Middle and High School Staff Training
We recognize that school staff are overburdened with the mental health needs of their students. Teachers, counselors, and administrators are exhausted and overwhelmed by these needs, which they are not well trained to manage. DBT for You is now offering staff trainings to help educators and school counselors more effectively teach emotional problem-solving, both in the moment to students in distress during the school day, and as part of a more universal curriculum to teach students how to prevent emotional escalation.
DBT, or Dialectical Behavior Therapy, is a mental health treatment that is popular and effective with people who have difficulty with emotion regulation and impulse control. It is a skill-based approach, where clinicians teach their clients how to regulate their emotions and problem-solve.
Over the past five years, DBT has been adapted for use in schools. The program is called DBT STEPS-A. School counselors and teachers across the country are being trained to provide this psycho-educational skill program to their students.
In a series of 2-hour workshops, staff will be taught the behavioral principles behind DBT STEPS-A, as well as the specifics of how to use emotion regulation, mindfulness, distress tolerance, walking the middle path, and interpersonal effectiveness skill sets with their students. School counselors and teachers will identify how DBT STEPS-A can be used within the school day with students who present with a wide variety of executive functioning learning needs.
We offer two training options. Option One is a 20-hour training for counseling staff and special education case managers. We teach counselors and special educators the DBT STEPS-A skills and how to use these in offices and classrooms with youth who have difficulty regulating emotions and managing impulsivity. Option Two is a 12 to 16-hour training for counselors and teachers who want to either teach the DBT STEPS-A curriculum as a class for their students or integrate portions of this curriculum into other executive functioning curriculum they currently use.
DBT STEPS-A is not a therapy program. It is a curriculum used to teach skills to youth. We educate staff using the workbook DBT Skills in Schools: Skills Training for Emotional Problem Solving for Adolescents (DBT STEPS-A) by Mazza et al.
If you are interested in learning more about what we do please contact us at 603-285-9129 or beth@dbteensnh.org. We are looking forward to talking with you!