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.  

This episode is the second in a four-episode arc that presents the Hierarchy of Interventions.  This grouping of 10 interventions forms a core curriculum of counseling skills used by residential staff to encourage the development of kids’ self-regulation abilities.  Last episode focused on using Distraction, Engaging, and Verbal Redirection to interrupt and prevent kids from going down an off-track path toward increased emotional, cognitive, and behavioral dysregulation.  This episode introduces the Aspect Compass model of the human mind.  Understanding this metaphor for how the mind works, makes it easier for direct-care counseling staff to move beyond the behavior-management level of intervention and instead help kids develop their self-regulation abilities.  

This episode revisits those three interventions from the perspective of the Aspect Compass Model and then goes on to present the labeling intervention.  Different variations on the Labeling intervention are used to increase clients’ self-monitoring of their own behaviors, their own bodies, their own feelings, and their own developing social skills.  One variation on Labeling is also used in place of giving directions and setting limits.  Those interventions are intended to encourage compliance, where labeling encourages kids to choose cooperation.   

This episode on the Unit Supervisor Learning Pathway moves away from a focus on managerial skills and switches to a focus on counseling skills to be taught to direct-care Child Care Counselors.  It presents 10 interventions, or techniques, for Counselors to use with kids when they become off-track, dysregulated, and uncentered.  Skillful use of this package of interventions starts with understanding the ways in which they can be thought of as forming a hierarchy.  That includes the higher up interventions being increasingly disruptive to the group environment of the residential unit, being an increasingly heavy-handed display of the staff being in charge, and requiring more judgement and skill from staff so that the intervention de-escalates the situation rather than causing an escalation.  However, these ten interventions are not like a true hierarchy in that staff can start anywhere on the scale, can use the interventions in various combinations, and even that some of the interventions can be thought of as just examples of the other interventions. 

This episode goes on to take a closer look at three interventions at the bottom of the hierarchy: distraction, engaging, and verbal redirections.  Distraction is frequently the first intervention used for interrupting an emerging pattern of dysregulation.  Engaging is the most frequent intervention that should be used by residential staff in that it provides the kids with practice at co-regulating with a calmer and more psychologically and neurologically organized person.  Improved co-regulation skills leads to improved self-regulation skills.  Verbal Redirection is regularly used to support the development of kids’ self-awareness, and is frequently used with having kids Practice or Over-Practice a desired behavior and in combination with Listening Checks.