60. Care vs Treatment, Behavior Management, and Respect
Becoming Centered
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...
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59. Season 3 - Overview and Intentions
Becoming Centered
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...
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58. Supervision14 - Weekly Staff Meetings
Becoming Centered
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...
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57. Supervision13 - Meeting Fundamentals
Becoming Centered
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...
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56. Supervision12 - Resilience pt.2
Becoming Centered
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. A sense of belonging. A sense of purpose. A...
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55. Supervision11 - Resilience pt. 1
Becoming Centered
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. A sense of belonging. A sense of purpose. A sense of agency. A sense of...
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54. Supervision10 - Choices, Breaks, Support Center, Physical Intervention
Becoming Centered
Episode 54 concludes a four-episode arc, within the Unit 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...
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53. Supervision9 - Change Environment and Limit Setting
Becoming Centered
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,...
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52. Supervision8 - The Aspect Compass and Labeling
Becoming Centered
This episode is the second in a three-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...
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51. Supervision7 - The Hierarchy of Interventions
Becoming Centered
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...
info_outlineThis episode continues to present a model for how to structure a supervision meeting. Last episode focused on how a Unit Supervisor sometimes functions primarily as a Counselor. In that sub-role, the Supervisor is most concerned with the emotional well-being of their Supervisees. Although that can fill the entire supervision meeting, generally, after five to ten minutes the meeting agenda will usually move on to the Supervisor sub-role of functioning primarily as a Teacher.
Being an effective Teacher means having an organized curriculuum that typically draws from your agency's policies and procedures manual. The Supervisor is tasked with making sure that each staff person has the necessary knowledge to properly implement the program. Some of that can be addressed in staff meetings, however, becuase new staff are hired throughout the year, the supervision meeting serves as a place to individually make sure that every staff has the necessary familiarity with the program's and the residential unit's policies, procedures, practices, and philosophy of care and treatment.
However, the bulk of the supervision meeting time is typically best spent with the Supervisor in the sub-role of a Coach. As a Coach, the Supervisor focuses on the skills that each staff person needs to excel at their job. The fundamentals of residential care and treatment can be divided up into three categories: Executive Skills, Engagement Skills, and Teamwork Skills. Work on these skills, especially for newer staff is the foundation for their professional development as caregivers.
These fundamental skills are different than specific counseling skills that will be the focus of a future podcast episode. Those counselor skills, such as Verbal Redirection, Labeling, Change of Environment, Limit Setting, Forced Choice, Weighted Choice, and Centering Breaks are treatment skills that will also need coaching to learn and master. However, the use of fundamental skills (Executive Skills, Engagement Skills, and Teamwork Skills) are a great place for a Unit Supervisor to start with coaching since their use will create a therapeutic environment on the residential unit.