Ruth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, MEd
Wednesdays, March 19 and 26, 2025
10 am – 12 pm
4 CECs – participants must attend both sessions to earn CECs

Registration Fee: $100
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

In response to feedback from participants in her previous trainings, instructor Ruth Pearlman has expanded this webinar to 2 parts. Even before COVID children were grieving losses that were not largely recognized or understood. COVID has magnified the grief experience of children on multiple levels. A child’s response to loss is dependent on many factors including age, emotional development, relationship, and social supports. Ms. Pearlman will explore children’s concepts of death and non-death losses applying Piaget’s Cognitive Theory to understand how
children conceptualize loss at each stage of development.

Day 1 will focus on lecture with ample opportunity to ask questions and interact with the instructor and other participants.  Day 2 will focus on the application of the content provided on the first day.

In this webinar, we will:

• identify a spectrum of non-death losses in childhood
• review Piaget’s Cognitive Theory and apply it to children’s understanding of loss
• examine the role of magical thinking in children’s developmental understanding of loss
• identify modern grief terminology
• specifically examine the loss and grief trajectory in the lives of children in foster/alternative care

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

This training marries the essential elements of a successful supervisory practice with the core ethical standards of helping professions. Participants will gain tools to ensure that each clinician can grow an ethical practice that will help protect the profession, the clinician, and every client they serve. This training will give participants tools to both evaluate the ethical practice of each clinician and to strengthen any ethically weak areas, which will allow participants to anticipate and address problems before ethical violations occur.

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Wednesday, March 5, 2025

Webinar
9 am – 12 pm
3 CEC

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

This training marries the essential elements of a successful supervisory practice with the foundation of the diagnostic process. Participants will gain tools to ensure that each supervised clinician can learn how to diagnose disorders and conditions that will be a treatment focus. This training will give participants tools to both evaluate and improve diagnosing tools, and how to troubleshoot and intervene as may be needed.

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Wednesday, February 26, 2025
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm
3 CEC

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

We know that good supervision can be hard to find, and one major reason is that supervisors are rarely adequately trained. If you are a supervisor, or interested in becoming one, this training will help you build an ethical, engaging, effectual supervision practice.

In this webinar, participants will:

• explore the common mistakes supervisors make
• examine effective theoretical orientations and models of supervision
• explore the core components of the supervisory relationships and the needed tools

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Tuesday, February 18, 2025
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

Historically mislabeled as a difficult population, this webinar will explore the characteristics of adolescent addiction, the recovery pitfalls, and effective treatment interventions that will engage your young clients.

Adolescent Addiction is a distinct problem, with biopsychosocial elements unique to this age group, which indicates there are unique treatment implications. This training explores the unique elements of adolescent addiction and discusses the best ways to both prevent and treat it. While the majority of the training addresses substance use, other addictions – gambling, sex, internet, fitness – will be included.

Adolescent Addiction is often guided by cultural, political, and social forces. Adolescents my be judged for wanting attention, submitting to peer pressure, or making “stupid” choices, depending on the culture in which the teen is a member. The degree that the addiction is accepted is often based on these influences. This training includes a discussion of these influences, not only in understanding how teen addiction develops, but also how recovery can be sabotaged or supported by these influences.

Participants will:

• learn the differences between the adult and adolescent brain
• explore the principles of addiction and how it affects the adolescent brain
• review updated assessment tools for this population

9 am – 12 pm
Instructor: Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II

This workshop seeks to help social work supervisors to support staff working with children and families in crisis using various supervision models. Supervisors will learn to guide their staff in assessing the diverse needs, strengths, and limitations of their clients. The workshop will also explore techniques to support staff in ethical practice and effective communication with children, family members and family groups.

Learning Objectives (Supervisory Best Practices):

1. Support supervisees in understanding and recognizing signs and symptoms of mental illness in children and adolescents
2. Teach supervisees to comprehensively assess the needs of children and their families in crisis
3. Engage supervisees in collaborating with inter-professional teams to engage appropriate systems in response to clients’ needs
4. Guide supervisees in developing effective communication with children and their families
5. Support supervisees to use culturally informed, ethical, and equitable approaches to working with children and their families
6. Assist supervisees in navigating complex issues of confidentiality and mandated reporting in service to children and families

All therapists want to be exceptional, and this workshop can show you how

Across all helping professions, research shows that techniques don’t lead to better outcomes. Have you ever wondered why the DSM doesn’t guide treatment more effectively? And, what explains why some therapists are better than others if it isn’t the theory they’re using?

Control-mastery Theory, emerging from decades of elegant research, can help answer these questions and provides ways to understand how therapy works across techniques, practitioners and clients. This perspective may be the best way to learn to be a better therapist.

In this introductory workshop you will learn the basics of this approach which you can begin to apply to your work right away. There is actually no evidence supporting the idea that one technique is superior over another. But there is strong research evidence for the therapist’s increased effectiveness when responding to an individual client’s particular problems and goals. This means to be effective and truly helpful therapists need to understand what the individual client wants and how they will use therapy to achieve those goals.

Control-mastery is more a stance than a list of techniques based on an empirically derived method of case formulation, called the Plan Formulation. This approach provides a learnable framework for understanding a client’s conscious and unconscious goals, the beliefs and obstacles that prevent the client from pursuing their reasonable goals toward a more satisfying and functional life, traumatic experiences that contributed to the development of those obstacles, and what the most helpful stance is that the therapist can take. This theory helps you understand not only what to do, but how to be a particular client’s therapist.

This workshop will provide participants with the Control-mastery case formulation method and how to use it, an understanding of how trauma shapes beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, how the therapist attitude can help to change those beliefs, and be more flexible, creative and case specific with clients.

Using lecture, discussion, and in-depth case examples demonstrating the application of this stance, participants will:

• Learn the fundamentals of Control-mastery Theory
• Understand how this theory advocates for an individual “client-driven” approach
• Develop an appreciation for how necessary countertransference is and how to utilize it to deepen their understanding of what the client is trying to resolve
• Understand the Control-mastery perspective on trauma
• Practice application of the principles of the theory on clinical cases