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Strengths approach to supervision

Parents and carers want to give their children the best start in life. One simple way they can do this is by helping children recognise and manage their feelings, body signals and reactions. As teachers, social workers, counsellors and wellbeing staff, we can support parents and carers with information, ideas and simple, practical strategies to implement at home.

Social and emotional literacy is the ability to understand, manage, and express emotions effectively; fundamental skills for building healthy relationships and navigating social interactions in everyday life.

In this workshop, we’ll explore how practitioners can encourage parents and carers to learn about, model and support their child’s social and emotional development.

What to expect

  • An introduction to social and emotional literacy: understanding emotions, empathy, self-awareness, and interpersonal communication.
  • Suggestions and ideas for how parents and carers can be their child’s first ‘social and emotional literacy’ teacher.
  • Activities to help children recognise and regulate their feelings, build empathy and create healthy, respectful connections with others.
  • Practical strategies to recognise and reframe anxiety and other challenging feelings.
  • Opportunities to share experiences, insights, and challenges related to social-emotional wellbeing.
  • An exploration of a variety of Innovative Resources tools and card sets.
  • Take-home resources: handouts or materials to reinforce learning and continue practicing skills outside the workshop setting.

Resources

  • Strength Cards® for Kids
  • Strength Cards® Unlimited
  • The Bears
  • Funky Fish
  • Can-do dinosaurs
  • Cars ‘R’ Us
  • Paperworks
  • Anxiety Solutions
  • Anxiety Solutions for kids

Suitable for

  •  Social workers
  • Child, youth and family workers
  • Health workers
  • School counsellors
  • Teachers
  • Wellbeing staff
  • Early year’s professionals
  • Counsellors

Everyone has strengths. Our qualities, capacities, relationships, values, stories, experiences, skills and material resources can all be strengths.

But ‘The Problem’ can easily be experienced as all-consuming, keeping clients and services alike stuck and creating barriers to change. Strengths-based practice focusses squarely on identifying, mobilising and celebrating clients’ strengths.

Social workers, counsellors, managers, educators—and anyone who works with others—can become a catalyst for building cultures where strengths and connectedness flourish, so that clients build resilience, capacity for lasting change and genuine ‘agency’ in their own lives. This highly engaging and practical training facilitates participants’ learning of strengths-based principles, skills and resources that can be applied immediately in their work.

In this comprehensive introduction to the strengths approach, you will learn a range of immediately applicable strategies that you can use in your work and personal life. Through a series of videos, reflective exercises, written and visual content, you will explore questions like:

  • How can I reduce power imbalances and increase empowerment?
  • How can I frame conversations so that they are solution-oriented rather than problem-oriented?
  • How can I ask great questions to create the conditions for change?

In this highly-engaging workshop, delivered over four  x 90 minute sessions (or timed to suit), we explore diverse range of original resources developed especially for building social and emotional literacy in children. The resources are tools for generating change and strategies to encourage children to recognise body signals, sooth worry and anxiety, build strengths and resilience, navigate and regulate emotions, build respectful relationships, and challenge gender stereotypes.

The early years—from birth to eight years old—is a time when remarkable growth is taking place and brain development is at its peak. Children begin to mirror the language, behaviours and attitudes of people around them. They internalise concepts about their potential and place in life. This includes ideas about gender and culture. By teaching children skills for navigating their internal world of feelings as well as their external world of connection with others, we support them to lay the foundations of life-long resilience.

The workshop explores:

  • navigating and regulating emotions
  • developing strengths and resilience
  • building respectful relationships
  • supporting adults caring for children—including self-care and parenting.

Participants will:

  • take away practical everyday ideas for using the tools
  • explore tools for teaching children to recognise and talk about body signals and feelings
  • discover how body signals can be used to help teach children protective behaviours
  • get some simple, fun activities children can do to self-soothe worry or anxiety
  • learn core strengths-based, solution-focused practice principles and skills to support your work with young children.

Your Facilitator:

Our training is provided by Alison Krusec. With over 30 years’ experience working with children and families in a range of settings, Alison is the ideal person to support your team in building their social and emotional literacy toolkit. Alison is passionate about strengths-based, solution-focussed approaches to supporting children to notice their strengths, manage emotions, stay safe, build resilience, deal with challenges and have a positive growth mindset. She can tailor training around the needs of your centre.

Contact Alison to discuss your team’s requirements – [email protected]