Life Coaching: General Introduction
Coaching elicits, encourages, and advances people’s positive power, helping people to grow and reach closer to their potential by harnessing the best in them. Adults and children can benefit from the self-growth and confidence that coaching delivers. This seminar presents a variety of coaching techniques tailored to adults, adolescents and children. Topics include: finding one’s strengths, choosing everyday activities to find happiness, time-orientation, personal savoring, skill-streaming, reducing resistance and enhancing generalization. Research from human development and positive psychology will be presented to support these techniques.
Fundamentals of Coaching Children and Teens: Principles, Practice and Power
Coaching is a relatively new concept referred to in a variety of ways such as Life Coaching, ADHD Coaching, and Professional/Career Coaching. Principles of coaching are evolving, and various writers and practitioners have begun to elaborate guidelines and strategies for the understanding and practice of coaching. This seminar will focus on coaching children and teens. Some basic fundamental aspects of coaching this age group will be discussed, and emphasis will be on coaching to find their unique strengths and power. The relationship between coaching and child/adolescent empowerment throughout development will be examined, with the goal of maximizing critical periods in cognitive and emotional growth. A variety of coaching exercises are built into the seminar to provide you with practical skills.
Practical Techniques and Strategies for Coaching Children and Teens
Building a coaching practice involves practical arrangements of time, place and context. This is a "how-to" seminar where the techniques of coaching will be placed within the context of a coaching practice. You'll look at specific strategies and techniques such as: listening, goal-setting, opening, expanding and focusing discourse, questioning techniques, transfer of training, relapse prevention, consultation and termination. You'll review record-keeping systems and forms such as coaching information sheets, parental consent, and session notes. You'll discuss assessment of child and parent needs, goal-setting and re-setting, and making and remaking agreements for how to work together. Ethical issues will also be addressed.
Practicum Experience in Coaching Children and Teens
In this "hands-on" seminar you will discuss methods and tools for empowering children and teens through coaching, and then practice the skills learned. Principles of the coaching process will be reviewed while the practice of coaching and promoting growth in children and teens is emphasized. Rationales and systems for assessment, problem solving, goal setting, and making, implementing, evaluating, and reorganizing plans will be outlined. Human growth exercises, decision-making skills, empowerment techniques, listening strategies and consultation methods will be offered. You will also examine challenging cases and share experiences with difficult problems. Person-to-person coaching, group processing, brainstorming, and solution-focused interactive communication will be used.
Coaching Boys and Girls
Coaching, as a new profession, will be described and differences in coaching techniques for boys and girls will be offered. Coaching is defined as a relationship where the coach trains the individual intensively by instruction, demonstration and practice. Coaches are personal change agents who are devoted to harnessing and inspiring the best in people. Coaches help people to reach their potential. In the 1960s and 1970s writers and researchers were not focused on gender differences as they were concerned about equality, gender discrimination and sexism. Both researchers and popular writers are now able to explore gender differences with more openness and acceptance. This seminar begins by looking at some biological differences between boys and girls and concludes with suggestions for supporting, teaching and coaching boys and girls.
Reactive Attachment Disorders in Children
Attachment plays a vital evolutionary role. It ensures brain growth, infant development, and social cognition. Attachment is a neurobiological process that prepares the child for collaborative existence with people. The goal of parent-child interaction is secure attachment. When secure attachment is not achieved forms of insecure attachment or reactive attachment disorder evolve to causally result in impairment of motor control, attention, social information processing, emotional control and intelligence. The impact of reactive attachment disorder is profound. This seminar will review new, startling empirical research, demonstrate tests for assessing attachment in infants, children and adults and review intervention programs directed toward improved parenting, child remediation and earned security in the adult.
Stress and Learning: The Brain’s Role
The human brain mobilizes a series of events during stressful events to handle the moment and to cope with the aftermath. The cortex, limbic, endocrine, immune and cardiovascular systems are all involved in responding to stress. Brain and body responses are short-term including a racing heart, sweaty palms and a throbbing head and long-term with high blood pressure, insomnia, mental clouding, indecision and labile moods. Stress alters the brain with a myriad of responses that increase the risk of cognitive, affective and physical problems. When academic learning is accompanied by stressful, anxiety-provoking and humiliating events, the short-term and long-term stress responses are elicited. This workshop will explore the brain’s role in stressful learning.
The Brain: Issues in Learning, Memory and Interventions
This seminar provides a tour of the central nervous system starting in the spinal cord and brain stem, then moving up to the higher centers of thinking, learning and memory. Ideas for teaching include how to engage higher centers of learning. Emphasis is placed on the balance of higher order learning with lower order learning. Basic descriptions of neurons and neurotransmitters are offered along with information on the development of brain circuitry. Strategies for instruction follow a time-line going from engagement, focus and attention to sustained neural firing that promotes micro-gene transcription, which is actual learning. Learning is described in terms of cellular mechanisms and the relay of information across vast neuro-pathways. Optimal teaching focuses on the spread of information across pathways: how do we promote long term potentiation? Executive functions, as they relate to learning, are explained. Teachers want to play to the executive function in order to capture attention and ensure that the learning goals are accepted by the CEOs of the brain. Memory is discussed in terms of functions of the hippocampus, amygdala and pituitary. Direct instruction and Precision teaching aim to provide adequate dialogue, previewing and practice to move information into long term storage. Alexithymia is described as problems with right-left hemisphere function. Educators will look at the process by which students make thoughts and feelings verbal and how to encourage this transfer of brain states. Teachers will learn how to optimize callosal transfer to create verbal expression, access to thoughts, emotions and concepts.
The Brain: Issues in Emotional-Social Development and Disorders of Affect
The process of emotional development is described as the infant forms bonds with caregivers and begins to participate in a communicative give and take. Educators and counselors will identify behavior showing problems with bonding and trust. This emotional turn-taking, which grows from bonding and attachment, gives way to affect development and elaboration of social bonds. These bonds are crucial for the development of neurons, pathways and energy production in the brain. Teachers and counselors will learn how to maximize emotional well-being in order to support learning and memory. Infants with reduced or absent bonding patterns are unable to grow parts of the brain including the orbito-frontal cortex, the pleasure center, the brakes of the brain and the basal ganglia (movement coordinator). Teachers and counselors will learn how to isolate executive disorders and prevent them from hijacking the learning process. Failure to develop vital brain areas renders individuals susceptible to emotional impairment such as reactive attachment disorder, depression, anxiety, selective mutism, borderline personality and post traumatic stress disorder. Teachers and counselors will learn how to distinguish behaviors which reflect disorders and manage them within school settings.
Bipolar Disorder in Children
According to the DSM IV, children and adolescents do not manifest the symptoms of adult Bipolar Disorder. This seminar will explain how research has shown that children to show symptoms of adult Bipolar Disorder but even more important, children and teens manifest prodromal symptoms of Bipolar Disorder. As well, evidence is reviewed showing that there are known signs and symptoms clusters to describe the prodromal characteristics of Bipolar Disorder. Research is compelling showing that children can be identified in prodromal states of Bipolar Disorder and treated such that the regressive process is stopped. Treatments for Bipolar Disorder in children and teens is discussed, school strategies are reviewed and considerations for medication are offered.
