Wednesday, June 17
Webinar
9am – 12 pm (ET)
3 CECs, including cultural competency

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

Culture shows up in every session—whether we name it or not. Making Sense of the Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) is a practical, clinically grounded training for mental health professionals who want to strengthen cultural humility, improve diagnostic accuracy, and build stronger therapeutic alliances. Culture impacts how distress is experienced, expressed, interpreted, and treated—yet it’s often left unspoken in assessment.

The CFI offers a structured, respectful way to explore meaning, context, strengths, stressors, and help-seeking preferences without turning culture into a checklist or relying on assumptions. In this training, you’ll learn what the CFI is, why it was developed, and how to integrate it into intake, case conceptualization, diagnosis, and treatment planning in a way that feels natural and collaborative. You’ll also work through a case vignette, and leave with strategies you can apply immediately with clients across settings.

Learning Objectives:

• Define the Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) and explain how it supports culturally responsive assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning.
• Describe the purpose and historical context of the CFI within the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation framework, including its role in reducing misdiagnosis and bias.
• Select and apply CFI questions in real clinical settings using a flexible, time-efficient approach.
• Translate CFI findings into clinical action by integrating client meaning, strengths, stressors, and help-seeking preferences into case conceptualization and collaborative treatment planning.

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Wed, January 14, 2026
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm (ET)
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.

Ruth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, M.ED

Wednesday, March 4, 2026

10 am – 12 pm (ET)

Live Webinar
2 CECs

Registration Fee: $50
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

Magical Thinking, the cognitive process of assigning direct cause and effect to life events, was once thought to only occur in young childhood. Recent research supports that Magical Thinking is present throughout the lifespan, especially when we are confronted with traumatic and/or grief events. This workshop will explore how the Magical Thinking of traumatic events in childhood forges a narrative of self-blame that the child brings into adulthood. We will explore how to clinically expose the destructive self-blame stories that clients have carried within themselves. We will explore ways to assist clients in reconstructing their narratives. This workshop will also examine elements of Magical Thinking that child perpetrators use to manipulate their victims into silence. Lastly, we will discuss the tendency for traumatically grieved clients to re-employ Magical Thinking in their guilt and shock over the deaths of loved ones.

Please note: This workshop will contain content regarding childhood sexual abuse and suicide.

Learning objectives:

1. Participants will be able to identify Magical Thinking throughout the lifespan
2. Participants will learn how to assist clients in reframing narratives that have been distorted by Magical Thinking Cause and Effect beliefs.
3. Participants will understand the role of Magical Thinking in the cognitive processing of grief.

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II

Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm (ET)
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

Ruth Pearlman, LCSW, LICSW, M.ED
Wednesday, April 8, 2026

Live Webinar
10 am – 12 pm (ET)
2 CECs

Registration fee: $50
10% Discount for UConn SSW Alumni and Current UConn SSW Field Instructors

Webinar link will be emailed when your registration is complete.

As social workers, we tend to have limited training in the grief of children. How they cognitively and psychologically understand loss is often omitted from our core learning objectives. For children in foster or residential or alternative care, the research is even more limited. This webinar will focus on the specific bereavement and grief experiences of children in alternative care. We will explore how a child, to even “be” in alternative care, is to be a griever. Any alternative care for a child, by its very definition, requires that the child in care has either lost a family member(s) to actual death or another form of loss that often feels like a death.

How have we systemically viewed these grieving children? Are we more likely to diagnose their expressions of grief as negative behaviors? Can the most oppositional child we treat be among the most bereaved children we have encountered?

This webinar will examine children in alternative care as disenfranchised grievers. We will address the bereavement needs that so often, and unintentionally, go untreated. We will also explore why this grief has been systemically undertreated due to a system that was never given adequate resources to address the bereavement needs of these children.

Participants will:

• be able to identify the common symptoms of grief experienced by children in care
• be able to identify how grief manifests in behavioral symptoms
• learn positive interventions to address grief and loss issues of children in alternative care

This workshop teaches new supervisors and updates those who are experienced about the range of skills involved in individual and group supervision in an array of service contexts. Supervisors are guided in structuring regularly scheduled supervisory sessions in accordance with the learning styles of supervisees and the appropriate use of individual versus group meetings. Emphasis is placed on supporting staff in self-assessment with careful attention to diversity, inclusion, and equity issues within the service context.

Learning Objectives (Supervisory Best Practices):

1. Structure regularly scheduled supervisory sessions in accordance with the learning styles of supervisees
2. Support supervisees in self-assessment and planning to advance their practice strengths, address challenges, and develop as professionals
3. Teach supervisees to use an “evidence-informed” approach to empirically evaluating practice
4. Model the behavior of striving for professional competence through ongoing education, supervision, and self-care
5. Structure group supervision sessions focused on common practice themes and situations (e.g., ethical dilemmas)
6. Utilize social work group facilitation skills to promote group process during group supervision

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Virtual
Wednesday, June 10
9 am -12 pm (ET)
3 CECs

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

Webinar link will be included in your confirmation email.

All clinicians need to develop skills in conducting and interpreting the Mental Status Examination. This course offers a detailed exploration of the MSE components, enabling participants to assess cognitive, emotional, and behavioral functioning accurately.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify & describe the key components of the MSE
• Learn to conduct a more thorough MSE exam
• Practice recognizing elements of the MSE in vignettes
• Recognize the influence of cultural background and individual traits on MSE

Jennifer Berton, PhD, LICSW, CADC-II
Tues, Jan 20, 2026
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm (ET)
3 CECs

Registration Fee: $75
10% discount for UConn SSW Alumni and current SSW Practicum 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
Thursday, November 20, 2025
Webinar
9 am – 12 pm (ET)
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