Full Courses- College Credit Available
Healing Discipline: Finding Joy in Working with Challenging Students
Why this course?
Today’s educators have more responsibilities than ever before. Teachers are increasingly accountable for student performance while trying to manage challenging behavior in the classroom. Many good educators are leaving the profession due to hopelessness and helplessness.
Course Description
This two-day seminar, based on more than 50 years of combined experience in the field of education, is not your typical lecture. It’s a dynamic and interactive learning experience that will equip educators with a better understanding of children who have suffered from disruptive attachment, trauma, and entitlement. Participants will learn about establishing healthy boundaries and building healthy relationships with students. As the educator develops skills and confidence in working with challenging students, they’ll feel more joy and success in their role. This leads to a deeper connection between the educator and student, enhancing the student’s emotional and academic growth and bringing hope back into the field of education. Although the seminar is geared toward educators, mental health professionals, and parents will also benefit.
Educational Goals and Learning Objectives
Participants will:
- Develop a clear understanding of healthy versus unhealthy child development and how it influences behavior.
- Explore the root causes of severe behavior, including trauma, attachment disruptions, temperament, developmental delays, and entitlement.
- Reflect on how your own personal history affects your interactions with students, clients, and colleagues.
- Using The Healing Environment framework, discover how strong relationships, consistent boundaries, and effective communication promote emotional healing and improve behavior.
- Learn to apply key principles of child development—including Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development and Foster Cline’s Stages of Conscience Development—to determine which discipline strategies are most appropriate in different situations.
- Gain clarity on when to prioritize accountability, when to show sensitivity, and when both are necessary for healthy growth.
- Recognize that because children are still developing a conscience, consistent accountability is essential to support their emotional and moral growth
By the end of the seminar, participants will have a toolkit of practical strategies and healthy discipline techniques that they can immediately implement in their classrooms. This hands-on approach ensures that the learning is not just theoretical, leading to a more positive and productive classroom environment.
College Credit Available!
Healing Discipline: Part 2 The Joy Continues
Why this course?
The educational setting is becoming more challenging. Children are coming into our schools without the self-regulation to manage their behavior, sit quietly through a lesson, or follow the educator’s directions. Educators are overwhelmed by the enormity of their responsibilities, the constant disruptions and chaos that ruin their best-laid plans, and feeling the pressure to fix it all.
Course Description
In this two-day conference, we will explore personal needs, priorities, emotional triggers, and the roadblocks that get in the way of caring for ourselves and setting appropriate boundaries with our students. Understanding ourselves helps us set reasonable expectations for our students, establish healthy boundaries, and build strong relationships and teams. This self-awareness prevents us from taking student behavior personally, allowing us to connect in ways that support student healing and create a fun, caring school environment. We will review Healing Discipline Strategies and teach additional techniques for managing student behavior. Participants will be able to create Healing Discipline Behavior Plans they can immediately implement in their classrooms.
This class is a continuation of our first course: “Healing Discipline: Finding Joy in Working with Challenging Students.” While it is helpful to have taken our first course before this one, it is not required. We understand that everyone’s schedule is different, so if you want to take our first course, you can see if we have a live class available or register for the class on demand, providing you with the flexibility to learn at your own pace and convenience.
EDUCATIONAL GOALS:
- Build Self-Awareness & Confidence – Strengthen self-acceptance and skills for working with challenging students.
- Deepen personal insight by reflecting on experiences and examining belief systems to better understand how they shape your teaching and discipline philosophy.
- Clarify Student Expectations – Understand how lowered expectations have affected our students. Set clear, consistent, and age-appropriate behavior expectations.
- Strengthen Trauma-Informed, Accountable Practices – Explore how trauma impacts behavior and emotional development while maintaining clear boundaries and accountability. Learn how to lead with empathy without lowering expectations and how to recognize when trauma-informed practices are misapplied as permissiveness.
- Review the Healing Environment and Learn More Behavioral Strategies
- Collaborate in Teams – Work effectively with colleagues and families to support student growth.
- Create Healing Behavior Plans – Design behavior plans that combine structure/accountability, empathy, and relationship building.
Day 1
- Build Confidence in Working with Challenging Situations
Strengthen your confidence and competence in working with students who exhibit severe or disruptive behaviors.
- Deepen Self-Awareness and Professional Clarity
Reflect on the personal experiences and belief systems that shape your approach to teaching and discipline. Learn to accept yourself as an educator, which enhances your ability to communicate clearly and compassionately with families.
- Identify and Challenge Toxic Thinking
Understand what toxic thinking is and how to recognize the thoughts and emotional patterns that undermine your ability to set and maintain healthy boundaries—for both yourself and your students.
- Understand Trauma and Emotional Healing
Gain a clear, practical understanding of how trauma affects a person’s belief system about themselves and others —and what it takes to overcome trauma.
- Recenter Your Priorities and Protect Your Well-Being
Reevaluate your expectations of yourself and others. Learn how to detach from student behavior, so you can remain grounded, compassionate, and effective—even in the most difficult moments.
Day 2: Apply Insight to Student Behavior & Team Collaboration
Focus: Behavior strategies, emotional regulation, expectations, and working with school teams to manage student behavior.
- Understand how student academic and behavior expectations have been slowly lowered over time. Learn how to set and maintain high, developmentally appropriate behavior expectations for students.
- Understand how emotional regulation develops—and how to respond when students are dysregulated – it is not what you think.
- Learn practical Healing Discipline strategies like Tea Talk, Paradoxical Techniques, and guidelines for using reinforcements (if you use them at all).
- Strengthen your ability to collaborate with families and colleagues—even when perspectives differ. Student behavior can not change if even one team member is undermining the process.
- Design individualized Healing Behavior Plans that use The Healing Environment model to blend empathy, structure, accountability, and relationship-building.
College Credit Available!
Book Study: Healing Discipline: Hope for Shattered Lives; A Guide for Educators
Why this course?
In the last decade there has been a significant shift in children’s behaviors. In the past teachers had 1 or 2 students every few years that had significant behavior concerns. Now teachers are seeing an increase where they may have a handful of students every year that cause significant disruption to the learning environment. This has had a huge impact in the school setting. Teachers are no longer able to just teach as they are spending a large amount of time trying to manage students’ behaviors. This is occurring at the same time where there has been an increase in accountability for students’ academic performance. This increase in responsibility has been a drain on teachers. Teachers have reported that they often feel like they are in a domestic violence situation with their students. Never knowing when their students are going misbehave or explode.
In this book we will address the dynamics of the behavior, the manipulation and unhealthy control the students are trying to obtain. We have faith and belief the child can change. It is important for the educators to feel support and be heard while implementing strategies where there is an opportunity for authentic behavior change.
This book is about hope—hope that we can establish change in situations that appear hopeless. As we begin to understand our own strengths, weaknesses, histories, and the causes of severe behavior we can then learn how to implement strategies to set up a healing environment for these children. The strategies we recommend are ones that the educator can implement, feel good about and have faith in. This will give our students an opportunity to heal, grow and mature. We want to bring hope to children coming from shattered lives and joy back for the educator and in the school settings!
Educational Goals
- Develop Trauma-Informed Practices
Cultivate an understanding of how trauma and attachment influence child development and equip educators with strategies to support healing and resilience in students. - Enhance Understanding of Developmental Stages
Help educators deepen their knowledge and apply developmental theories, like Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, to guide effective teaching strategies and improve behavior management. - Create Supportive Learning Environments
Foster the ability to design and maintain healing environments tailored to meet the diverse emotional, social, and developmental needs of students. - Strengthen Relationships with Stakeholders
Build skills to engage collaboratively with parents, caregivers, and colleagues to ensure consistent support for students’ growth and success. - Promote Educator Well-being
Empower educators to recognize personal roadblocks to self-care, develop strategies to overcome them, and maintain their emotional resilience in challenging environments.
Learning Objectives
- Understand Trauma and Attachment
Identify the different types of trauma and their impacts on attachment, development, and behavior, and apply trauma-informed strategies to classroom practices. - Apply Developmental Theories
Explore Erik Erikson’s Stages of Development and discuss how understanding these stages can shape effective teaching strategies and enhance student behavior management. - Design Healing Environments
Analyze the characteristics of a healing environment and create actionable plans to address the needs of a specific student identified during the study. - Engage Effectively with Parents and Teams
Learn strategies for handling difficult parent interactions and navigating challenges with colleagues to help develop collaborative relationships that support student success. - Implement Self-Care Practices
Create a self-care plan that addresses personal roadblocks, incorporates strategies for maintaining resilience, and supports ongoing professional effectiveness.
College Credit Available!
Mini Courses- Certificate for Hours Available
What is a Healing Environment?
This short course introduces the healing environment. Participants will take a test to know what they naturally bring to the healing environment. Participants will also learn what a healing environment looks like for children with severe emotional and behavioral problems. Understanding what children need will help participants put appropriate behavior strategies in place.
This course combines our modules on the Healing Environment in one easy to access format.
Developing Strong Relationships with Your Students
This course focuses exclusively on how to develop deep, healthy connections with students. The teacher-student relationship is the foundation of any behavioral change. Relationship-building strategies when working with students with challenging behaviors will also be covered. Students can not heal from trauma, entitlement, disruptive attachment without healthy relationships
This course combines our modules on relationship building in one easy to access format.
Healing Discipline in a Nut Shell: Causes of Shocking Misbehavior and What You Can Do
Understand the root causes of shocking misbehavior in the classroom and simple, practical steps you can implement today.
In this 2 1/2 hour, 13 part video training course, participants will get a introduction to causes of severe behavior, the healing environment and strategies for working with students with severe emotional and behavioral problems.
Objectives for the one day training:
- Participants will learn what a Healing Environment is.
- Participants will gain a better understanding of the underlying causes of severe behavior, which includes trauma, attachment, development, temperament, and entitlement.
- Techniques will be learned on how to manage disciplinary problems in the classroom.
Adult Self-Control and Self-Care
In this training, we will spend time exploring our needs, priorities, emotional triggers, and roadblocks that get in the way of taking care of ourselves. As we delve deeper into understanding ourselves, we can more easily set boundaries with students, form healthy relationships with students and colleagues, and develop strong teams. When educators have a better understanding of themselves, they are less likely to take student behavior personally; therefore, they can make connections and set healthy boundaries that can lead to healing for their students.
This course combines our modules on adult self control and self care in one easy to access format.
Developing School Teams that Promote Student Healing
It takes a team when working with and teaching children with severe behavior and emotional issues, and being a good communicator is an essential element to the team process. Educators will learn how to communicate their thoughts and feelings and be able to work with others who may have a different point of view. This package will cover what is a team in the educational setting, how to manage team disagreements, and how to deal with undermining from team members.
This course combines our modules on teaming and team building in one easy to access format.
Introduction to Boundaries: Whose Responsibility is it?
To set healthy boundaries, we need to understand our responsibilities and roles. We also should know our personal boundaries within those responsibilities and when we are taking on someone else’s responsibility, role, or job. In this module, we will discuss roles and responsibilities, and if we are taking on someone else’s responsibility, how and when to politely hand it back.
Underlying Causes of Severe Behavior and Emotional Problems: Why are we Seeing So Much Misbehavior
This short course will provide a better understanding of children who have suffered from disruptive attachment, trauma, and entitlement, which are often the root cause of inappropriate and/or out-of-control behavior in the classroom. Participants will also learn how healthy and unhealthy development impacts behavior. With this understanding, the educator can implement appropriate behavior strategies.
This course combines our modules on the the underlying causes of severe behavior in one easy to access format.
How to Set Boundaries and Structure with Students Who are Out of Control
To set healthy boundaries, we need to understand our responsibilities and roles. We also should know our personal boundaries within those responsibilities and when we are taking on someone else’s responsibility, role, or job. In this module, we will discuss roles and responsibilities, and if we are taking on someone else’s responsibility, how and when to politely hand it back.
The Five-Minute Plan (a structured time-out)
Setting boundaries with students can be a challenge. Knowing how to do this in a healing way with children with severe behavior and emotional issues takes extra skill, technique, and self-awareness. We cover one strategy that is easy to implement and help students develop emotional regulation and self-control, which will help them be successful.
This course reviews the 5 minute reset strategy.
Continuing Professional Education and Development Hours
Our online courses qualify for continuing education and professional development credit hours. Our two main courses provide college credit! With our certificate of completion, our classes will contribute to your required hours in order to keep your license up-to-date. Once you complete your chosen course, we can verify the completion and provide you with the certificate for presentation to your respective state board. They are accredited through Northwest Nazarene University and are currently valid in the following states:
- Arizona
- Colorado
- Connecticut
- Idaho
- Iowa
- Maryland
- Massachusetts
- Michigan
- Montana
- Nevada
- New Mexico
- North Dakota
- Oregon
- Pennsylvania
- South Carolina
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Virginia
- Washington
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
We are in the process of adding new states to the list. If your state was not listed please check with your state department of education and/or check back periodically as we update this list for time-to-time.
Depending on your situation, it may not be clear which course is appropriate for you to take. No problem! Contact us and we can help you to make the right choice. We are available via email at info@healingchildren.com or via phone at 1-888-311-1883.
