agency, your program, your number of staff, and the average length of stay of your clients. 

The weekly residential unit staff meeting is likely the largest, longest, and in the sense of staff hours, one of the most expensive structures in your program.  The more effective the design and facilitation of this meeting, the better your agency will be able to provide quality care and treatment to children and youth.

I’m very excited about Episode 57 of the Becoming Centered podcast!  It provides guidance in an area that most human service agencies simply can’t fit into their training programs; how to design and facilitate internal staff meetings. 

Middle managers, such as Unit Directors, are tasked with running some of the most technically difficult meetings.  With only the training provided by their own experiences, they are responsible for a program structure, that if you were to add up the hourly wages of all the participants, is an incredibly expensive use of time for agencies that typically run under very tight budgets.    

In addition, this content area strongly illustrates how the Meta-Compass Model can be used to integrate diverse perspectives.  This podcast explores the profound parallels between fostering resilience in clients, working effectively with groups of kids, how to structure internal staff meetings, and how to develop high-functioning teams.  These strategies are a blending of teachings from psychology, social work, and business administration.

Thank you listeners! The Becoming Centered Podcast has now reached the 3000 mark for downloads! A big theme for this season has been how to use behavior management techniques in a way that encourages the development of self-regulation. The latest two episodes have taken a slightly different perspective, focusing on how to create an environment that helps kids become more resilient. It’s my sincere hope that my listeners are taking these tools, techniques, and perspectives and applying them to help kids get the most out of their residential treatment and education experience! I hope you’ll help spread the word about the Becoming Centered Podcast to other residential treatment staff, teachers, and helping professionals.

Episode 56 of the Becoming Centered podcast is part two of a two-part arc focusing on the concept of resilience. 

Resilience is the ability to stay centered even in the face of various stressors and triggers. 

It’s related to, but different than, self-regulation which is the ability to become centered when emotionally dysregulated, cognitively disorganized, behaviorally chaotic, and physiologically / neurologically elevated.

There are four qualities that support emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological / neurological resilience.

1. A sense of belonging.
2. A sense of purpose.
3. A sense of agency.
4. A sense of meaning.

This episode reviews the factors that make up a sense of belonging and expands on the importance of a sense of purpose for kids in residential treatment and special education.  It then presents the importance of, and ways to foster, a sense of agency and meaning in clients and staff. 

Episode 55 of the Becoming Centered podcast focuses on the concept of resilience. 

Resilience is the ability to stay centered even in the face of various stressors and triggers. 

It’s related to, but different than, self-regulation which is the ability to become centered when emotionally dysregulated, cognitively disorganized, behaviorally chaotic, and physiologically / neurologically elevated.

There’re four qualities that support emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological / neurological resilience.

1. A sense of belonging.
2. A sense of purpose.
3. A sense of agency.
4. A sense of meaning.

This episode, part one of a two-part arc, focuses on emotional and cognitive resilience and how to promote a sense of belonging and purpose in a residential program or special education setting. 

Episode 54 concludes a four-episode arc, within the Supervision Pathway, that presents the 10 techniques that make up the Hierarchy of Interventions.  This episode focuses on how to implement these interventions in a way that goes beyond surface behavior management to supporting the development of self-regulation in children and youth.  

This episode particularly focuses on the Forced-Choice and related Weighted-Choice techniques.  These interventions leverage a program’s consequence system to help child-clients make choices that determine whether or not they receive a consequence for any misbehaviors.  That, in turn, supports the development of self-regulation over their own impulses and emotional-reasoning.  These techniques are also a very effective way to help kids who struggle with taking responsibility for their own feelings, thoughts, and especially behaviors to mature.  They are also excellent techniques for ending pointless control-battles between a staff person and a client.  

Centering Breaks are similar to Time Outs, however, they add structures to the time that move the intervention beyond simply removing a client from an over-stimulating or triggering situation.  These structures are individualized to the needs and abilities of individual kids, but are strategically intended to help each child or youth become emotionally, cognitively, behaviorally, and physiologically centered.  

The Support Center structure and intervention is used by many multi-unit residential programs and schools to completely separate misbehaving kids from their peers.  Typically, separate counselors staff the Support Center, providing a change of face as well as a Change-of-Environment.  Ideally, Support Center counselors also Process the incidents that resulted in a child or youth being separated from the group.  A structured approach to Processing is presented in prior podcast episodes.

Physical Interventions, including physical restraint, are techniques used in residential treatment programs to safely de-escalate or contain extreme behaviors.  Processing afterwards is key for moving these interventions beyond behavior management to supporting the development of self-regulation in kids.

Episode 53 reviews the first four tools and techniques that make up the Hierarchy of Interventions (Distraction, Engaging, Verbal Redirection, Labeling) and presents the next two steps in the Hierarchy, Changing the Environment and Limit Setting.  A major emphasis is placed on using these techniques to not only manage behaviors, but also to help clients develop their abilities to self-regulate.

Behavior Management is a necessary component of providing Care to troubled children and youth.  All kids sometimes exhibit behavior problems.  However, kids in residential treatment, perhaps especially because they’re surrounded by other struggling peers, will sometimes use problem-behaviors.  Part of the Care of children is to maintain a safe environment, including efforts to keep kids safe from their own dysregulated behaviors and those of their peers.  But behavior management is not enough.

In addition to providing Care, a residential treatment program must also provide a Treatment experience.  It’s not enough to create an environment in which kids “behave” only to have problem-behaviors reappear after kids leave the program.  For lasting change to occur, kids need to improve their abilities to self-regulate their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors (including internal physiological “behaviors”).  When used skillfully, the techniques that make up the Hierarchy of Intervention can be used in way that not only manages behaviors but also encourages the brain development necessary for improved self-regulation. 

Changing the Environment is a very powerful way to help kids who have become overwhelmed and dysregulated to the point where they can no longer fully process language.  Changing various aspects of a kids surroundings is a generally reliable way to help them to calm down to the point where they become psychologically organized enough to make thoughtful choices.

Limit Setting, when used to clarify behavioral expectations, and especially when used to clarify values, is another way to help kids learn how to better regulate their own thoughts and behaviors.