41. Season 2 - Overview

Becoming Centered

Episode 41 of the Becoming Centered Podcast kicks off season 2 of this effort to spread knowledge about professional residential treatment of children and youth. This season is organized into two different educational pathways, mirroring consulting work being done.

The Processing pathway is all about how to help kids process their own use of problem-behaviors. Typically, their own incidents and experiences leave parts of their brains confused about what has happened. They will come up with some way to understand, but often times their framing of what led to their misbehaviors doesn't support positive character development and increased self-regulation. With structured guidance from staff, they can learn how to understand their own patterns of behaviors in a way that leads to increased self-control and self-regulation of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

The Unit Supervision pathway starts with a focus on how to create the time for all direct-care staff to receive several hours of individual supervision each month. It then moves on to how to structure the supervision time and then what content to cover in supervision. It presents a combination of management training and techniques, tools, and perspectives for how to teach counseling skills. This pathway recognizes that in-service trainings, and podcasts, are not the most effective way to promote professional development among residential staff. Rather, in-the-moment coaching and regularly individual supervision sessions are, by far, the most effective way to raise the skill levels and performance of direct-care staff. This series will focus on the management and counseling skills needed to provide quality individual supervision.

This episode also presents a couple concepts for residential staff to consider. The first is the distinction between providing Care and providing Treatment. The second is a way to distinguish between providing Counseling and providing Therapy.

While the podcast episodes will continue to be available on most podcast hosting sites, this season's episodes will tend to have more written support materials that listeners can download from the www.BearClanllc.com website Podcast page.