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Events

3rd Educating for Resilience Conference

November 9, 2017 to November 10, 2017

  • Category: Conference, Workshop
  • Region: GTA
  • Topic: Other, Professional Issues, Teacher Development
  • Grades: Intermediate (grades 7-10), JK-SK, Junior (grades 4-6), Primary (grades 1-3), Senior (grades 11-12)

Working with Children, Youth and Families with Complex Needs and Hidden Strengths: The Skills to Build Resilience

Summary and Objectives of the Workshop

When working with children and adolescents from emotionally turbulent and physically challenging backgrounds, we often focus too narrowly on the individual’s complex needs and problems—like delinquency, anxiety or conflict with caregivers—and miss the broader sources of healing and resilience in young people’s lives. This workshop will present a strengths-focused, resistance-proof model for clinical and community work that makes therapeutic interventions more effective and change more sustainable. It demonstrates skills that educators and mental health professionals can use in classroom, clinical and community settings to nurture the resilience of those with whom they work.

With ample case studies and fascinating explanations of research, Michael shows why we need to work just as hard changing the environments that surround children as we do changing children themselves. Workshop participants will learn how to identify and enhance access to protective and promotive processes that exert a positive influence on young people’s wellbeing. These include relationships with adults, a sense of personal self-control, agency and power, experiences of social justice and fair treatment, belonging and purpose, spirituality, and cultural rootedness. Michael will also discuss how to contract to achieve useful therapeutic goals that are culturally meaningful, and participants will leave knowing how to help their clients successfully transition their success in clinical, residential and community settings back into their “real-life” social environments at home.